🚀 Inventions and machines 📡 Communication

The telephone

📖 In short

A telephone is a device that carries your voice from one place to another using electricity, so you can talk to a friend next door or in a faraway country in moments. Alexander Graham Bell invented it about 150 years ago, and today most people carry a smartphone in their pocket.

🤩 Did you know?

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876.
The transistor was invented in 1947, and devices became smaller.
The first fiber-optic telephone cable was completed in 1983.
In an emergency we call a special short number for the ambulance, fire service and police.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 How does it work?

A phone has a microphone that turns your voice into electric signals, which travel along wires or through the air, then the earpiece of the other phone turns them back into a voice.

🔍 The first call

It's said the first sentence Bell spoke on the telephone was a call to his assistant: “Come here, I want you!”, and the assistant heard him in the other room.

💡 From wires to waves

The first phones were connected only by wires. Then came the mobile phone, which sends the voice by radio waves to special masts, so we can talk while we walk.

🎯 The smartphone

Today's smartphone is a little computer with a camera, maps, games and the internet. But don't forget to put it down to play, read and talk with your family face to face.