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Friday, March 10, 2017
Remember the old party lines? Or the days when you actually had to be wired to a wall to talk to someone? When you couldn't "screen" your calls with an answering machine? And you actually had to be at home to talk on the phone?

On this day in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell spoke into his new invention, the telephone. “Mr. Watson," he said. "Come here. I want to see you.”  It worked. And what followed over the next 140-odd years would change the shape of human communication.

But did you know...
  • Bell applied for the patent just three days before the famous phone call took place?
  • His patent filing barely made it over the wire (pun intended), beating a claim by Elisha Gray by a mere two hours?
  • The Western Union Telegraph Company hired both Gray and rival inventor Thomas Edison to develop their own technology for a telephone?
Alexander Graham Bell sued Western Union in a rare patent case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. His claim was upheld and the Bell Company became American Telephone and Telegraph, which we know today as AT&T.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Posted by: Betty | 8:00 AM | permalink
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