This case study is a historic analysis of the developments that resulted in the electric telephone. It is a story about human communication. Long distance communication that had already developed with the electrical telegraph system created by Samuel Morse in America and Cooke & Wheatstone in Britain. But now electricity became—next to its capability to transport coded information—also a carrier of spoken information: 'electric speech'. It was the fascinating development of the telephone. Imagine those pre-electric generations, used to slow postal communication, who were already amazed when the telegraph made Distant Writing with lightning speed possible in the mid-nineteenth century. Then the teacher of deaf Alexander Graham Bell, after some years of early experimenting, developed the concept of the membrane telephony (1874) that made Distant Speech possible. Together with the fathers of his two deaf pupils, Hubbard and Sanders, he created the Bell Patent Association (1875) to facilitate its development. Further experimenting, together with his assistant Thomas Watson, resulted in the first prototype of a rude form of the telephone. But it worked when Bell spoke the famous word “Watson, come here”. The Race to the Patent Office to establish his priority is a breathtaking story. It resulted in two patents; his famous First Telephone Patent (1876) and Second Telephone Patent (1877). Patents that had to be defended in the coming years in over 600 lawsuits against all those people jumping on the bandwagon. After demonstrating his invention to the world—among those the English Queen—, it was the Bell Telephone Company (1878) that started to lease the first telephones, and gave licenses to the first Bell-companies offering telephones services to the eager business community. Soon, as the business of the pioneers started to grow and more capital was needed, the American Bell Telephone Company (1880) was organized. That was the start of the Bell Monopoly, based on his valuable patents. And when the telephone market boomed, American Telephone & Telegraph Company (1885) took over and created the Bell System serving urban US. By then the original pioneers had already left their child in the hands of others. This is a story about a basic innovation that was part of clusters of innovations that in totality represents the invention of the electric telephone. The book describes the work of the many individual entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists. It places—analyzing the American Revolution and its aftermath in detail—the inventions in the US context in the second half of the 19th Century; with the ‘’ spirit of times’ of the Gilded Age, and the 'madness of times' with its wars and revolutions. It tells about the contributions of 'the gentlemen of science' and the ‘engineers’, but also the ‘entrepreneur inventors’. Their contributions resulted in several 'clusters of innovations' and ‘clusters of businesses’, described in detail (including patent wars, mergers and acquisitions, and applications). Both from the micro-perspective of the individual entrepreneur, scientist and inventor, as well as the macro-perspective of their influence on society, the basic innovations are described. The book gives the reader a view on the effects of technical change caused by the application of ‘electricity’, how it influenced daily private and working life, and how it affected society. It shows an important aspect of the 2nd Industrial Revolution that created the foundations for our present society. This book is part of series of books (the Invention Series) that covers the inventions within the General Purpose Technologies that fueled breakthrough technological changes. Other titles include: 'The Invention of the Steam Engine', 'The invention of the electro-motive Engine', ‘The Invention of the Electric Light’, ‘The Invention of the Communication Engine ‘Telegraph’’, and ‘The Invention of the Communication Engine ‘Telephone’’. Commercial versions are available through Amazon.