Telephone "voice", together meaning "distant voice". Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed. As with other influential inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb, and the computer, several inventors pioneered experimental work on "voice transmission over a wire" and improved on each other's ideas. New controversies over the issue still arise from time to time. Charles Bourseul, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have all been credited with the invention of the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone by
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