- The telephone is one of the most important inventions in the world. Since it was patented and introduced to the public in June 1876, it has become the world’s most used device.The term telephone comes from the Greek words”tele”, which means far or distant and “phone” which means voice. Literally, the name of the device means distant voice.
- Bell patented the telephone in 1876 and the technology began to spread, he recommended that users begin a call by saying “ahoy,” a common nautical greeting for more than a century; he answered his phone like that for the rest of his life. Thomas Edison, on the other hand, thought “hello” was a better choice.
- Across the world, 13.5 billion phone calls are made everyday, which equates to 4.9 trillion phone calls every year. And that does not even consider the billions of texts sent each day!
- The patent for the telephone was granted to engineer and scientist Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Although Bell was born in Scotland, he holds two citizenships – Canadian and British. Bell came to the U.S as a teacher of the deaf, and conceived the idea of “electronic speech” while visiting his hearing-impaired mother in Canada. When he was eleven, Bell invented a machine that could clean wheat. After gaining fame for developing the telephone, the inventor became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1882.
