Western Union promoted the new telephone as a fresh invention; as a new kind of telegraph that could send messages spoken by an operator. Nobody, in those days, thought of the telephone as something to have at home! Remember, houses still had no electricity then. At a gathering of scientists, Edison showed that his loud-speaking telephone was better than the one Alexander Graham Bell had made. He and Bell sat together at the gathering. A colleague of Edison recited a nursery rhyme into the phone, and everybody could hear that. But when it came to Bell’s phone, only the ones sitting close by could hear the sound.
Obviously, Bell was not happy with all this. Soon, Bell dragged Western Union into court over the patent rights. Finally, Western Union agreed to pull out of the telephone market in 1879, and the dispute ended.
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