page_title: History of the telephone
section_title: Mechanical and acoustic devices
hierarchical_section_title: History of the telephone / Telephone prehistory / Mechanical and acoustic devices
caption_attribution_description: Source details: This etching first appeared in 1889 in Henri de Parville's French translation/update of François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno's update of Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's book originally titled, A guide to the scientific knowledge of things familiar. The French 1889 edition is titled, La clef de la science, explication des phénomènes de tous les jours par Brewer et Moigno. This Wikimedia Commons image is a scan from the 1890 Swedish translation by Thore Kahlmeter, Hvarför? och Huru? Nyckel till naturvetenskaperna and is taken from Project Runeberg here. The original etching in the French edition can be seen on Google Books here. Emtilt (talk) 06:00, 20 September 2014 (UTC)
context_page_description: This history of the telephone chronicles the development of the electrical telephone, and includes a brief review of its predecessors.
context_section_description: Before the invention of electromagnetic telephones, mechanical acoustic devices existed for transmitting speech and music over a greater distance greater than that of normal direct speech. The earliest mechanical telephones were based on sound transmission through pipes or other physical media. The acoustic tin can telephone, or "lovers' phone", has been known for centuries. It connects two diaphragms with a taut string or wire, which transmits sound by mechanical vibrations from one to the other along the wire (and not by a modulated electric current). The classic example is the children's toy made by connecting the bottoms of two paper cups, metal cans, or plastic bottles with tautly held string.
  Some of the earliest known experiments were conducted by the British physicist and polymath Robert Hooke from 1664 to 1685. An acoustic string phone made in 1667 is attributed to him.
  For a few years in the late 1800s, acoustic telephones were marketed commercially as a competitor to the electrical telephone. When the Bell telephone patents expired and many new telephone manufacturers began competing, acoustic telephone makers quickly went out of business.  Their maximum range was very limited. An example of one such company was the Pulsion Telephone Supply Company created by Lemuel Mellett in Massachusetts, which designed its version in 1888 and deployed it on railroad right-of-ways.
  Additionally, speaking tubes have long been common, especially within buildings and aboard ships, and they are still in use today.
caption: A 19th century acoustic tin can or "lovers' telephone"
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