section_path: History/Telegraph and telephone
section_name: Telegraph and telephone
paragraph_text: Telegraph and telephone
  
  On July 25, 1837, the first commercial electrical telegraph was demonstrated by English inventor Sir William Fothergill Cooke and English scientist Sir Charles Wheatstone. Both inventors viewed their device as "an improvement to the electromagnetic telegraph" and not as a new device.
  
  Samuel Morse independently developed a version of the electrical telegraph that he unsuccessfully demonstrated on September 2, 1837. His code was an important advance over Wheatstone's signaling method. The first transatlantic telegraph cable was successfully completed on July 27, 1866, allowing transatlantic telecommunication for the first time.
  
  The conventional telephone was patented by Alexander Bell in 1876. Elisha Gray also filed a caveat for it in 1876. Gray abandoned his caveat and because he did not contest Bell's priority, the examiner approved Bell's patent on March 3, 1876. Gray had filed his caveat for the variable resistance telephone, but Bell was the first to document the idea and test it in a telephone. Antonio Meucci invented a device that allowed the electrical transmission of voice over a line nearly 30 years before in 1849, but his device was of little practical value because it relied on the electrophonic effect requiring users to place the receiver in their mouths to "hear". The first commercial telephone services were set up by the Bell Telephone Company in 1878 and 1879 on both sides of the Atlantic in the cities of New Haven and London.