The Telephone Technology Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

The Telephone Technology - Essay Example Subscribers who wanted to communicate with more than one point had to obtain and set up as many pairs of telephones as the number of communicating points. Telephone technology was restricted to domestic lines. It was Western Union which first used telephone exchanges to interconnect individual subscribers in 1878. Alexander Graham Bell’s Bell Telephone Company was quick to incorporate the concept of telephone exchanges. Though the Bell Telephone Company was supposed to have monopolized the telephone business for more than 15 years since its invention, there were nevertheless as many as 1,730 telephone companies operating during the period. In the initial days, the most serious contender tot Bell’s monopoly was Western Union which had bought patents from others who had designed variations of Bell’s original principle of telephone, and had created the American Telephone Company as early as in December 1877. Had Bell not own the patent infringement case against Western Union in the Supreme Court of America in 1879, Western Union, with its large telegraph network already in place, was poised to overtake the Bell Telephone Company within a very short period of time. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was set up in 1885 to provide long-distance service to American Bell Company subscribers. The Bell Telephone Company had been expanded and rechristened the American Bell Company in the meantime. The first automatic commercial exchange began operating in 1892. By the turn of the century, independent telephone companies were fast overtaking the American Bell Company. In 1889 the first public coin telephone had been set up in Hartford, Connecticut. These were attended payphones with the payment collected by someone standing at hand. The invention of the electron tube in 1906 by Lee De Forest made amplification possible and led the way to national phone service. The subsequent development