telephones

I see today that Google are celebrating Alexander Graham Bell's "invention" of the telephone. Except he never invented it. That honour goes to Antonio Meucci, whose work predates Bell's and who was unfortunately too poor to be able to maintain the patent on his device. He built prototypes of...

Many people are using USB phones with Skype and similar services. Will the POT (plain old telephone) companies eventually stop supporting telephone systems that have their own source of power independent from the other utilities? On one hand it’s a nice back-up when there is a power failure...

Okay, for the purposes of this scenario, it's sometime before, say, 1980. There's no caller ID, voice mail, call waiting, three-way calling, or anything fancy like that. Person A calls Person B, but B doesn't pick up. While B's phone is ringing, Person C also tries to call B. These are both...