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 Today,
everyone uses the telephone every day. In fact, we can't even live
a day without it. Think about your life without the telephone. If
you don't have it, you have to visit people when you want
to tell them something. Or you'll have to write them letters. It would
be very inconvenient! So, we have
to thank a man named Alexander Graham Bell. Why? This is because he
invented the amazing machine! This week, let's
learn more about the history of the telephone!
About 132 years ago, there were no telephones in the world. In the past, people wrote
letters to deliver messages. In an emergency, they sent a telegram.
But letters took days or weeks to arrive. Also, sending a telegram wasn't easy, either.
People had to go to the telegraph office. Sometimes
they had to walk many kilometers to send a telegram. Usually they wrote a very
short message because sending a long message was very expensive. So it was very
hard to keep in touch with someone
who lived far away.
In 1876, a young man named Alexander Graham Bell decided to invent
the telephone. He was 29 years old. Bell made the very first phone
call in history on March 10, 1876 in Boston. It was a short call over
a very short distance. Bell called his
friend Thomas Watson who was just down the hall and said a single sentence message: "Watson,
come here. I want you!"
 In
1877, Bell formed the Bell Telephone
Company. By 1880, just 4 years after the first phone call, there were
over 60,000 phones in America. But making a call was different than
it is today.
There was no direct dialing because there
were no phone numbers. Therefore, people had to
pick up the receiver and tell the operator the name of the
person they wanted to talk to. The operator knew everyone in town
who had a phone and how to connect callers. Later, people replaced customers' names with numbers.
Later, people invented the dial telephone. So callers
could dial the number they wanted themselves and be connected by a
mechanical switchboard.
Operators would no longer be needed for calls. The telephone changed
America and eventually the world forever! |
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