Dial In to This Quiz on Telephone History

Thomas Edison improved on Bell’s original telephone transmitter, Guglielmo Marconi introduced a wireless telephone in 1915, and Elisha Gray created a telephone prototype in 1876 (in fact some believe he’s the true inventor of the device). Samuel Morse, on the other hand, was the inventor of the telegraph — the technology the telephone largely replaced. Morse died four years before Bell’s famous 1876 inaugural phone.

Engineer Martin Cooper made the first-ever cell phone call during a Motorola press conference for the DynaTAC phone on April 3, 1973. It took another decade before Motorola finally released the DynaTAC 8000x to customers. You could only talk for 35 minutes before the battery died, and it cost about $4,000, but the age of cell phones had arrived.

IBM is best known as the PC king of the 1980s, but the company also had a go at the burgeoning smartphone market 15 years before the release of the iPhone. In 1992, IBM revealed the Simon, a phone with a digital touchscreen, built-in programs, and third-party apps. In fact, the Simon was so ahead of its time, it predated the word “smartphone,” which wasn’t coined until 1995.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson held the first-ever phone conversation, separated only two miles apart. Thirty-eight years later, those same two inventors held another landmark phone conversation — only this time they were separated by an entire continent. Bell was in New York City, Watson was in San Francisco, and some 3,400 miles of telephone wire stretched between them.

The invention of the telephone led to the foundation of the American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) company. A year after revealing his invention in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell established the Bell Telephone Company, and after a series of reorganizations and patent lawsuits, Bell established AT&T in 1885. The company remains the largest telecommunications company by revenue today.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Nokia — named for the Finnish town and river — was a giant in the mobile phone industry, but the company actually began as a paper mill in southern Finland 1865. It wasn’t until a merger with three other companies in 1967 that the company began making electronics equipment. Nokia has only been a telecommunications company for 30 years in its more than 150-year history.

Bluetooth technology, which allows devices to communicate wirelessly, was invented in 1996. Swedish inventor Jaap Haartsen had been reading a book about Harald Bluetooth, the Viking king who united Scandinavia in the 10th century, and was inspired to name the new technology after the historic leader. The Bluetooth logo depicts the runes of the king’s last name merged together, known as a “bind-rune.”

The word "telephone" is derived from two Greek words: “tēle” (far) and “phonē” (sound). The word has been in use since at least the 17th century, and was first used to describe the string telephone. Later, it was also used for speaking tubes and megaphones that projected the voice. Alexander Graham Bell adopted the word for his electrical device in 1876, and the rest is history.

First launched on the Nokia 6110 cell phone in 1997, “Snake” allowed players to control a serpent that slowly grew larger and larger as the game progressed. If a player ran into its own tail, the game was over. Although it was not the very first mobile game ever made (that distinction belongs to “Tetris”), “Snake” proved to be incredibly popular, demonstrating that phones could be much more than communication devices.

The ability to make a video call may seem like a cutting-edge innovation that was introduced with smartphones, but it was actually first demonstrated in 1930. That year, AT&T used early television cameras to allow people in their corporate headquarters to both see and hear the people they were speaking to in their research labs. It took several decades for this technology to catch on.

Telephone books were once vital to contacting people and services. A far cry from the thick yellow phone books we know today, the first telephone book was just a single page long. Released in 1878, it contained just 50 names of people who owned telephones. To speak to the correct person, you simply spoke their name into the phone and an operator would make the connection.

For most of the telephone’s history, calls couldn’t be placed directly between two people. Instead, an intermediary known as an operator used a switchboard to connect two phone subscribers. Before the introduction of technology that circumvented the need for operators arrived in the 1930s, some 235,000 people, mostly women, worked as telephone operators in the U.S.

Most children are familiar with the tin-can telephone, or two cans joined by a piece of string. When you speak into one can, your voice can be clearly heard by the person holding the other can. This simple toy was once a major scientific discovery. Inventor Robert Hooke’s String Telephone was a breakthrough in understanding how sound is transmitted.

Mark Twain loved technology. He was a close friend of inventor Nikola Tesla and one of the first writers to use a typewriter for his work. In 1878, just two years after the invention of the telephone, he had one installed in his house.

When we pick up the phone, it seems natural to say “Hello!” Yet when telephones were invented, it wasn't clear what the proper greeting would be. Alexander Graham Bell thought the naval greeting “Ahoy!” would be best; Thomas Edison suggested “Hello!” Before this point, "hello" was mostly said in moments of surprise, but the greeting won out, eventually becoming an everyday word.

*69 is a telephone feature that allows subscribers to automatically redial the last phone number that called them (much to the horror of phone pranksters everywhere). But *69 isn’t the only convenient shortcut. Other * numbers allows users to block their number on caller IDs or cancel call waiting, among a dozen other features.

Just a few days after filing his telephone patent, Alexander Graham Bell was ready to test his prototype. He sent his assistant, Thomas Watson, into another room and spoke into his telephone: “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you.” As Bell recorded in his journal, “To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.”

Electric telegraphs were the first method of transmitting messages swiftly over long distances. Using pulses of electricity, written communication could travel across continents. The first telephones used a similar network of conductive wires (or “lines”) to transmit audio data. For the first time, a voice could be projected hundreds of miles.

The red telephone box is as much a British icon as Big Ben and Stonehenge. The first all-red kiosks were introduced in 1926 and were painted red so they were easy to find. The introduction of the K6 model in 1935, in honor of George V’s Silver Jubilee, became the iconic model seen throughout Britain. Today, an estimated 5,000 telephone boxes still serve their original function.

Many inventors are credited with work that led to the development of the telephone, but most people credit Alexander Graham Bell with creating the first working phone. He was granted the first U.S. patent for the invention in 1876. Bell’s device turned speech into an electrical current by measuring the vibrations in air caused by the voice.