Suffocating summer temperatures prevail in the US capital of Washington, DC, on 11 June 2002. In the shining white US Capitol building, members of the House of Representatives have convened for a vote on a motion to strip Alexander Graham Bell of his original telephone patent. The text of the motion, drawn up by 13 of the members, says it is time to give recognition to the real inventor. At the end of the day, the motion is passed unanimously.
Ever since the introduction of the telephone, Bell has been considered the ingenious inventor of the device, a milestone in information technology. But he was not the only one. During the second half of the 1800s, three men competed to be the first to introduce a useful telephone: a Scottish teacher of the deaf, an Italian immigrant, and an American inventor.
Connecting Americans
In the early 1800s, information travelled slowly. Sayan uncle left the American east coast to try his luck out west, but got injured or sick. It could take weeks or months before his family would learn about it.
Letters, messages and newspapers were all carried by horse carriage, and in 1850 it took 30 days to send a message 1700km from Kansas City, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, Utah. The uncle could be dead and buried long before his family was notifiedhe was sick.
The invention of the telegraph changed all that. By directing simple electrical impulses through a cable, messages that used to take months to arrive could now be delivered in a few minutes.
The telegraph worked by having an operator using a Morse code key – a small device that completes
