How long have there been phones? The development in detail

Today hardly anyone wonders how long the phone has been around. Smartphones have become an integral part of everyday life and without the phone, some would certainly be quite helpless. The groundbreaking invention is not that old.

How long has the phone been in existence?

When asked about the inventor of the phone, the Scot is usually called Alexander Graham Bell. However, this is not correct.

• In principle, Bell only marketed the phone and popularized the invention. However, the father of the telephone is German: on October 26, 1861, the physics teacher Philipp Reis presented his self-made device for voice transmission - and made calls from one room to an adjoining room.
• The first sentences that were called over the phone were not highly philosophical or really worthy of the historical moment. "The sun is made of copper" and "The horse does not eat cucumber salad" have been handed down.
• In 1874, Reis died of tuberculosis at the age of 40. He himself did not experience the triumphal march of his invention and, incidentally, was not the only one who researched the electronic transmission of the spoken word.
• The patent was secured in 1876 by one of his competitors, this Scot Alexander Graham Bell. Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. This company later became the world's largest telecommunications company, AT&T.
• In Germany, the first telephone book was published in Berlin in 1881. It was called "Directory of those involved in the telephone system". It was not yet as thick as the phone books that were later searched for a number. It contained just 187 entries for 94 people.

Bell's development to this day

In the little more than 150 years since its invention, the phone has seen rapid development.

• The first telephone booth was set up in Berlin in 1904. As early as 1926, the Reichsbahn introduced "train telephony by radio" in all D-trains on the Hamburg-Berlin route.
• In 1930 there were already about 3.2 million telephone connections in Germany alone.
• At that time, however, there was not as much telephone calls as today, which was certainly also due to the comparatively high costs. Six years later, so-called community connections for "little speakers" were introduced.
• During the Second World War, private telephone traffic decreased again. It was only in the mid-1950s that telephone calls increased again. For the first time, users could choose to go abroad. Before that, this was done via exchanges.
• Another milestone are mobile phones. The first car phones appeared in 1958 with the expansion of the first large-scale mobile network - the A network. These cell phones had nothing in common with today's cell phones. The devices weighed about 16 kilograms. The size was also impressive: they used almost all of the space in the trunk.
• In 1972 the B network was expanded. Now the participants could also be called in the car. The cell phones got smaller - they were only the size of a suitcase.
• With the expansion of the C network in 1985, the number of mobile phone users also increased. Four years later, ISDN was introduced in Germany. The landline became digital. The technical basis for digital mobile radio networks GMS followed in 1992, which was a breakthrough in mobile radio, combined with the introduction of the D network.
• The first SMS service was presented at CeBIT in 1994. Mobile communications were on the rise.
• However, it still took a while for the first smartphones to hit the market: it was only in 2007 that T-Mobile exclusively sold the first iPhone in Germany.
• The first Android phone was released by Telekom in 2009.

Would you like to know how old your iPhone is? In the next practical tip, we will reveal how you can find out.