"Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you" is one of the most famous quotes from the Industrial Revolution and signaled a new era in communications. Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone in 1876, although some historians say Elisha Gray, a competitor of Bell, was the first to submit his telephone design to the U.S. patent office. No matter the true origins of the telephone, it connected the world like no other invention until the Internet.