Learn English – How was “tin can phone”/”string phone” called before telephone invented

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Or was anything carrying sound to remote already called phone before telephone?

Best Answer

Lover's String (also found as Lovers' String or Lover's Telegraph) was the name used in the late 19th Century in documents relating to the development and patenting of the electric telephone.

In documents relating to Mr Bell's 2nd patent (#186,787 of Jan 30, 1877), there is discussion of the origin of the telephone in which we find this text:

He shows and describes it as a "stretched" diaphragm, with a piece of soft iron attached to it, showing that it is to be an elastic membrane, and not of iron. He got his idea from the lover's string telephone, which is ordinarily made with a diaphragm of parchment or bladder.

Conklin's Handy Manual of Useful Information and World's Atlas of 1891 (as well as several other publications) mentions this:

In 1831, Wheatstone showed that when the sounding boards of two musical instruments were connected together by a rod of pine wood, a tune played on one will be faithfully reproduced by the other. Somewhat later a toy, called the Lovers' String, was made, and is the simplest form of a mechanical telephone. The toy consisted of two tin cups, the bottoms made of parchment or cat gut tightly stretched like a drum head, and connected, one with the other, by a string or cord. When the string was drawn taut, sounds such as those of ordinary speech produced in front of one of the cups were transmitted along the string to the other cup and reproduced there. This was the first telephone.

There is an image of the text in a different publication, here.

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