"Friends who are linked by telephone have good times," read a Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. The first ads for the telephone touted it as a tool to save "time and temper." It also helped out in emergencies, ads noted.Įventually, telephone companies began to sell the devices on the pleasure principle. So Bell searched for a way to overcome these obstacles and came up with a working telephone. Once the message arrived, an expert had to translate it. Only a single message could be sent at a time, and it had to be sent to a single point. The telegraph had several significant limitations, though. to his assistant in Baltimore, Maryland: "What hath God wrought!"įor the first time, people separated by distance could communicate relatively quickly.īy 1883 Western Union had 12,917 telegraph offices scattered across the country. Morse acknowledged its wonderous nature in the first message he transmitted from Washington, D.C. The telegraph, invented by Samuel Morse in 1844, was a marvel. In fact, Bell described his device as a "speaking telegraph." Consider the telephone, invented in 1876.Alexander Graham Bell was trying to develop an advanced telegraph that could send multiple messages over multiple lines, according to Robert Friedel, a history professor at the University of Maryland. Inventing a new technology is an unpredictable business.Īn inventor often starts out with one idea and ends up developing a completely different product.
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