In 1800, Count Alessandro Volta invented the first true battery, which came to be known as the voltaic pile. The voltaic pile consisted of pairs of copper and zinc discs piled on top of each other, separated by a layer of cloth or cardboard soaked in brine.

In the late 1830’s Samuel B. Morse develops a method of transmitting a pattern of sounds by pressing down and releasing a button forming letters and words. This became known as Morse Code.

In 1856, Italian inventor Anthony Meucci developed a form of electromagnetic telephone to communicate from his laboratory to a bedroom in his house. He is often credited with inventing the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell.

Johann Reis transfers voice electrically over a distance of 340 feet with his Reis telephone, using the phrase “The horse does not eat cucumber salad” as an example to prove that speech can be recognized at the receiving end because this phrase is hard to understand acoustically in German.

Elisha Gray filed a patent caveat on Feb 14, 1876 for a liquid transmitter used in a telephone, but the patent was ultimately awarded to Alexander Graham Bell.

Bell first successfully transmits speech, saying “Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!”

On February 12, 1877, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Mr. Watson demonstrated the first two-way long distance telephone call between the Lyceum in Salem to the Boston Globe in Boston.

The first experimental telephone exchange was based on the ideas of Tividar Puskás, and it was built by the Bell Telephone Company in Boston in 1877. He would go on to improve upon his invention, developing the multiplex switchboard.

German technician and inventor Paul Nipkow managed to transmit static image with 18 horizontal lines of resolution. His “Electric Telescope” quickly became the basis of many future mechanical television designs.

Karl Ferdinand Braun, a German physicist, invents the “Braun tube”, or Cathode Ray Tube, which would become the cornerstone of television development. Braun was the first to conceive the use of a CRT as a display device.

Manti Telephone Company was formed in 1907 by a group of business men who saw the potential that telephone service could bring to the area. The first Board of Directors consisted of A.H. Christensen, A.O. Anderson, Stanley Crawford, Quince Crawford, and E.D. Sorensen

First transcontinental telephone call (3600 miles), with Thomas Augustus Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco receiving a call from Alexander Graham Bell at 15 Dey Street in New York City is made.

AT&T conducts more than 4,000 measurements of people’s heads to gauge the best dimensions of standard headsets so that callers’ lips would be near the microphone when holding handsets up to their ears.

On January 7, 1927, the first official transatlantic telephone call is made when W. S. Gifford, president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, calls Sir Evelyn P. Murray, secretary of the General Post Office of Great Britain, on the new commercial circuit.

On September 7, 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth’s image dissector transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, to a receiver in another room of his laboratory in San Francisco. Pem Farnsworth recalled in 1985 that her husband broke the stunned silence of his lab assistants by saying, “There you are – electronic television!”

AT&T commences the first subscriber Touch-Tone service in the towns of Carnegie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania, using push-button telephones that eventually replace rotary dial phones.

Intelsat I was the first commercial communications satellite to be placed in geosynchronous orbit, on April 6, 1965.

In 1971, Theodore Paraskevakos invents a way to transmit electronic data through telephone lines, which forms the original basis for what is now known as caller ID. In May 1985, Kazuo Hashimoto invents a display device to receive Caller ID information. Caller ID is implemented nationally in the United States by 1995.

Since the 1910s, American antitrust regulators had been accusing the Bell System of abusing its monopoly power and in 1974 the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice brought a lawsuit against Bell claiming violations of the Sherman Act. Feeling that it was about to lose the suit, AT&T proposed an alternative: its breakup. Effective January 1, 1984 AT&T completes the divestiture of its local operating companies, forming a new AT&T and the so-called Baby Bells.

Telecom Relay Service is made available for the disabled.