Communication has certainly changed a lot over the past 150 years. When our founding fathers first came to America, the only form of communication they had with one another was through letters, which could take days or even weeks to reach its destination. Sending letters to England could take months. But even before that Native Americans actually used smoke signals to communicate with one another. Native Americans are not the only group of people who have used smoke signals to communicate. The Chinese have also used smoke signals as well as the Boy Scouts of America. This form of communication is used by creating puffs of smoke using a fire and a blanket. The smoke signals must be used in an area where they will be visible to the receiver and is usually transmitted on top of a hill or mountain (http://www.indians.org/articles/smoke-signals.html).
It was evident that something had to be developed to make communicating with one another easier and faster. That’s where the telephone comes in. It could actually be considered the greatest invention of the nineteenth century. It not only made communicating with others who were miles away much quicker, it also spawned the growth of many businesses since it made communication much easier.
Surprisingly, there were two people in the running to patent the telephone, not just one person as the majority of people believe. In the 1870s, two relatively unheard of inventors of this time, Alexander Graham Bell and the less known Elisha Gary, both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically. This would later be known as the telephone, of course. Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other, but Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which as most people know, Bell won.