page_title: Timeline of the telephone
section_title: Up to 1875
hierarchical_section_title: Timeline of the telephone / Up to 1875
caption_attribution_description: Theodore Newton Vail, 1845-1920, bust portrait, facing left
context_page_description: This timeline of the telephone covers landline, radio, and cellular telephony technologies and provides many important dates in the history of the telephone.
context_section_description: 1667: Robert Hooke creates an acoustic string telephone that conveys sounds over a taut extended wire by mechanical vibrations.
  1844: Innocenzo Manzetti first suggests the idea of an electric "speaking telegraph", or telephone.
  1849: Antonio Meucci demonstrates a communicating device to individuals in Havana. It is disputed that this is an electromagnetic telephone, but it is said to involve direct transmission of electricity into the user's body.
  1854: Charles Bourseul publishes a description of a make-and-break telephone transmitter and receiver in L'Illustration, (Paris) but does not construct a working instrument.
  1854: Meucci demonstrates an electric voice-operated device in New York, but it is not clear what kind of device he demonstrated.
  1860: Johann Philipp Reis of Germany demonstrates a make-and-break transmitter after the design of Bourseul and a knitting-needle receiver.  Witnesses said they heard human voices being transmitted.
  1861: Johann Philipp Reis transfers voice electrically over a distance of 340 feet with his Reis telephone. To prove that speech can be recognized successfully at the receiving end, he uses the phrase "The horse does not eat cucumber salad" as an example because this phrase is hard to understand acoustically in German.
  1864: In an attempt to give his musical automaton a voice, Innocenzo Manzetti invents the 'speaking telegraph'. He shows no interest in patenting his device, but it is reported in newspapers.
  1865: Meucci reads of Manzetti's invention and writes to the editors of two newspapers claiming priority and quoting his first experiment in 1849. He writes "I do not wish to deny Mr. Manzetti his invention, I only wish to observe that two thoughts could be found to contain the same discovery, and that by uniting the two ideas one can more easily reach the certainty about a thing this important."
  1871: Meucci files a patent caveat (a statement of intention to file a patent application) for a Sound Telegraph, but it does not describe an electromagnetic telephone.
  1872: Elisha Gray founds the Western Electric Manufacturing Company.
  1872: Professor Vanderwyde demonstrates Reis's telephone in New York.
  July 1873: Thomas Edison notes varying resistance in carbon grains due to pressure, and builds a rheostat based on the principle but abandons it because of its sensitivity to vibration.
  May 1874: Gray invents an electromagnet device for transmitting musical tones. Some of his receivers use a metallic diaphragm.
  July 1874: Alexander Graham Bell conceives the theoretical concept for the telephone while vacationing at his parents' farm near Brantford, Canada. Alexander Melville Bell records notes of his son's conversation in his personal journal.
  29 December 1874: Gray demonstrates his musical tones device and transmits "familiar melodies through telegraph wire" at the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois.
  4 May 1875: Bell conceives of using varying resistance in a wire conducting electric current to create a varying current amplitude.
  2 June 1875: Bell transmits the sound of a plucked steel reed using electromagnet instruments.
  1 July 1875: Bell uses a bi-directional "gallows" telephone that was able to transmit "indistinct but voice-like sounds" but not clear speech. Both the transmitter and the receiver were identical membrane electromagnet instruments.
  1875: Thomas Edison experiments with acoustic telegraphy and, in November, builds an electro-dynamic receiver but does not exploit it.
caption: Theodore Newton Vail
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