Telephone is an instrument that is designed for the simultaneous transmission and reception of the human voice. Inexpensive, simple to operate, and offering its user a personal type of communication that cannot be obtained through the written word, the telephone has become the most widely used telecommunications device. Hundreds of millions of telephone sets are in use throughout the world.

1896 Telephone (Swedish)

The word telephone, from the Greek roots tele, “far,” and phone, “sound,” was applied as early as the late 17th century; in modern usage it refers solely to electrical devices derived from the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell[2] and others. The U.S. patent granted to Bell in March 1876 for the development of a device to transmit speech sounds over electric wires is often said to be the most valuable ever issued. The general concepts involved in the invention of the telephone–of speech sounds as a complex of vibrations in air that is transferrable to solid bodies and of the convertibility of those vibrations to electrical impulses in conducting metals–had by then been understood for decades. Bell was but one of a number of workers racing to pull them together into a practical instrument for the transmission of speech.

Within 20 years of the Bell patent, the telephone instrument, as modified by Thomas Watson, Emil Berliner, Thomas Edison, and others, acquired a form that has not changed fundamentally in a century. Since the invention of the transistor in 1947, metal wiring and other heavy hardware have been replaced by lightweight and compact microcircuitry. Advances in electronics have improved the performance of the basic design, and they also have allowed the introduction of a number of “smart” features such as automatic redialing, call-number identification, and analog-to-digital conversion for transmission over digital circuits. Such advances supplement, but do not replace, the basic telephone design. As it has since the early years of telephone communication, the telephone instrument comprises the following functional components: a power source, a switch hook, a dialer, a ringer, a transmitter, a receiver, and an anti-sidetone circuit.

(telephon)e set (телефонный) аппарат

analog-to-digital conversion преобразование аналоговой формы в цифровую

anti-sidetone circuit характеристика местного эффекта

call-number identification определение номеров входящих звонков

dialer номеронабиратель

hardware аппаратное обеспечение

microcircuitry микросхемы

receiver телефонная трубка

reception прием (звонка)

redialing повторный набор номера

ringer звонок

switch hook рычажный переключатель телефона

transmission передача

transmitter микрофон

wire провод

operate управлять, контролировать

pull тянуть, натягивать

transmit передавать

apply применять

faint слабый, нечеткий

transferrable передаваемый

Complete the table using information from the text.

a. Write a few paragraphs (one or three) about the inventions you have read about. Use the table above as a support.

b. Answer (in written) the question: “What kind of telephone do you use at home?”

a. Describe (orally) a telephone that you wish someone could invent for you.

b. If you think you could invent a new type of a telephone yourself say how.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. His first version of the Web was a program named “Enquire”. At the time, Berners-Lee was working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory located in Geneva, Switzerland. He invented the system as a way of sharing scientific data (and other information) around the world, using the Internet, a world-wide network of computers, and hypertext documents. He wrote the language HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language), the basic language for the Web, and devised URL’s (universal resource locators) to designate the location of each web page. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) was his set of rules for linking to pages on the Web. After he wrote the first browser in 1990, the World Wide Web was up and going. Its growth was (and still is) phenomenal, and has changed the world, making information more accessible than ever before in history. Berners-Lee is now a Principal Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusett, USA) and the Director of the W3 Consortium. which develops and maintains these and other standards that enable computers on the Web to effectively store and communicate different forms of information