Timeline of The Telephone - 1876 To 1878

1876 To 1878

• 11 February 1876: Elisha Gray invents liquid transmitter for use with a telephone, but does not build one.
• 14 February 1876: (about 9:30am) Gray or his lawyer brings to the Washington, D.C. patent office Gray's caveat for the telephone. (A caveat was like a patent application without request for examination to notify the patent office of an invention in process.)
• 14 February 1876: (about 11:30am) Bell's lawyer brings to the same patent office Bell's patent application for the telephone. Bell's lawyer requested that it be registered immediately in the cash receipts blotter.
• 14 February 1876: (about 1:30pm) Approximately two hours later Elisha Gray's caveat was registered in the cash blotter. Although his caveat was not a full application, Gray could have converted it into a patent application, but did not do so because of advice from his lawyer and his involvement with acoustic telegraphy. The result was that the patent was awarded to Bell.
• 7 March 1876: Bell's US patent No. 174,465 for the telephone is granted.
• 10 March 1876: Bell transmits speech "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a liquid transmitter as described in Gray's caveat, and an electromagnetic receiver.
• 16 May 1876: Thomas Edison files first patent application for acoustic telegraphy for which US patent 182,996 was granted October 10, 1876.
• 10 August 1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the world's first long distance telephone call, about 6 miles between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, Canada.
• 1876: Hungarian Tivadar Puskas invented the telephone switchboard exchange (later working with Edison).
• 9 October 1876: Bell makes the first two-way long distance telephone call between Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
• October 1876: Thomas Edison tests his first carbon microphone.
• 20 January 1877: Edison "first succeeded in transmitting over wires many articulated sentences" using carbon granules as a pressure sensitive variable resistance under the pressure of a diaphragm (Josephson, p143).
• 30 January 1877: Bell's US patent No. 186,787 is granted for an electro-magnetic telephone using permanent magnets, iron diaphragms, and a call bell.
• 4 March 1877: Emile Berliner invents a microphone based on "loose contact" between two metal electrodes, an improvement on the Reis' Telephone, and in April 1877 files a caveat of an invention in process.
• April 1877: A telephone line connects the workshop of Charles Williams, Jr., located in Boston, to his house in Somerville, Massachusetts at 109 Court Street in Boston, where Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson had previously experimented with their telephone. The telephones became No. 1 and 2 in the Bell Telephone Company.
• 27 April 1877: Thomas Edison files telephone patent application. The US patents (Nos. 474,230, 474,231 and 474,232) were awarded to Edison in 1892 over the competing claims of Alexander Graham Bell, Emile Berliner, Elisha Gray, A E Dolbear, J W McDonagh, G B Richmond, W L W Voeker, J H Irwin and Francis Blake Jr. Edison's carbon granules transmitter and Bell's electromagnetic receiver were used, with improvements, by the Bell system for many decades thereafter (Josephson, p 146).
• 4 June 1877: Emile Berliner files telephone patent application that includes a carbon microphone transmitter.
• 9 July 1877: Bell Telephone Company, a common law joint stock company, organized by Alexander Graham Bell's future father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard.
• 1 December 1877: Western Union enters the telephone business using Thomas Edison's superior carbon microphone transmitter.
• January 1878: First North American telephone exchange is opened in New Haven, Connecticut.
• 4 February 1878: Thomas Edison demonstrates the telephone between Menlo Park, New Jersey and Philadelphia, a distance of 210 km.
• 14 June 1878: The Telephone Company Ltd (Bell's Patents) registered, London. Opened in London 21 August 1879 - Europe's first telephone exchange, followed a couple of weeks later by one in Manchester.
• 12 September 1878: the Bell Telephone Company sues Western Union for infringing Bell's patents.
• 1878: The first Australian telephone trials were made between Semaphore and Kapunda (and later Adelaide and Port Adelaide) in South Australia.