When was the first phone invented

In the transcontinental telephone line began operating. Attorney General. During World War I, the government nationalized telephone and telegraph lines in the United States from June to July , when, after a joint resolution of Congress, President Wilson issued an order putting them under the direction of the U.

Post Office. They set the rates the phone companies could charge and determined what services and equipment each could offer. Department of Justice anti-trust suit that had been filed in By , the 30 millionth phone was connected in the United States; by the s, there were more than 80 million phone hookups in the U.

In , the first digital cellular network went online in Orlando, Florida; by there were 25 million cellular phone subscribers, and that number exploded at the turn of the century, with digital cellular phone service expected to replace land-line phones for most U. Within 50 years of its invention, the telephone had become an indispensable tool in the United States. For example, people said the telephone would: help further democracy; be a tool for grassroots organizers; lead to additional advances in networked communications; allow social decentralization, resulting in a movement out of cities and more flexible work arrangements; change marketing and politics; alter the ways in which wars are fought; cause the postal service to lose business; open up new job opportunities; allow more public feedback; make the world smaller, increasing contact between peoples of all nations and thus fostering world peace; increase crime and aid criminals; be an aid for physicians, police, fire, and emergency workers; be a valuable tool for journalists; bring people closer together, decreasing loneliness and building new communities; inspire a decline in the art of writing; have an impact on language patterns and introduce new words; and someday lead to an advanced form of the transmission of intelligence.

Privacy was also a major concern. As is the case with the Internet, the telephone worked to improve privacy while simultaneously leaving people open to invasions of their privacy. In the beginning days of the telephone, people would often have to journey to the local general store or some other central point to be able to make and receive calls.

The technology, which was supplied by Huawei, achieved a peak downlink rate of Mbps. WhatsApp also launched that year, letting customers send and receive calls and messages via the internet. The messaging system now has 1. Ten years later, Britons were sending a billion messages per month. In , British text volume reached its highest point, with billion sent in the UK alone. The free augmented reality game uses the smartphone camera and location to show Pokemon characters in the real world.

Despite this, it still retained our favourite features from the original , including the iconic design, super-long battery life and even an updated version of Snake. Needless to say, it stole the show at the Mobile World Congress MWC tech expo and was one of the biggest hits of the year. Apple marked ten years in the smartphone game with the all-screen iPhone X and ditched a physical home button for the first time.

See the latest mobile phone deals. Specs included a monochrome LCD screen, extendable antenna and a memory capable of storing 99 phone numbers. The most expensive and desirable phone on the market at the time of its release, the StarTac debuted the clamshell design and was the lightest and smallest phone on the market.

This little known German-made and impractically minimal handset was the first phone that had no visible external antenna. Although its uninspiring design and tiny 97 x pixel display failed to set the world on fire, it more than merits a place in the annals of mobile phone history.

Sponsor of London Fashion Week in , it was an instant success and kickstarted the vogue for customising your handset. Nokia Another first for the Finnish phone-maker, the was the first handset to feature a WAP browser. That meant it was capable of browsing the internet. Or at least a stripped down and incredibly slow version of it that was of little use to most people.

Motorola Timeport. A must-have for self-proclaimed citizens of the world. And the hordes of Gen X-ers heading to Asia on the backpacker trail. As was the fashion of the time. The first serious attempt at an internet-enabled mobile phone, the Communicator was ahead of its time. But on the plus side, it had 8MB of storage and a full keyboard, you could use it as a personal organiser, as well as a web browser and email support.

Billed as the first commercially available camera phone, Sharp's effort was only sold in Japan and had a camera resolution of 0. Legendarily sturdy, the was the phone that launched a thousand memes. And with million units shifted, stands as one of the biggest-selling phone of all time. The best part of a decade and a half and one smartphone boom later, it remains the best selling mobile phone of all time. The last great flip phone, the Razr was impossibly thin at only 14mm.

Unusually for the time, it also had an aluminium casing that looked achingly slick. Ironically, the overwhelming success of the Razr was probably the main cause of the downfall of Motorola. The first true Blackberry phone, which integrated a phone with fully functioning email, web browsing and the much loved Blackberry Messenger.

Compare new mobile phone deals. It was the lightest and smallest GSM phone available at the time and featured the easy to use Nokia menu system. The was the first to popularise the unmistakable small-candybar shape which was the work of British designer Alastair Curtis.

The result was million sales worldwide. Within a year, the smaller was released. It was not a revolutionary update from its predecessor, but its compact design, four built-in games Pairs II, Space Impact, Bantumi, and Snake II and the fact it could support long SMS messages of up to characters made it a success.

And the best part of 20 years later, still inspires memes and favourable comparisons to fragile, modern-day smartphones. Featuring an updated design based on the original candy bar shape, the version 2. The was notable with its unusual fold-out keyboard, with built-in email and support for Blackberry emails.

The history of the telephone dates back to , when English polymath Robert Hooke created the first acoustic string telephone. Yet, it would take years until Alexander Graham Bell successfully carried out the first bi-directional transmission of clear speech on March 10, Watson, come here, I want to see you," where the first words ever spoken over a telephone line.

John Colgan, CEO of cloud telephony company Solgari , said: "From a faint crackle of audio in , there are now 25 million landline telephones in the UK, more than 7 billion mobile devices worldwide, with billions of people, from Edinburgh to Nova Scotia, using internet-enabled audio, video and instant message communications.

Three days before the trial, Bell was granted the , patent for his invention by US officials. In this first telephone, sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate — called the diaphragm — to vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument.

When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Poll Privacy Policy One year after the experiment, the first long-distance telephone line was deployed.