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
History of the telephone History of the telephone This history of the telephone chronicles the development of the electrical telephone, and includes a brief review of its predecessors. Before the invention of electromagnetic telephones, mechanical acoustic devices existed for transmitting speech and music over a distance greater than that of normal direct speech. The earliest mechanical telephones were based on sound transmission through pipes or other physical media. The acoustic tin can telephone, or "lovers' phone", has been known for centuries. It connects two diaphragms with a taut string or wire, which transmits sound by mechanical vibrations from one to the other along the