Who really invented telephones/ AN ARTICLE BY anil kumar lines

when  i am attended in a class to explain "the survival of landline telephony" i asked a student who invented telephones ? his reply made me laugh "not me"..so let us share my thought

Who really invented the telephone?

Although Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) is generally credited with inventing telephones, his story is a controversial one. Bell became interested in sound and speech largely because his mother was deaf. Both his father and grandfather were noted experts on teaching deaf people and Bell too became a teacher of the deaf before making his name as an inventor.

But other inventors were working on the idea of making a telephone at the same time as Bell. Elisha Gray (1835–1901), for example, filed a patent on a similar invention just hours after Bell made his own patent application. A third inventor, Antonio Meucci (1808–1889), seems to have developed the telephone in the 1840s—years before either Bell or Gray. In 2002, his contribution was finally recognized when the US Congress passed a bill in his honor.

Photo: Alexander Graham Bell. Courtesy of US Library of Congress.

Bell's patent

Artwork: Alexander Graham Bell's original telephone patent. Artwork courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Bell's patent ("Telegraphy," US patent number 174,465) was filed on February 14, 1876 and granted the following month, and it describes various improvements to simple telegraphy (the method of sending messages down a length of wire using electric currents made famous by Samuel Morse). The most interesting part for modern readers is figure 7, shown here, in which Bell explains how his equipment can carry signals from "the human voice or by means of a musical instrument" (in other words, how his telegraph can be used as a telephone). You'll recognize how it works straight away if you've read the rest of this article. Briefly:

1. The speaker talks into a horn.
2. The sound of their voice makes a diaphragm (a kind of small tight drum skin stretched across the narrow end of the horn) vibrate.
3. The vibrations move a coil near a magnet, converting the mechanical sound energy into a fluctuating electric current.
4. The electric current travels down a wire, which can (in theory) be any length.
5. At the receiving end, similar equipment reverses the process. The electric current flows into a coil placed near a magnet, making the coil move back and forth, and pushing another diaphragm.
6. The diaphragm, stretched over a second horn, recreates the original sound. The narrowing shape of the diaphragm helps to amplify the sound.