Engineering the Telephone Timeline

This is a replica of Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone, created in 1926 for the 50th anniversary. The first phones were direct wired to a phone ...

This telephone was designed to be connected to a telephone exchange, where calls would be connected by a switchboard operator. The phone used batterie...

The candlestick telephone could be conveniently placed on a table. It was attached by wire to a wall-mounted box that held the ringer, coil and conden...

The first Bell System rotary phones maintained the candlestick design of the phone. By the 1920s, AT&T, the large national telephone company, had begu...

Cradle phones with a handset containing both the transmitter and receiver did not become practical until the late 1920s. Engineers had to overcome two...

AT&T engineers developed this phone in 1937 after studying how customers used the new handset telephones, creating a rectangular base and a revised ha...

AT&T redesigned its primary tabletop phone in 1949. The Model 500 served as families’ main home phone for over 40 years with only minor design changes...

During the 1950s, people started to add additional telephones in their homes. AT&T designed the Princess phone as an attractive, compact, lightweight ...

AT&T introduced its first commercial touch tone phone service outside of Pittsburgh. Touch tone phones offered a simplified calling experience when co...

Inventor Martin Cooper used his DynaTac 8000X in 1973 to make the first cellular phone call - to one of his competitors. When the phone finally came t...