Beginnings of the telephone service

After the invention of the telephone in 1876, telephony developed rapidly, and a public telephone service grew up in most countries. Growth was much more rapid in the USA than elsewhere. Telephone exchanges were introduced from 1878, and interurban links came into use as the density of exchanges grew. Technical difficulties, commercial rivalries, and, outside the USA, governmental policies, held back the development of long-distance or trunk lines until the middle 1880s. In Europe, and some other places outside the USA, long-line development was greatly accelerated by the system of simultaneous telephony and telegraph invented by Francois van Rysselberghe, so that by 1887, Europe had over 17 000 km of long-distance telephone lines. In the USA, long-distance telephony developed at about the same time on a basis of metallic-loop circuits. In 1891, Britain scored a notable success in providing telephony between London and Paris, although Britain had no effective internal long-distance system until 1896. Commercial telephony over a distance of 1625 km, between New York and Chicago, was established in the USA in 1892. The technical improvement of both exchanges and transmission systems proceeded rapidly, with the introduction of coil loading of cables and long lines, electromechanical telephone repeaters in the first decade of the present century, and the exploitation of electronics and modulation in the second decade.