The Stunning Evolution of the Telephone Since 1876: Photos

For most of the remainder of the 19th century, participants in this new experiment had some version of the wooden wall-mounted telephone. Although Charles Williams’ “coffin” phone represented the simplest form of this device, the three-box phone was more emblematic of the sprawling setup required.

“There are four major components to an operable phone [at this time],” says Graham Gifford, executive director of the New Hampshire Telephone Museum. Phones needed a ringer box, a battery box, a handset (often in two pieces for the receiver and microphone) and a transmitter, she explains.

A hand crank known as a magneto, often attached to the top ringer box, was also essential. Winding the crank generated an alternating electrical current along a wire to an operator at a local exchange, who then connected the call by plugging a cord into the recipient’s line on a switchboard.

The first coin-operated public pay phone surfaced in a Connecticut bank in 1889, reportedly due to inventor William Gray’s difficulty in securing a phone to call a doctor when his wife was sick. Early versions of the service depended on the honor system; the exchange operator told the user how much to pay after the call was completed and would listen as coins traveled through separate chutes and triggered distinct bells according to denomination. Prepay models debuted in 1898 and the first outdoor booths appeared a few years later, paving the way for an explosion in service that would lead to more than 2 million payphones across the United States by the end of the 20th century.

Supposedly frustrated by a local exchange operator’s tendency to route calls to her husband’s mortician business, another undertaker named Almon B. Strowger acquired a patent in 1891 for an automatic switching system. First installed in La Porte, Indiana, in 1892, Strowger’s system relied on electromagnetic pulses to move a mechanical arm across a switchboard; because the caller needed to indicate a specific receiver, Strowger and his engineers eventually devised the rotary dial to generate the appropriate number of pulses corresponding to the recipient’s line. Initially, smaller independent exchanges were the primary users of dial phones and automatic switchboards, but the devices became more widespread after 1919 when the dominant American Telephone and Telegraph Company—otherwise known as AT&T—first adopted them.

A side effect of the development of dial technology was the emergence of a new wave of popular phones after the turn of the 20th century. The candlestick or upright phone featured a mouthpiece atop a stand, with a receiver that fit on a side hook when not in use. Strowger’s version featured a rotary dial in the middle of the stand, but many later models incorporated the dial into the base of the stand. (Other versions had no dial at all.) Although some models had wooden parts, many candlestick phones were fashioned from nickel, brass or steel.

“It’s the first glimmer of mobility,” Gifford explains. “The candlestick had a long enough cord, or you could make it have a long enough cord, that you could actually have just the candlestick part in your hand at a desk…You needed the [other] parts, but you could get up and move around [with it].”

By the 1930s, phones had transformed in both composition and appearance. Bakelite, a type of early plastic, proved durable and easier to mold than metal, resulting in celebrated phone models such as the Ericsson DBH 1001. The black DBH 1001 displayed its rotary dial on a square base, and its combined handset rested across a top cradle when not in use. The look was emulated by the Western Electric 302, one of the first phones to eliminate the separate ringer box by incorporating the component inside the unit.

Introduced in 1946, the first car phones leveraged radio frequencies from towers in cities and along highways as the earliest form of mobile phone technology. Initially, the challenges threatened to outweigh the conveniences of the service: The cumbersome equipment filled up most of a car’s trunk and caused the lights to dim when operating. Furthermore, users paid $15 per month, plus 30 to 40 cents per call, while fighting for a free line within the limited bandwidth. A modest 5,000 customers had signed on by 1948, but improvements to the mobile system resulted in a waiting list for anyone hoping to join the ranks of the 40,000 subscribers permitted to use the service by 1965.

Following several years of development and two years of small-town beta testing, the communications behemoth that was the Bell System rolled out the first commercial push-button phones in late 1963 with their Touch-Tone brand. The phones worked by way of dual-tone multifrequency, with each button producing two distinct tones in unison to signal the corresponding number to the central office and minimize the possibility of voices or background noises leading to inadvertent misdialing. The star and pound buttons were added to the now-familiar 12-key grid in 1968, and by 1976, the steady adoption of this technology had resulted in 70 percent of Bell exchanges being overhauled to handle push-button phones.

Although the first video phone was created by Bell Labs in the late 1920s, it took another four decades for a working commercial version to take shape. Attendees of the 1964 World’s Fair encountered the futuristic Picturephone, but there was a major obstacle beyond its exorbitant cost to public acceptance.

“It seem[ed] like a great idea, and I have no doubt people [in the lab were] like, ‘This is going to be fantastic,’ [but] it bombed,” Gifford notes. “Nobody wanted to be looking at whomever they were talking to.”

The Picturephone II, with its larger screen and zooming capabilities, fared no better in the 1970s, and AT&T abandoned its attempts to sway customers after the VideoPhone 2500 also flopped in the 1990s. Visually-aided communications eventually found their niche with internet-based platforms like Skype and Zoom in the new millennium.

Eleven years after producing a working prototype, Motorola unveiled the first commercial handheld cell phone in 1984 with the DynaTAC 8000X. “They called it a ‘brick phone,’” says Gifford of the bulky yet portable product. “It looked like a brick, weigh[ed] about 2 pounds…and had this big antenna.”

The DynaTAC 8000X allowed for 30 minutes of phone time after a 10-hour charge and sold for $3,995. Its status as a luxury item was highlighted when Gordon Gekko, portrayed by Michael Douglas, used one in the 1987 movie Wall Street. Subsequent cellular innovations included the launch of SMS texting services on the Nokia network in 1993, and the arrival of the flip phone with the Motorola StarTAC in 1996.

Although the term wasn’t coined for a few more years, the first smartphone is generally acknowledged to be the IBM Simon personal communicator that entered the market in 1994. Measuring a relatively compact 8-by-2.5-by-1.5 inches and weighing just over 1 pound, the Simon boasted a stylus-enabled touch screen, email, fax, address book and alarm clock for $1,099. The price tag dropped to around $895 with a two-year contract with BellSouth.

The smartphone as we understand it today truly arrived in 2007 with the Apple iPhone, which combined communication services with computer-level operating capabilities. With the introduction of the Apple App Store the following year, the device transformed the phone into an indispensable component of everyday life.