Title: Telephone History - Invention of the Telephone
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Content: Probably no means of  communication has revolutionized the daily lives of ordinary people more than the  telephone. Simply described, it is a system which converts sound, specifically the human  voice, to electrical impulses of various frequencies and then back to a tone that sounds  like the original voice. In 1831, Englishman Michael Faraday (1791-1867) proved that  vibrations of metal could be converted to electrical impulses. This was the technological  basis of the telephone, but no one actually used this system to transmit sound until 1861. In that year, Johann Philip Reis (1834-1874) in Germany is said to have built a simple  apparatus that changed sound to electricity and back again to sound. 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.