“Which brings us at last to the niche in the wall and the world-changing object it contained: the telephone. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, no one anywhere, Bell included, saw its full potential. Many didn’t see any potential for it at all. Executives from Western Union famously dismissed the phone as “an electrical toy.†So Bell proceeded independently and did rather well out of it, to say the least. The Bell patent (No. 174,465) became the single most valuable patent ever granted. All Bell did really was put together existing technologies. The components necessary to make telephones had existed for thirty years, and the principles were understood. The problem wasn’t so much with getting a voice to travel along a wire—children had long been doing that with two tin cans and a length of string—as with amplifying it so that it could be heard at a distance. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 326). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 326). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
