Company History: You can find out more about
the many telephone companies in the US in the
Company Histories section.
Who Invented It?: We all know who invented the phone,
don't we? Find out more in
this section.
Visit: Our Seattle museum, part of the
Welcome to the Virtual Museum's Science and Technology of Phones section--or, rather, wing, as in a physical museum this section's exhibits would take up quite a bit of space. There is always a bit of dust here from the new construction going on, so watch your step ...
You may want to begin with the
Timeline showing a history of the telephone and its related machinery--for instance, did you know the technology used to develop the telephone also spurred the development of computers and satellites?
Next, we have an exhibit showing
How Phones Work (and incidentally quite a bit of history there as well), and from there ... well, you can look at whatever interests you.
Here's a list of current Science and Technology exhibits:
- Timeline -- An overview of telephone and related history.
- How Phones Work -- How exactly does your voice change into electricity and fly across the wires to its destination? We explore that, and the invention of the telephone, in this section.
- How Cordless and Cell Phones Work -- Wires are all well and good, but modern phones use the air to do their work. But how, and what does radio have to do with it?
- Calling a Country Far Far Away -- Does long distance calling work differently than shorter calls? How do we get phone conversations across the ocean? And how did we do it before the era of satellites?
- A Time before Phones -- All this talk about phones, but they were only invented in the 1870s. How did people communicate before that? And what inventions lead up to the telephone?
- The Telephone Patent Follies -- We all know who invented the phone, don't we? Elisha Gray. Er, no. Western Union. Ummmm ... Thomas Edison? Nope, it really was Alexander Graham Bell, but it took years for the courts to decide.
More science exhibits will be arriving in the future, so keep coming back. And if you have any questions, or ideas, please feel free to contact us at
telcomhist@aol.com
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