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1878: First phone directory printed in Connecticut. Telegraph manager George Coy of New Haven, Connecticut, developed an exchange—the system that allows people to call each other—within a year ...
A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages, is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization that publishes the directory. Its purpose is to allow the telephone number of a subscriber identified by ...
20 March 1880: National Bell Telephone merges with others to form the American Bell Telephone Company. 1 April 1880: world's first wireless telephone call on Bell and Tainter's photophone (distant precursor to fiber-optic communications) from the Franklin School in Washington, D.C. to the window of Bell's laboratory, 213 meters away. [20] [21]
The telephone played a major communications role in American history from the 1876 publication of its first patent by Alexander Graham Bell onward. In the 20th century the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) dominated the telecommunication market as the at times largest company in the world, until it was broken up in 1982 and replaced by a system of competitors.
The early history of the telephone became and still remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the huge number of lawsuits filed in order to resolve the patent claims of the many individuals and commercial competitors. The Bell and Edison patents, however, were commercially decisive, because they ...
A History of Communications: Media and Society From the Evolution of Speech to the Internet (Cambridge University Press; 2011) 352 pages; Documents how successive forms of communication are embraced and, in turn, foment change in social institutions. Wheen, Andrew.
The Worldwide History of Telecommunications (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) John, Richard R. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Harvard University Press; 2010) 520 pages; the evolution of American telegraph and telephone networks. Kieve, Jeffrey L. (1973). The Electric Telegraph: a Social and Economic History. David and Charles.
Telephone calls are initiated most commonly with a keypad or dial, affixed to the telephone, to enter a telephone number, which is the address of the call recipient's telephone in the telecommunications system, but other methods existed in the early history of the telephone.