Today in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, patent no. 174461.
Two hours after it was lodged, his rival, Elisha Gray, applied for a similar patent. Bell's was granted. Over 600 law suits followed before the Supreme Court decision ruled in Bell's favour in 1893. Within a year the first telephone exchange was built in Connecticut and within the decade more than 150,000 people in the US alone owned telephones. At this point Bell was not yet thirty. In his later life, Bell experimented with sheep, convinced that sheep with extra nipples would give birth to more lambs.
