Telephone

A telephone is a device that lets two people talk to each other over a long distance. The word comes from two Greek words: "tele," meaning far, and "phone," meaning sound. The first working telephone was made in 1876. Before then, people who lived far apart could only send messages by mail or by telegraph, which carried only short coded signals.

The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born scientist working in the United States. On March 10, 1876, Bell spoke the first telephone message to his assistant in the next room. He said, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." A few days earlier, Bell had filed his patent for the invention. Another inventor named Elisha Gray filed a similar idea on the very same day. Historians still argue about who really came up with the telephone first.

Early telephones were simple. A person spoke into a mouthpiece, and their voice made a thin metal disk vibrate. The vibrations were turned into a tiny electric signal that traveled through a wire. At the other end, the signal made another metal disk vibrate, recreating the sound of the voice. To call someone, you first had to reach a human helper called an operator, who plugged your wire into the right socket by hand.

The telephone changed daily life faster than almost any invention before it. By 1900, there were about 600,000 phones in the United States. By 1950, there were more than 40 million. Families could check on grandparents in other states. Doctors could be called in emergencies. Businesses could close deals across the country in minutes instead of weeks.

The phone kept changing. Rotary dials replaced operators. Push buttons replaced rotary dials. In the 1980s, the first cell phones appeared. They were the size of a brick and cost as much as a small car. By the 2000s, phones fit in a pocket. Then came the smartphone, which is really a tiny computer that can also make calls. Today there are more than 6 billion smartphones in the world, almost one for every person on Earth.

Most people now use their phones more for texting, video, and apps than for talking. Bell himself probably would not be surprised. He once predicted that one day, a person in one city would be able to talk to a person in another, "as if they were face to face." He was right, and then some.