Here's a strange fact for you.

By the year 2000, roughly half the population of Earth had never made or received a phone call.

I know it seems a little hard to believe, but it's true.

Of course in the years that followed, with the explosion in the number of cell phones, that

number has dropped dramatically.

Without a doubt the telephone is one of the greatest inventions of all time.

Long before the internet reigned supreme, the telephone connected people around the world in a way that had never been possible before.

The telephone connected people around the world in a way that had never been possible before.

The idea of connecting people and sending messages across a wire is one that has been around for centuries.

Examples can be found dating back a few hundred years of the Lover's Phone.

That children's toy where you connect two cans with a length of string or wire.

The earliest known example of it was actually created by British physicist

Robert Hook, who built a similar device for an experiment. By the 1800s, various inventors began experimenting with using electricity to aid the transmission

of messages along wires.

Starting with the first working telegraph, which was created in 1816 by an English inventor named

Francis Rowlands, all the way until 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first

U.S. patent for the modern telephone.

By the way, contrary to popular belief, Bell wasn't the sole inventor of the telephone.

But he is the guy who beat a number of other inventors working on the same idea of electronic transmission

of the human voice across wires to the patent office.

Think about all the people you've probably spoken to on the phone throughout your life.

Those disembodied voices coming to you from far away.

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