Invented by: Alexander Graham Bell.

Information: Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847. When he left school, he worked for his father who was a speech therapist, teaching deaf people to speak. He caught tuberculosis (a very dangerous lung disease) when he was 23, so the family moved to Canada where the climate was drier.

After a year the family moved to Boston in America where Bell became a Professor at Boston University. He worked on his telephone idea in his spare time trying to pass messages to his assistant in another room. He further developed his idea and by 1876 took it to the patent office to 'file' a patent on it.

Another inventor, Elisha Gray, had also been working on a similar idea. He also took his idea to the patent office, but 2 hours later than Bell, and as the ideas were so similar, he was not allowed the patent.

Both Graham Bell and Elisha Gray were trying to invent a way of sending speech through wires and cables at the same time as each other. Bell reached the office where people register their inventions first, and so he won the right to make telephones for everyone.

All the cabling was very complicated, particularly the way in which the cables were switched about to connect the lines to different people. This was done by people who spent the whole day plugging and unplugging the telephone lines in a huge board of sockets. (There were lots of wrong numbers and bad connections in those days!)

When a new automatic switching system was invented, it became much easier and reliable.

Victorians Inventions Page