ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Gardiner Greene Hubbard

Gardiner Greene Hubbard was a man who lived a very long time ago, around 150 years ago in the 1800s. He was really interested in a kind of magic thing that he could do with his voice, and it was called "telegraphing." Imagine if you wanted to talk to someone really far away, like on the other side of a big mountain or even across an entire ocean! That was really hard to do back then, but telegraphing made it possible.

Gardiner Greene Hubbard loved telegraphing so much that he became one of the people in charge of a big company that helped people talk to each other far away. The company was called the Western Union Telegraph Company, and it helped people send important messages really quickly.

But Gardiner Greene Hubbard didn't stop there! He thought it would be even better if people could actually talk to each other using their voices, not just telegraphing. So he helped create something called the telephone. The telephone was like magic too, because it let people talk to each other on a special wire even if they were really far apart.

Gardiner Greene Hubbard was so smart and important that he even became the first president of a company that made telephones. This company was called the Bell Telephone Company. It was named after a man named Alexander Graham Bell who invented the very first telephone.

Gardiner Greene Hubbard was a really cool person who helped make it possible for you and me to talk to our friends and family on the phone, even if they're far away!