Telephone Invented (1876): Alexander Graham Bell's First Call

The telephone was patented by the Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell on 7 March 1876, and three days later, in a Boston boarding house, he made the first intelligible call to his assistant Thomas Watson. Bell’s device turned the human voice into an electrical current and back again, allowing people to speak across distance in real time. Within a few decades the telephone had changed business, family life and cities across the world.

Background: telegraphs and talking machines

By the 1870s the electric telegraph linked cities across North America and Europe, and since the first transatlantic cable of 1858 had briefly joined the continents. Yet telegraphy sent only coded dots and dashes, and lines were crowded with traffic. Telegraph companies wanted a way to send several messages along one wire at the same time.

Inventors on both sides of the Atlantic were also interested in sending sound electrically. In 1861 the German teacher Philipp Reis built a device he called the Telephon, which could transmit musical tones and, according to some reports, occasional words, but not clear speech. In New York, the Italian-born Antonio Meucci experimented with voice-transmitting devices from the 1850s.

Bell: a teacher of the deaf

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh on 3 March 1847. His father, Alexander Melville Bell, developed “Visible Speech”, a system of symbols describing how sounds are made, and his mother was deaf. Speech, hearing and sound were family passions.

After the deaths of his two brothers from tuberculosis, the family moved to Brantford, Ontario, in 1870. Bell went to Boston in 1871 to teach deaf students and in 1873 became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University. His work with the deaf and his knowledge of acoustics guided his inventions.

Bell began working on a “harmonic telegraph” that would send several messages at once using tuned reeds at different pitches. His backers included Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a Boston lawyer whose deaf daughter Mabel was Bell’s pupil and later his wife, and Thomas Sanders, a leather merchant. In 1874 Bell conceived the idea of transmitting speech by an electric current that varied in strength exactly as the air pressure of a sound wave varied.

Watson and the first sounds

Bell hired Thomas A. Watson, a young machinist at Charles Williams’s electrical workshop in Boston, to build his apparatus. On 2 June 1875, while they were testing the harmonic telegraph, a reed stuck at Watson’s end, and Bell heard the sound of its twang through the receiver in another room. He realised that the current had carried the complex overtones of a sound, not just a simple signal.

Within days Watson built a device, often called the “gallows” telephone from the shape of its frame, which transmitted voice-like sounds but not clear words. Bell continued refining the design and drafted a patent describing the method of transmitting speech electrically.

The patent race of 14 February 1876

On 14 February 1876 Bell’s lawyer filed his patent application at the US Patent Office in Washington. On the same day Elisha Gray, a Chicago inventor and co-founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, filed a caveat, a formal notice that he was working on an invention, describing a telephone using a variable-resistance liquid transmitter.

The Patent Office judged that Bell’s application had priority. Patent No. 174,465, “Improvements in Telegraphy”, was granted on 7 March 1876. It covered the method and apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically by causing electrical undulations similar in form to the vibrations of the air.

The timing later became the subject of fierce controversy. In 1886 a patent examiner, Zenas Wilber, swore an affidavit claiming he had shown Gray’s caveat to Bell; he had earlier sworn the opposite. Bell denied ever seeing Gray’s design. Courts upheld Bell’s claims, but some historians have argued that his notebook entries suggest he borrowed the idea of a liquid transmitter from Gray’s caveat, while others defend him. The question remains debated.

“Mr. Watson—Come here”

On 10 March 1876, at Bell’s lodgings at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, Bell and Watson tested a new liquid transmitter, in which a needle attached to a membrane dipped into acidulated water. Bell spoke into the transmitter, and Watson, listening at a receiver in another room, heard the words clearly.

Bell recorded the moment in his laboratory notebook: “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” It was the first intelligible sentence transmitted by telephone. Bell soon abandoned the liquid transmitter in favour of electromagnetic designs that were more practical.

Demonstrations and the first company

In June 1876 Bell demonstrated the telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Visitors and judges, including the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II and the British physicist Sir William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), were astonished, and the device won wide attention.

That summer Bell made one-way calls over several kilometres of telegraph line in Ontario, between Brantford and nearby Paris, and on 9 October 1876 Bell and Watson held a two-way conversation over a line between Boston and Cambridgeport. Bell gave popular lectures and demonstrations in which listeners heard music and speech sent from distant towns.

According to a widely repeated account, Hubbard offered to sell Bell’s patents to the Western Union Telegraph Company for 100,000 dollars, and Western Union declined. Instead, the Bell Telephone Company was founded on 9 July 1877, and two days later Bell married Mabel Hubbard.

Rivals and the patent wars

Western Union soon recognised its mistake and entered the market, using improved transmitters designed by Thomas Edison, whose carbon transmitter gave louder and clearer speech, and by Elisha Gray. The Bell company sued for patent infringement. In November 1879 the two sides settled: Western Union left the telephone business and handed over its patents and networks in return for a share of rental income.

Bell’s patents faced some 600 legal challenges. In 1888 the US Supreme Court upheld their validity in a series of decisions known as the Telephone Cases. Edison, meanwhile, turned his experiments with sound towards the phonograph of 1877.

The spread of telephone networks

The first commercial telephone exchange opened in New Haven, Connecticut, on 28 January 1878, allowing subscribers to be connected through a central switchboard. Exchanges quickly followed in other American cities and in Europe, with London’s first public exchange opening in 1879.

In 1885 the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was formed to build long-distance lines. On 18 October 1892 Bell opened the line between New York and Chicago. By 1900 there were more than a million telephones in the United States. On 25 January 1915 Bell, in New York, spoke to Watson in San Francisco to open the first transcontinental line, repeating his famous words of 1876.

By the numbers

Key people

• Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922): inventor and teacher of the deaf who patented the telephone.
• Thomas A. Watson (1854–1934): machinist and Bell’s assistant, who built the early instruments.
• Elisha Gray (1835–1901): inventor whose caveat of 14 February 1876 described a similar telephone.
• Gardiner Greene Hubbard (1822–1897): Bell’s financial backer, father-in-law and first president of the Bell Telephone Company.
• Thomas Edison (1847–1931): inventor of the carbon transmitter that greatly improved telephone sound.

Legacy

The telephone transformed how people lived and worked. Businesses could coordinate offices and factories instantly, newspapers gathered news faster, and families could speak across distances that once required letters. Telephone exchanges also created a large new occupation, the switchboard operator, filled mainly by young women.

Bell continued to invent, working on the photophone, which sent sound on a beam of light, as well as on aeronautics and hydrofoils, and he remained committed to deaf education. He died at his estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia, on 2 August 1922. During his funeral, telephone service across North America was briefly silenced in his honour.

The principle of turning sound into an electrical signal led on to radio, as Marconi’s transatlantic signals showed in 1901, and ultimately to mobile phones and the internet.

Timeline

• 1847, 3 March: Alexander Graham Bell is born in Edinburgh.
• 1875, 2 June: Bell hears the twang of a reed transmitted electrically.
• 1876, 14 February: Bell’s patent application and Elisha Gray’s caveat are filed.
• 1876, 7 March: Bell is granted US Patent No. 174,465.
• 1876, 10 March: Bell makes the first intelligible telephone call to Watson.
• 1876, June: Bell demonstrates the telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
• 1877, 9 July: The Bell Telephone Company is founded.
• 1878, 28 January: The first commercial telephone exchange opens in New Haven.
• 1892, 18 October: The New York–Chicago long-distance line opens.
• 1915, 25 January: Bell and Watson open the first transcontinental telephone line.

Why it matters

The telephone made instant voice communication over distance part of everyday life. Bell’s invention, and the networks built on it, laid the foundations of modern telecommunications, from the switchboard to the smartphone.