‘Talking with electricity’
E: Alexander Graham Bell understood the theory of a telephone, but struggled for a number of years to make a working model. Then, on March 10th 1876,he finally succeeded in transmitting speech. Bell’s first telephone of today, and over the next 100 years it underwent many changes. A microphone was added to produce signal. Then, the telephone ‘bell’ was attached, and users were given a unique ‘telephone number’. Once amplifiers were added in the 1920s, a telephone system was establishes that allowed people to talk across continents – the era of long-distance phone calls had arrived.