The telegraph began as a series of separate and private initiatives. The first lines were owned by railway companies and other organisations that sponsored them and by the inventors who developed them.
When the telephone arrived in the 1870s, it developed initially in the same way - as a purely private enterprise - driven only by the desire to grow and make a profit.
For forerunners in private enterprise of communications see the biographies of Edison, Sharples and Tasker.
The first telegraph enterprises were set up by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in Britain in 1837 and by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in America the following year.
It was hard going at first. None of the early lines made any profit and it took several years before business and governments began to see how useful the telegraph could be. But once the idea caught on, growth was explosive.
The 1850s saw a frantic scramble to build telegraph lines, with many new companies entering the business on both sides of the Atlantic.
The main factor fuelling the growth of the telegraph was customer demand - wealthy men and powerful organisations who were prepared to invest in the lines that would enable them to send messages further and faster.
So most of the early telegraph services were private ones - the idea of a public service accessible to all took much longer to develop.
Bell's patent, granted on March 7, 1876, has been called the most valuable in history. It shaped the fortunes of the early telephone businesses. Bell had patented the principles of the telephone - but with a transmitter that hardly worked.
Thomas Edison, backed by the Western Union Telegraph company, had developed a carbon-based transmitter that worked much better. But otherwise, his telephone was just like Bell's.
In America, the disputed patent was resolved in court and the Bell Telephone Company emerged victorious.
In Britain, the rival companies settled their differences to face a far more powerful threat - the Postmaster-General and his intention to bring all telephony under state licence.
