The story of the first telephone call – nine words that changed the world

“Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Hardly momentous words, but their implications were enormous.

Spoken by Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell in his Boston laboratory on March 10 1876, they were the first intelligible words to be transmitted electrically through a wire from one place to another. With that, the telephone age began.

Thomas Watson, Bell’s assistant, received that call only in the next room – but Bell’s ambitions ran much further. The 29-year-old professor of vocal physiology at Boston University was sure he had invented a technology that would change history. Now he just needed to convince the rest of the world.

Bell had been working on the design of a “harmonic telegraph”, as he called it, for several years. Originally, it was meant as a way of sending numerous telegraph messages simultaneously down the same cable.

But Bell was not the only one to have the idea. The American electrical engineer Elisha Grey was working along similar lines, and both men submitted patent caveats – a notice of their intention to submit a full application – within an hour of each other on February 14 1876. There followed some frantic communication between Bell in Boston and his agent in Washington DC to make sure the applications did not overlap.

Bell’s patent (US174465A) was finally issued on March 7. Three days later, he made history when he spoke those nine simple words. Grey abandoned his patent caveat, and his future attempts to contest Bell’s patent failed in court.

How Bell’s telephone worked

The key to this new telephone technology was developing a way of turning the acoustic oscillations generated by the human voice into electrical oscillations that could be transmitted through a telegraph cable. (By this time, undersea cables connected Ireland with North America, and England with mainland Europe.)

Bell and his assistant Watson had already shown that quite complex sounds such as musical notes could be transmitted electrically. In 1875, they built a transmitter made of parchment stretched tight like a drum, with a piece of magnetised iron attached that could move between the poles of an electromagnet.

Sound caused the parchment to vibrate. This in turn made the piece of iron move back and forth between the electromagnet’s poles, creating an oscillating current which could be turned back into sound with similar apparatus at the other end.

This was the technology that Bell patented on March 7 1876. But it was not the technology he used in his first demonstration three days later. In fact, his words were transmitted using a liquid transmitter filled with acidified water that conducted electricity.

This device was similar to ones Grey had been using. This fact caused some controversy when it later became known, forming part of Grey’s attempts to contest Bell’s patent. It is still sometimes claimed that Grey, rather than Bell, was the telephone’s true inventor.

Bell did not use the liquid transmitter again in his experiments – it was difficult to see how it could be turned into a commercial instrument. And for the first few months following the demonstration, the telephone seemed to be going precisely nowhere.

Everyone agreed it was a marvellous and ingenious device – but what was it for, exactly? It was no competition to the telegraph. After all, who were you going to call?

Salesman and showman

When Bell’s new device on show at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, it was largely lost in the crowd of exhibits – although the emperor of Brazil is reported to have exclaimed: “My God, it talks!”

However, two of the judges, eminent scientists Joseph Henry and William Thomson, awarded Bell one of the exhibition’s coveted medals. Irish-born Thomson – the first scientist to be elevated to the British Parliament’s upper house as Lord Kelvin – would later tell scientists back home about “the most wonderful thing in America … the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph is due to a young countryman of our own, Mr Graham Bell.”

Bell, meanwhile, was working hard at selling his invention. Like all Victorian inventors, he had to be a showman, too. At a performance in Salem, Massachusetts, in February 1877, he used the telephone to communicate with his assistant Watson far away in Boston.

First they played Morse code down the line in musical notes, and “the audience burst into wild applause”, according to reports. Then a “telephonic organ” in Boston played Auld Lang Syne and Yankee Doodle to the rapt Salem audience.

In London, wires were laid between theatres to enable a “telephonic concert, in which the audience in one house will hear the music played at the other”.

All of this took money, of course, and Bell had the investors to back him – including his soon-to-be father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a wealthy American lawyer, financier and the founder of the National Geographic Society. In 1877, they formalised the Bell Patent Association into the joint stock company, the Bell Telephone Company, to develop the commercial possibilities of Bell’s invention.

They were soon manufacturing telephone equipment to Bell’s design, and two years later established the International Bell Telephone Company to market the equipment in Europe. In 1885, this would become the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, better known today as AT&T.

On a more individual level, Bell made a fortune while his rival Grey has largely been relegated to a footnote in the history of electrical technologies.

By the turn of the 20th century, the telephone had found its place as an essential accessory for prosperous middle-class households in the US and Europe, and an important tool for businessmen.

It had also become a vital ingredient in the exciting mix of ideas and inventions that Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic used to imagine their technological future.

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Iwan Rhys Morus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. He is the author of How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon (Icon Books).