before me inovation wich is mabell there were a bunch of littel tiny local phone companys so u called only call people with in the range of those tiny phone companys n that range was normaly only like with in your city or maybe your state so when mabell came what they did was they bought up all the tiny little local companys and he connected them all together so for the first time in the world all the phones in the world all of the phones were connected so people from all over the world could contact eachother and talk to eachother over the phone so now instead of having to wait a few days for a letter to reach sombody on the other side of the country u could now pick up the phone and talk to them in the time it takes them to answer it