Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Telephone
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. Read more >>
The idea is 70 years old, but it took decades to make it possible and decades more to make it commonplace
The earlies Read more >>
America’s first female soldiers were Signal Corps telephone operators making sure critical messages got through, often while threatened by artillery fire.
The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, by Elizabeth Cobbs Read more >>
Alexander Graham Bell was able to invent the telephone after 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. Read more >>
A new book claims 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 (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95), Seth Shulman states that the famous inventor “was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone.” Read more >>
The urge to move documents as fast as possible has always been a national pre-occupation, because it has always been a necessity. Fax 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. Read more >>
The story of AT&T from its origins in Bell’s first local call to last year’s divestiture. Hail and good-bye.
The history of telephone communications in the United States is also, in large measure, the history of an extraordinary business organization. Read more >>
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. Read more >>
"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. Read more >>
The powerful Speaker of the House missed not one but two chances to invest in AT&T in the early days