It led me to think about researching today. Many people now give up investigating something if it is not on the web. To some extent that acceptable for the newest news on technology, since much on the net is more current than library texts, but for telephone history it is just the opposite, with little authoritative, original work being electronically published. And few good telephone history books have been scanned and put on the net. Spend a day at your local library to confirm or investigate points you've developed.
Good research takes time.
You can check out books for a year or a semester. You'll find you needn't cite me or encyclopedias for most things, instead, you'll read books I used for my writing. I would prefer, in fact, that people not cite my history writing alone, instead they should confirm my points with hardcopy sources, phrase the subject in their own words, then cite both electronic and hardcopy sources. Deciding what books to quote or source gets tough. Commonly cited texts, which combine scores of footnotes, a good index, and an author who has written extensively on telephones before, are logical choices to refer to.