Sabrina Richards
Devry University
Humanities

Telephone During the era before the telephone the telegraph was the fastest way to communicate over distance. Before that “information traveled no faster than a horse or a sailing ship; afterwards it moved at the speed of light (Nye, 1997, p. 1073). While there was an incredible increase in the speed of communication the use of the telegraph still contained a delay where the sender had to wait for a written response from the other individual (Burke, 2005). According to Burke (2005) the telegraph was not in direct competition with the mail service and letter writing. The telegraph required filling out the message and relying on the operator to send the message. A letter written at home was much more convenient than sending a telegram. Also, since the telegram was costlier than a letter messages were kept short, while letters could be much longer.
By the time the telephone became commonplace and costs were reasonable, the telephone quickly replaced the telegram and the written letter for communication in business and personal use. Burke (2005) does argue that the letter does allow for a record of the communication that the telephone (unrecorded) does not. This lack of permanence is similar to conversations in oral societies described by Ong (1982).

In 1854 a French inventor named Charles Bourseul recommended a technique for transmitting speech by converting sound waves to electric signals. A few years later, the German physicist Johann Philip Reis invented an instrument that could transmit musical tones, but not speech. However there were other inventors like Elisha Gray and Antonio Meucci that was also working on developing a practical telephone at the time. Mr. A Bell a Scottish-born American inventor and speech teacher in Boston received the first patent in March 1876. The following year, having discovered that only a steady-state electric current could transmit speech, Bell produced the first telephone capable of reproducing the quality and tone of human speech.
The first central telephones begin 1878, in New Haven, Conn. The popularity of the telephone grew quickly, hastened by advances in technology. In 1915, the first transcontinental telephone link in the U.S. began service between New York and San Francisco. Overseas radio-telephone service was introduced commercially in 1927, but the problem of extension prevented the laying of telephone cables until 1956, when the world's first transoceanic submarine telephone cable, extending between Newfoundland and Scotland was placed in service. In 1969 the first global telephones relay network was completed, with a series of satellites in geostationary orbits above the earth. The standard telephone consists of a handset and a separate base unit, joined by a connecting cord that includes four basic parts: a transmitter, a receiver, a dial for addressing calls, and a ringer to announce incoming calls
There are two types of transmitter carbon and electret. The carbon transmitter was invented by Thomas A Edison. The transmitter was consists of a thin diaphragm mounted behind a perforated grill. At the center of the diaphragm is a small dome filled with carbon granules. Sound waves passing through the grill cause the diaphragm to vibrate. When the diaphragm moves in, it compresses the granules to increase the flow of current through the transmitter. The electret transmitter consists of two disks, one plastic and one metal, separated by an electric field. Sound waves cause the plastic disk to vibrate, creating variations in the intensity of the electric field, which are then translated into variations of electric current. Telecommunications, 2012
In today's telephones, the transmitter and receiver are commonly housed in the handset, the ringer mechanism is mounted in the base, and the dial may be located in either the handset or the base. This arrangement varies in special-purpose telephones. In addition to a