1877 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world’s first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed. As with other influential inventions such as radio, television, the light bulb, and the computer, several inventors pioneered experimental work on voice transmission over a wire and improved on each other’s ideas. New controversies over the issue still arise from time to time. Charles Bourseul, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have all been credited with the invention of the telephone.
In 1854 the French engineer Charles Bourseul wrote the first design of a telephone in a public memorandum, but Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in March 1876. The Bell patents were forensically victorious and commercially decisive. That first patent by Bell was the master patent of the telephone, from which other patents for electric telephone devices and features flowed.
In 1876, shortly after the telephone was invented, Hungarian engineer Tivadar Puskás invented the telephone switch, which allowed for the formation of telephone exchanges, and eventually networks.
June 20,1877 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world's first commercial telephone