Telephones
Early development
Probably no means of communication has revolutionized the daily lives of ordinary people more than the telephone. The actual history for the invention of the telephone is a subject of complex dispute. Some of the inventors credited with inventing the telephone include Antonio Meucci, Philip Reis, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell's experiments with his assistant Thomas Watson finally proved successful on March 10, 1876, when the first complete sentence was transmitted: "Watson, come here; I want you.".Watson heard the request through a receiver connected to the transmitter that Bell had designed, and what followed after that is a history of the founding of the Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T), which grew to be the largest telephone company in the world.
Since 1876 there have been many improvements in the different parts of the telephone, rendering it now nearly perfect in its working.
Modern telephones
Due to the advancements of technology in recent years we have seen a great number of improvements being made to the telephone.
We saw the introduction of Cordless telephones, which was first invented by Teri Pall in 1965. It consisted of a base unit that connected to the land-line system and also communicated with remote handsets by low power radio.
We also saw the introduction of mobile phones. Modern mobile phone systems are cell-structured. Radio is used to communicate between a handset and nearby cell sites. When a handset gets too far from a cell site, a computer system commands the handset and a closer cell site to take up the communications on a different channel without interrupting the call.
Some mobile telephones, especially those used in remote locations, where constructing a cell network would be too unprofitable or difficult, instead communicated directly with an orbiting satellite.
Recently mobile phones have become digital allowing them to use a broadband Internet connection to transmit conversations as data packets. It is also known as Internet telephony or Voice over IP (VoIP), digital telephony, which uses a disruptive technology that is rapidly replacing traditional telephone networks.