Invention of telephone
... was taught at home, so he was not especially gifted at anything expect the piano. Alex gave himself a prize on the eleventh birthday, adding “Graham” to his middle name. Alex became a teacher himself, since he liked teaching other people. Alex hobbies were to collect bugs and butterflies, the skeletons of small animals, birds’ eggs, shells, and plants. Alex’s grandfather died in 1865. His brother Ted died in 1867 of tuberculosis, a disease for which there was no cure in the nineteenth century. The way Alex was introduced to telegraph was by his father, when he took him to Charles Wheatstone one of the most famous scientists in England at that time. He had developed a telegraph before Morse. Wheatstone had made a machine that could “speak.” Alex’s father was working for nearly twenty-five years to create a system of symbols that would represent every sound the human voice could make. When they heard the sounds coming out of the machine that Wheatstone made, that inspired Alex’s next project. His father’s machine was completed in 1864. The basic theory of the telephone came to Bell when he wasn’t looking for it. On his twenty-ninth birthday he was granted U.S. Patent No. 174,465 for “Improvement in Telegraphy”. In 1877 the telephone was invented. The first official telephone line ran from Charles Williams’s Electrical Shop in Boston to his home in suburban Somerville. The first person paying customer was Roswell Dower, who was his friend. Nearly 200 customers had signed up before July 9, 1877. The Bell Telephone Company was founded by Bell, Hubbard, Sanders, and Watson. In two days he got married to Mabel and set off on his honeymoon trip, leaving his company to the other partners. The charge was two telephones connected to each other was $20 a year for “social purposes” or $40 a year for business. Bell’s own prediction of the future of his invention was the most accurate because before he died people were able to communicate long distances and talk to people for a long period of time. Before his death in 1922, Bell saw the groundwork laid for all this. The development of radio, which sent sound waves through air, made possible “wireless” connection. In 1956 the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid. In the late thirties and early forties, long-distance calls within the country were improved by a better insu...