Samuel F.B. Morse. Although he is remembered as the inventor of the telegraph, Samuel Morse’s first career was as an artist. From 1810 through the 1830s he studied and taught painting in Europe and the United States. On a trip from Europe, Morse met U.S. scientist Charles Thomas Jackson, who had been studying electricity and the electromagnet in Paris. Morse became interested in the idea that electricity could facilitate human communication. Upon his return he broke from painting to work on developing an electric telegraph. European inventors were attempting similar projects, but Morse was the one who, in May 1844, successfully transmitted the first telegraph message–“What hath God wrought”–from Washington to Baltimore.

Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was born in 1847, in Edinburgh and educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London. He immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the United States in 1871. In the U.S. he began teaching deaf-mutes, publicizing the system called visible speech. The system, which was developed by his father, the Scottish educator Alexander Melville Bell (1819-1905), shows how the lips, tongue, and throat are used in the articulation of sound. In 1872 Bell founded a school for deaf-mutes in Boston. The school subsequently became part of Boston University, where Bell was appointed professor of vocal physiology. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1882.

Since the age of 18, Bell had been working on the idea of transmitting speech electrically. While Alexander Graham Bell was experimenting with telegraph instruments in the early 1870s, he realized it might be possible to transmit the human voice over a wire by using electricity. By March 1876 he made a transmission, but the sound was very faint. He improved his results over the next few months when he transmitted sound clearly between Cambridge and Salem, Massachusetts. It functioned as both a transmitter and a receiver.

Emile Berliner. Born in Hanover, Germany, Emile Berliner immigrated to the United States of America in 1870, where he established himself in Washington, D.C. After some time working in a livery stable, he became interested in the new audio technology of the telephone and phonograph, and invented an improved telephone transmitter acquired by the Bell Telephone Company, one of the first types of microphone. Berliner worked for Bell Telephone in Boston from 1877 to 1883, when he returned to Washington and established himself as a private researcher. Emile Berliner (1851–1929) is best known for developing the disc record gramophone (phonograph in American English).