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Who invented the telephone?

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) is credited with inventing the telephone in 1875. A year later he was the first to secure a patent (exclusive right to make, sell, and use an invention). So many other inventors were working simultaneously on the telephone, however, that there were endless disputes over who invented it first. A native of Scotland, Bell arrived in the United States in 1871 to teach speech to the deaf and had been experimenting with sound waves for six years. He was intrigued by the notion that sound wave vibrations could be converted into electrical currents at one end of a circuit and reconverted into identical sound waves at the other end of the circuit. If this could be done, it would result in a revolutionary new communication tool. Bell described this idea to his father in 1874, just a year before he built his telephone.

On June 3, 1875, Bell perfected the first dual...

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