Telephone

Grover Cleveland's Attorney General Tries to Get Rich Quick

R. Hal Williams | February/March 2021

After the Department of Justice brought suit to nullify the Bell telephone patents, it was discovered the action could have made Attorney General Garland a multi-millionaire.

Elected mayor of Buffalo in 1881, governor of New York in 1882, and president of the United States in 1884, Grover Cleveland owed his rapid rise in politics to his reputation for honesty, retrenchment, and administrative reform. In 1884 he ran as the clean candidate against James G.

The Cell-Phone Revolution

Tom Farley |

The idea is 70 years old, but it took decades to make it possible and decades more to make it commonplace

The Hello Girls

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

America’s first female soldiers were Signal Corps telephone operators who made sure that critical messages got through, often while threatened by artillery fire.

The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, by Elizabeth Cobbs

The Pluck Heard 'Round the World

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Winter 2010

Alexander Graham Bell was able to invent the telephone in 1875 after Thomas Watson tweaked a reed that transmitted sounds to the next room.

On a hot day in June 1875, 28-year-old Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, were toiling in adjacent workshops at 109 Court Street in Boston.

Did Alexander Graham Bell Steal the Telephone Patent?

Ralph O. Meyer, Edwin S. Grosvenor | Spring/Summer 2008

A new book claims that Alexander Graham Bell stole the telephone from Elisha Gray, despite all the evidence against that theory.

In his new book, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret, Seth Shulman claims that the famous inventor “was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone.”

Did Alexander Graham Bell Steal the Telephone Patent?

Ralph O. Meyer, Edwin S. Grosvenor | Spring/Summer 2008

A new book claims that Alexander Graham Bell stole the telephone from Elisha Gray, despite all the evidence against that theory.

Posthaste

Robert L. O’connell | September/October 1989

The urge to move documents as fast as possible has always been a national preoccupation because it has always been a necessity. Faxes and Federal Express are just the latest among many innovations for getting the message across.

Reaching out and touching someone hasn’t always been easy—especially if it was necessary to hand that person something in the process.

Breaking the Connection

Peter Baida | June/July 1985

This is the story of AT&T, from its origins in Bell’s first local call ,to last year’s divestiture. Hail and goodbye.

The history of telephone communications in the United States is also, in large measure, the history of an extraordinary business organization.

Hindsight, Foresight, and No Sight

Peter Baida | June/July 1985

Late in 1876, William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, rejected an opportunity to purchase from Alexander Graham Bell and his associates all patents relating to Bell’s telephone for $100,000.

THE VOICE HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

Lincoln Barnett | April 1965

"My God, it talks!” said the Emperor of Brazil. So the new invention did—but not until Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant had solved some brain racking problems

On the afternoon of June 2, 1875, two young men bent over work benches in the hot and stifling garret of a five-story brick building occupied by the electrical workshops of Charles Williams, at 109 Court Street, Boston.

Thanks, But No Thanks, Mr. Bell

Joseph G. Cannon | April 1962

The powerful Speaker of the House missed not one but two chances to invest in AT&T in the early days

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.