Well, if you haven’t guessed it already once the telephone was invented someone would come up with an idea for a Telephone Company.
Today on Days to Remember we celebrate how on January 25th 1881, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and few others signed an agreement to organize the Oriental Telephone Company.
Did you know Alexander Bell was born in Scotland?
Upon the conclusion of Bell’s funeral, on August 22nd 1922, every phone on the continent of North America was silenced in honor of the man who had given to mankind the means for direct communication at a distance.
Besides being an inventor Bell started out as an instructor at a boys’ boarding school when he was only 16. His father had developed “Visible Speech,” a system of phonetic symbols. These symbols showed how to physically make the sounds needed to say any word.
Bell was able to use this system with deaf students to help them learn to talk and improve their diction. Helen Keller was one of his students.
In March 1876, Bell received the telephone patent. He founded the Bell Telephone Company with his father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, his assistant Thomas Watson and Thomas Sanders the following year.
Competitor Western Union hired other inventors, including Elisha Gray, to develop their own phone system, which led to a legal fight between the two businesses. Over the years, Bell vigorously defended his telephone patent in a number of other lawsuits.
After Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell founded the Oriental Telephone Company, the world’s first telephone company, on January 25, 1881, Bell would make the first transcontinental telephone call 34 years later on January 25, 1915.
Bell originally recorded saying “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” to summon Watson from the next room at his Boston laboratory.
Of course, the statement is one of several things disputed in Bell’s history.
Often credited as the inventor of the telephone, the United States Congress acknowledged Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone in 2002.
There are some who also believe Bell was merely a patent troll, stealing ideas from others and creatively crafting legal documents.
The circuit the 1915 call was made on consisted of 2,500 tons of copper wire, 130,000 poles, and three vacuum tube repeaters.
It’s hard to say what really happened back then, and who said what, however the telephone is a marvel of mankind that we still use today.