On March 10, 1876, the first telephone call was made. The inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, employed a prototype transmitter that used the vibrations caused by sound waves to electronically send a signal into the receiver in the next room. “Watson,” Bell said, “Come here – I want to see you.” One hundred and fifty years later, we’re vibrating millions of times faster, with our text messages and e-mails, internet chats and wireless headsets. We can talk to astronauts on the space station and researchers in submarines. We can have conversations with people all over the world, from the top of the Himalayas to the middle of the African plains. It seems that every month, there’s a new invention and a new way to communicate.

The word invention comes from the Latin verb invenire, meaning to discover or find. It’s not just a matter of suddenly coming across a new thing, however – there’s an element of hard work and creativity involved in any new invention. In English, we use the word to mean both the physical result of this process, and the process itself.

Example 1 (process): The invention of the telegraph made instantaneous transatlantic communication possible.

Example 2 (result): The telegraph was one of the most important inventions of the 19th century.

The pace of invention often means that things that were extremely useful and important at one time are replaced with newer methods or models. While there are still places around the world that use telegrams, the telephone, mail system, or computer e-mail system is used much more frequently. Most of the large international telegraph services (Telex) sent their last messages out between 1999 and 2009.