Countdown to Christmas
25 - Telephone
The telephone enables people to communicate acoustically and synchronously over any distance. This is a significant advance and an important addition to the communication by post that was used until then. Like many other inventions, it was initially only accessible to a few and later achieved practically universal use - at least in affluent societies.
While human operators were still required for every call at the beginning of the development, people were able to enter telephone numbers themselves from the beginning of the 20th century with the invention of the dial - a huge step forward.
Another epoch-making development was mobile telephony - which today shapes and structures our lives in many different ways.
Inventors
The telephone was brought to commercial maturity by the American inventor and entrepreneur Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. However, as with many other inventions, there were predecessors who already had similar ideas and implemented them technically. These included the Italian Antonio Meucci (1854) and the German Johann Philipp Reis (1861). The latter also coined the term telephone.
We all like to hear the voices of our nearest and dearest at the holidays. The telephone makes this possible, even without being physically close. Beyond its huge economic importance, it was and is therefore also an important tool for maintaining and strengthening social ties.
