The telephone was invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, an eminent scientist, inventor, and engineer.

He was born in a middle-class family on 3rd March 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father taught elocution, and his mother worked as a music teacher at the University of London. At age 10, he enrolled at the Royal High School, Edinburgh.

Graham Bell invented the telephone to solve the problem of electric currents being used upon unintended transmission. His initial idea came from the crude acoustic receivers employed in telegraphy stations upon which signals transmitted through a wire caused an attached diaphragm to vibrate. A tuning fork or resonator, commonly called a ‘microphone,’ was created and used with the receiver to “transmit” and “receive” sound.

Bell maintained a strong interest in the advancement of phonetics throughout his life, serving as president of both the American Association for Promoting the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, based upon his father’s teachings and the Volta (later Alexander Graham Bell) Association for the Deaf, established by his father and Gardiner Greene Hubbard. He was one of the nine founding members of the Volta Bureau in 1887, established as a center “for collection and diffusion of information relating to the deaf,” and served as its president between 1888 and 1894.

He first introduced using an electrical device to transmit sound in 1874 while living in Boston. On February 14th, 1875, he requested that an amendment be added to his U.S. patent No 174,465 for a telephone design submitted on January 13th of the same year, which declared: “the object of my invention is to transmit vocal or other sounds telegraphically by causing electrical undulations similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds.”

The first telephone line between two cities occurred on October 9, 1877, in Boston and Brantford. Bell’s device was then known as a “harmonic telegraph,” but the terminology had been shortened to simply ‘telephone’ within three years.

On March 7, 1876, U.S. Patent 508629 was issued to Bell for the invention of an “improvement [that] consists in so constructing the instruments that they have two distinct, adjustable, and reversible modes of vibration, and apply signals by causing variable undulations or vibrations in the current of the main circuit induced in a secondary circuit, substantially as set forth.” This apparatus used what is now called variable resistance to change the amplitude of the current in the receiver.

On June 21, 1876, Bell conducted the first telephonic long-distance call between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, Canada. The reed apparatus created by Thomas Watson was still attached to this telephone line when he made his first successful telephone call over a longer distance. Bell established the telephone’s “quality of service” by having Watson, stationed in Paris, Ontario, close his receiver’s circuit breaker with two pliers.

Today, Alexander Graham Bell is considered the inventor of the first practical telephone.