TELEPHONE’S 150TH ANNIVERSARY: Credit to All
A. Michael Noll
March 4, 2026
© copyright AMN 2026
[This blog by A. Michael Noll is distributed here with the permission of the author.]
The telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell on March 7, 1876, although an inscription in the margin had been made on the Bell application based on an application made the same day by Elisha Gray. This has clouded Bell’s claim to the invention ever since. Bell made his first telephone conversation a few days later on March 10, 1876.
Bell’s initial idea for a telephone was not practical, since the electrical signal generated by his transmitter (today known as a microphone) would have been too weak to produce much sound at the receiver (today’s head phone). Gray, as an electrical engineer, knew all this and invented the concept of a variable resistance microphone. Bell copied this idea and made a liquid variable-resistance microphone – though not practical with its acid liquid. Ultimately, a couple of years later, Thomas Alva Edison at his invention factory invented the variable-resistance carbon button microphone, which made telephones practical with decent speech quality.
There was a patent battle between Bell and Gray – which went all the way to the US Supreme Court and resulted in a split decision awarding the patent to Bell. Bell, who was educated in London, was a Canadian teacher of elocution and of the deaf, with his laboratory in Boston. Elisha Gray, as an engineer, was more practical and was the co-founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, based in a suburb of Chicago. Gray simply did not have the “class” of Bell.
Perhaps in the end, who invented what was less important than the provision of telephone service with the creation of the Bell System. Theodore N. Vail was the founding president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and built its monopoly of telephone service in the United States. AT&T acquired Western Electric as its manufacturing entity, perhaps to appease and silence Gray over the invention.
Over the decades since, AT&T has protected Western Electric from various attempts by the Federal government to break-up the Bell System. AT&T has had a strong belief that telephony was all about physical things: telephones and equipment. In the 1980s, AT&T lusted after digital computers and such companies as NCR and Olivetti. AT&T relinquished its provision of local telephone service with the Bell breakup so that it could enter the computer business. AT&T retained Western Electric, but ultimately spun it off as Lucent Technologies, which then went through transformations as Alcatel Bell Labs and today Nokia Bell Labs, somehow believing that the image of Bell Labs was important. The old Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. ceased to exist in the mid 1980s, although the “Bell Labs” brand continued on. The old “AT&T” brand continues on after being acquired by Southwestern Bell.
It has been an incredible ride for telecommunications, with signals transmitted around the planet and across continents on wires, cables, microwave radio, optical fiber, and communication satellites – and switched mechanically, electrically, and in digital packets. Telecommunication has become too cheap to meter and has made the world smaller – perhaps for an ultimate good. I guess we should thank Bell, Gray, Edison, Vail and all the engineers and inventors and service providers who made this happen – credit to all.
A. Michael Noll was a research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. in Murray Hill, NJ in the 1960s and 1970s. He currently is professor emeritus at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, after serving as dean for two years. He was on the staff of the President’s Science Advisor for two years and also worked in marketing at AT&T. He is an early pioneer of generative algorithmic digital computer art and animation.
