Telephone Coloring Page

Alexander Graham Bell was a teacher of deaf students, and his mother and his wife were both deaf, so he spent years studying sound and speech. He was granted a patent for the telephone in March 1876. A few days later he spoke the first words over it to his assistant, Thomas Watson, who was in another room, and asked him to come in.

Before the telephone a message could only travel as fast as a letter or a telegraph operator tapping out code. A voice sent along a wire could be heard right away, and by 1878 a town in Connecticut had printed the first telephone book, a single page with about 50 names. The tall candlestick telephones in old photos came along in the late 1800s.