History of the telephone sent by Morse on January 6, 1838, across of wiring. Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time to time. Charles Bourseul, Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have all been credited with the telephone's invention. The early history of the telephone became and still remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the huge mass of lawsuits to resolve the patent claims of many individuals and commercial competitors. The Bell and Edison
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",