History of the telephone patents, however, were commercially decisive, because they dominated telephone technology and were upheld by court decisions in the United States. The modern telephone is the result of work of many people. Alexander Graham Bell was, however, the first to patent the telephone, as an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". Bell has most often been credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. However, in Germany Johann Philipp Reis is seen as a leading telephone pioneer who stopped only just short of a successful device, and as well the Italian-American inventor and businessman Antonio Meucci has been
History of the telephone worked mainly on a store and forward basis. Although telephones devices were in use before the invention of the telephone exchange, their success and economical operation would have been impossible with the schema and structure of the contemporary telegraph systems. Prior to the invention of the telephone switchboard, pairs of telephones were connected directly with each other, which was primarily useful for connecting a home to the owner's business. A telephone exchange provides telephone service for a small area. Either manually by operators, or automatically by machine switching equipment, it interconnects individual subscriber lines for calls made between them. This