In the 1870s, two inventors greatly changed the way humans interact with one another by independently creating the telephone, a device that can successfully transmit speech electrically.

Most people are not aware that both Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell independently designed the telephone and both men ended up rushing their designs to the patent office within hours of one another, but Bell patented his telephone first.

Bell initially set out to improve the telegraph, a wire-based electrical system, but his success with creating the telephone stemmed from his trials to improve the telegraph. The telegraph had been an accepted form of communication for around 30 years when Bell first began experimenting with the electrical signals. The telegraph used a dot-and-dash Morse code, but was limited to only sending and receiving one message at a time. The knowledge of the nature of sound and understanding of music led Bell to think that there was a possibility of transmitting multiple messages over one wire at the same time. The idea of having more than one telegraph had been around for a while, but Bell used his understanding of music to offer a harmonic approach as a possible solution to this issue. Bell developed a harmonic telegraph that he based off of the principle that multiple notes could be successfully sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes differed in pitch.

Bell was lucky enough that his father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard, despised the control exerted by the Western Union Telegraph Company, and saw the idea of a multiple telegraph to break the monopoly. Hubbard ended up giving Bell the financial backing he needed to continue his progress. Bell continued his work but failed to inform Hubbard that he had met with a young electrician, Thomas Watson, and the two were exploring an idea that Bell had thought of over summer- creating a device that could transmit speech electrically. After meeting with the director of the Smithsonian Institution, Bell had received enough encouragement to continue his idea and the two prove that different tones would change the strength of the electrical current in a wire. In June 1875, Bell realized he could hear sound over a wire and that sound was a twanging clock spring. This led to his greatest success on March 10, 1876 when the telephone was born and the multiple telegraphs died. The communications potential in his demonstration of talking with electricity far outweighed the outdated Morse code system.

The invention of the telephone was an important milestone in American history, and significantly changed the way citizens interact with one another.