Roberta McKern
Right up there with household electricity and the automobile, surely one of the big transformers of the 20th century was the rise of the telephone.
Alexander Graham Bell is generally credited with inventing it, though others were also working in the field. The telephone marked its debut in 1876, the year of the American Centennial. The first public telephone appeared in 1877, but further development of central exchanges by 1879 and of automatic…