If the telephone had not been invented what would have happened?

The key distinguishing characteristic of the telephone was its ability to transmit the voice directly from speaker to listener. If the telephone had never been invented and we were left with communications like the telegraph, where the communication had to be encoded into dots and dashes, it is possible that some form of automated coding (keyboard entry, telex) would have been developed to a greater extent than it was, and something resembling digital communications might have come along sooner than it did, but later than the telephone actually did. On the other hand, the telephone was such an integral part of the advances that were being made in the late 19th century, that it seems likely that it would have been developed by someone else if Bell and his rivals had not done so. A Word truly without the telephone would have to be a world in which electricity was not developed at all.