On this day in history, we celebrate Alexander Graham Bell patenting his most famous invention (in 1876) by investigating variants of "telephone" in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016). Specifically, I found occurrences of phone, phones, phoning, payphone, telephone, and celly, and graphed these instances by decade as follows:

As the figure shows, Dr. Bell's invention has figured prominently in Top Ten music, with this prominence becoming greater throughout the years, particularly in the 2000s and 2010s (after a buck in the trend in the 1990s). One would predict these numbers to continue their rise, as technology progresses and telephones find still greater uses in our daily lives.

This song isn't a part of my Top Ten collection, but it is a favorite of mine that deals with the telephone: