II.

Development

In 1854 the French inventor Charles Bourseul suggested that vibrations caused by speaking into a flexible disc or diaphragm might be used to connect and disconnect an electric circuit, thereby producing similar vibrations in a diaphragm at another location, where the original sound would be reproduced. A few years later, the German physicist Johann Philip Reis invented an instrument that transmitted musical tones but could not reproduce speech. A form of acoustic communication device had also been developed in the 1850s by an Italian-American inventor, Antonio Meucci. However, in 1876, having discovered that only a steady electric current could be used to transmit speech, the American inventor Alexander Graham Bell produced the first telephone capable of transmitting and receiving human speech with its quality and timbre. His compatriot Elisha Gray had filed a claim for the invention just hours after Bell, but Bell's patent was upheld by the United States Supreme Court, and he has become widely recognized as the inventor of the telephone.