Inventing a new technology is an unpredictable business.
An inventor often starts out with one idea and ends up developing a completely different product. Consider the telephone, invented in 1876.Alexander Graham Bell was trying to develop an advanced telegraph that could send multiple messages over multiple lines, according to Robert Friedel, a history professor at the University of Maryland. In fact, Bell described his device as a "speaking telegraph."
The telegraph, invented by Samuel Morse in 1844, was a marvel. Morse acknowledged its wonderous nature in the first message he transmitted from Washington, D.C. to his assistant in Baltimore, Maryland: "What hath God wrought!"
For the first time, people separated by distance could communicate relatively quickly.
By 1883 Western Union had 12,917 telegraph offices scattered across the country.
The telegraph had several significant limitations, though. Only a single message could be sent at a time, and it had to be sent to a single point. Once the message arrived, an expert had to translate it.
So Bell searched for a way to overcome these obstacles and came up with a working telephone. The first ads for the telephone touted it as a tool to save "time and temper." It also helped out in emergencies, ads noted.
Eventually, telephone companies began to sell the devices on the pleasure principle.
"Friends who are linked by telephone have good times," read a Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. ad. And: "How much pleasure it gives and how little it costs to send your voice over the long distance lines of the Bell system."
We got the message, and have been talking up a storm ever since.