Invention of the telephone useful and widespread apparatus it is now. The telephone exchange was an idea of the Hungarian engineer Tivadar Puskás (1844–1893) in 1876, while he was working for Thomas Edison on a telegraph exchange. Puskás was working on his idea for an electrical telegraph exchange when Alexander Graham Bell received the first patent for the telephone. This caused Puskás to take a fresh look at his own work and he refocused on perfecting a design for a telephone exchange. He then got in touch with the U.S. inventor Thomas Edison who liked the design. According to Edison, "Tivadar Puskas was the
Telephone to other inventions, and not all early researchers of the electrical device called it "telephone". A communication device for sailing vessels "The Telephone" was the invention of a captain John Taylor in 1844. This instrument used four air horns to communicate with vessels in foggy weather. Later, c. 1860, Johann Philipp Reis used the term in reference to his Reis telephone, his device appears to be the first such device based on conversion of sound into electrical impulses, the term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the , "tēle", "far" and φωνή, "phōnē",