Title: Telephone History - Invention of the Telephone
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Content: A crude device, it  was incapable of transmitting most frequencies, and it was never fully developed. A practical telephone was actually  invented independently by two men working in the United States, Elisha Gray and Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell. Incredibly, both men filed for a  patent on their designs at the New York patent office on February 14, 1876, with Bell  beating Gray by only two hours! Although Gray had built the first steel diaphragm /  electromagnet receiver in 1874, he wasn’t able to master the design of a workable  transmitter until after Bell had. Bell had worked tirelessly, experimenting with various  types of mechanisms, while Gray had become discouraged. According to the famous story, the first fully intelligible telephone  call occurred on March 6, 1876, when Bell, in one room, called to his assistant in another  room. " Come here, Watson, I want you." Watson heard the request  through a receiver connected to the transmitter that Bell had designed, and what followed  after that is a history of the founding of the Bell Telephone Company (later AT&T),  which grew to be the largest telephone company in the world. The first  telephone system, known as an exchange, which is a practical means of communicating  between many people who have telephones, was installed in Hartford, Connecticut in 1877,  and the first exchange linking two major cities was established between New York and  Boston in 1883. The first exchange outside the United States was built in London in 1879.