The word telephone was coined by Johann Philip Riess (1834-1874) who in 1861 was the first to transmit electrically the sound of a tuning fork over a distance. The device created by Riess and those by others who followed, like the one by the American Elisha Gray (1835-1901), was based on the sharp interruption and resumption of an electrical current caused by a reed made to vibrate by the sound to be transmitted; but the intensity of the current remained the same.
The pitch of the sounds, which depends on the fundamental frequency, did not change.
The timbre, which depends on the harmonics accompanying the fundamental frequency, was to some extent altered. miscellaneousations in intensity could in no way be reproduced. Far more was required to reproduce the articulations and inflections of the human voice.
It was the genius of the Scottish physicist, naturalized American, Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) who solved the problem in the simplest and most elegant way. Bell presented his first telephone at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 and he patented it in the same year, just a few hours before Gray patented a similar one. But already in 1871, Antonio Meucci (1808-1889), who in 1857 had built a rudimental telephone device, had patented one fairly similar to Bell's. ...continues