Robert G. Brown Jr. (1857 - aft. 1940) was an American engineer who invented the first

telephone handset A handset is a component of a telephone that a user holds to the ear and mouth to receive audio through the receiver and speak to the remote party using the built-in transmitter. In earlier telephones, the transmitter was mounted directly on ...

, in 1878. The Gold and Stock Exchange in New York used a few of the handsets. They were not accepted by the Bell Company until nearly fifty years later, when they began being used in the United States. Robert G. Brown graduated from Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (which became what's today known as

NYU Tandon School of Engineering The New York University Tandon School of Engineering (commonly referred to as Tandon) is the engineering and applied sciences school of New York University. Tandon is the second oldest private engineering and technology school in the United Sta ...

) in 1868.

Europe connection

Brown went to France with the hope that there would be more receptivity to his idea. In 1879, the Société Générale des Téléphones produced a telephone using Brown's handset design, which became popular in Europe.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Robert G. 1920 deaths Telephony 19th-century American inventors Year of birth uncertain Polytechnic Institute of New York University alumni