While some audiences in 1879 were being outraged by Ibsen's A Doll's House, others were listening to lectures on the latest electrical discoveries and inventions at England's Royal Institution, which held meetings each Friday during October and June. Ibsen dramatized the awakening of women from Victorian restrictions; the lecturing scientists sought to explain how electrical communications could liberate mankind from the tyranny of isolation.

These were forward looking men, but they could barely imagine all the implications of their work. Could Ibsen foresee Sigmund Freud's Three Treatises on the Theory of Sex, published 25 years later, or today's women's movement? Could Sir William Henry Preece — scholar, electrical researcher, inventor and lecturer — predict radio broadcasting, color TV, radar, and satellite repeaters, for reliable world–wide communications and navigation?

In one of Preece's lecturer at the Royal Institution in 1880, he described the "tremendous" improvement, that Wheatstone's alphabetical telegraphic apparatus had made possible in Great Britain's telegraph network. He reported about 5000 units then in use — an increase from the 1200 units of only 10 years earlier.

The eight telegraphic circuits of 1870 had by then grown to the "enormous" quantity of 150, and where earlier equipment could handle only 70 to 80 words per minute, the improved units could carry 150 to 180 words per minute.

In his enthusiastic report Preece said the Wheatstone apparatus had reached a peak of perfection — "at the head of the world, and the time is not far distant when even America will take advantage of the invention we are now using."

But the U.S. had its own inventors. They were busily tinkering with the next step in communications — telephony, which was destined soon to overshadow telegraphy.

Elisha Gray, co–founder of the Western Electric Company, and Alexander Graham Bell, were in a race to perfect a practical telephone. Gray was an expert electrician and Bell barely understood electrical principles, but ironically, Bell won the race. By 1880, when Preece was trumpeting the praise of Wheatstone's telegraphic apparatus in England, Bell in America was already selling some of his, shares in the Bell Telephone Company, putting himself in the millionaire class.

However, because Bell and most of the telephone company founders sold too soon, no heirs to mighty telephone fortunes survive.

The U.S. also was making great strides in other electrical fields. In 1880 as telephone lines began to span the country, Thomas Alva Edison was directing the installation of street lighting in New York City after patenting the electric–light lamp. He was self–educated, with only a minimal understanding of the work of Ampère, Faraday, Maxwell, Henry and Hertz.

It was only 1879 when William Edward Ayrton, an electrical engineer who did a great deal of work in electrical measurements and better known for his Ayrton shunt and the Ayrton–Mather galvanometer, pioneered electricity as a motive power for railways. Electric trolleys soon traversed the larger cities in the United States, and by 1895 the first main–line railway was electrified. Electric automobiles, such as the Runabout and the Electric Brougham (1900), made a tentative appearance, but were soon replaced by "gas guzzlers." However, it was 25 years after electric motive power was first used for railways before the Broadway–City Hall, electrically powered subway opened in New York City (1905).

Of course, Europe did a great deal of the pioneer work in electric–motive power. Siemens and Halske, a German company, exhibited what it claimed was the first electric railway at the 1879 Industrial Exhibition in Berlin; the Paris subway became operational in 1898, seven years before the New York system; and the first trolley bus, a light wagonette, is said to have run along the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin in 1882. Its rear axle was driven by two motors, each about 3 hp.

The end of the 70's ushered in a period of great activity and jealous competition among U.S. and foreign inventors. The outcome of patent battles in the courts often hinged on proof that an idea was conceived days or even hours prior to another inventor's claim. Bell and his backers defended thousands of suits against his patent — No. 174,465, issued March 7, 1876. All the attacks proved unsuccessful.

Even in his days of success, Bell was not above envying other inventors. When Edison invented the phonograph (1876-1878), Bell was deeply upset. Although busy with his responsibilities of improving and promoting his telephone and battling patent–infringement cases in court, he is said to have remarked, "It is a most astonishing thing to me that I could possibly have let this invention [the phonograph] slip through my fingers."

Edison again topped Bell when he created a practical carbon microphone (patented 1886) that made long-distance telephone practical. (Some historians attribute the carbon microphone to David Hughes in 1878.)

Bell's first liquid microphone wasn't practical, but his magnetic–inductive, or rather variable–reluctance, device, which he used as a microphone in later demonstrations and his first commercial system, developed very–low electrical outputs. Fortunately, the inductive device when used as a receiver was very sensitive, and allowed communications up to about 35 miles, but with a lot of shouting.

The carbon microphone, on the other hand, had amplifying qualities and could develop more power output than was present in the input energy of the sound, because of its valve–like modulation action. The induction microphone directly converted sound to electrical energy, but very inefficiently.

Edison's carbon microphone and Bell's magnetic receiver became, and remains to this day, the mainstay of the world's telephone systems. By 1887, the year Giuseppe Verdi composed the opera Otello, Hertz demonstrated, that electromagnetic waves behave like light waves and Edward Bellamy was writing, Looking Backwards, Bell Telephone's subscribers had grown from hundreds to millions; calls once made by names, now were done by numbers.

The phonograph was being invented and developed almost simultaneously with the telephone. In the beginning, many experimenters tried — most were unsuccessful — to reproduce sound by mechanical means. At best, they created musical tones. The human voice eluded clear reproduction.

Sound was studied, analyzed and even recorded. In 1857 a French scientist named Leon Scott developed the "phonautograph" that could record sound on a rotating, lamp–blackened cylinder, but the sound could not be played back. It was not until 1877, while experimenting with an automatic telegraph repeater, that Edison invented a recorder and reproducer of sound.

Interestingly, the U.S. Patent Office found no prior claims to any device bearing any resemblance to Edison's device. His phonograph used a spirally grooved, tinfoil–coated cylinder with a mouthpiece for recording sound by scratching "hill–and–dale" impressions, in the foil with an attached needle. A crank rotated the cylinder. For listening, a funnel horn replaced the mouthpiece.

Four years later, inventors Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter developed the idea of using a wax cylinder as an improved sound recording medium. In 1887, ten years after Edison's basic patent, the Volta Graphophone Company was formed to manufacture and merchandise the Graphophone, based upon the work of Bell and Tainter.

Other inventors also were at work. During 1888 to 1901, Emile Berliner and Eldridge Johnson developed flat–disc records that could be mass-produced in hard rubber or shellac from a master record. These discs used lateral recording, as do today's records, a significant departure from Edison's hill–and–dale approach. To exploit these inventions, the Victor Talking Machine Co., forerunner of a major division of today's RCA, was founded. The rival Columbia Phonograph Company was organized by Edward D. Easton in 1888. Columbia later became RCA's competitor not only in records but also in broadcasting, color TV, and now in home–recorded TV, still in the development stage.

In England, an important merchandising innovation was tried in 1901, when the British Victor Talking Machine Company began recording noted opera singers. Under the name Monarch, it marketed recordings of dozens of celebrated European singers in 1903. A year later Victor released its first comprehensive Red Seal list of artists.

By 1905 Edison's phonograph company, following the lead of the British company, secured stars of New York's Metropolitan Opera for its recordings, featuring them under the trade name Diamond Disk records.

One of the most famous opera stars, who contributed substantially to the commercial success of the phonograph industry, was the "golden tenor" Enrico Caruso. Born in Naples, Italy, in 1873, he became a tremendous success at the Metropolitan in 1904 after initial success in Europe. His powerful, melodious voice made hundreds of recordings, now valuable collectors items.

The early crude mechanical recording systems needed a powerful voice like his to produce effective results. Thus there was a perfect "marriage." There is no doubt that phonograph records, which easily could distribute music to the masses, contributed as much to Caruso's widespread popularity as Caruso's voice contributed to the phonograph's initial success.

Mechanical improvements followed along with improved marketing techniques. A spring–wound motor and mechanical speed governor replaced the crank, and a radial tone arm carried the sound from a pick–up needle to a large Victor–phonograph "morning glory" horn. By 1905, the horn disappeared into a cabinet and the phonograph was called a Victrola.

During all this time (1877 to 1905) Edison continued to make improvements on the phonograph, his favorite invention and one of his biggest moneymakers. By 1910 the phonograph and record market had reached $7 million in sales.

The main use of the phonograph, of course, was for entertainment. Yet when he first invented it, Edison is said to have stated, "I don't want the phonograph used for amusement purposes. It is not a toy." Since today's multimillion recording industry is mainly for entertainment, though it serves also many serious purposes, historical, educational and artistic — it's interesting to speculate if Edison would consider today's phonograph a toy.

In the 1860's and 1870's the very idea of telephony or speech reproduction was equated by the public with supernatural phenomena. Voices that traveled over wires and came out of a box could only be mystical, or the result of insane hallucinations. How would the public react to communication without even the wires? The answer was soon to come.

In 1884 messages sent through buried insulated wires — no doubt some carrying press releases of the success of Mark Twain's new novel, Huckleberry Finn — were picked up on telephone circuits erected on poles 80 ft above the ground. Telegraph circuits created electrical disturbances in telephone lines 2000 ft away, and distinct speech could be picked up from phone lines as far as a quarter mile away. By 1892 messages were deliberately sent, by such inductive methods, a distance of 3.3 miles across the Bristol Channel in England.