On March 10, 1876, he called his assistant — and the telephone age began.
Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) was the Scottish-born inventor awarded the first US telephone patent in 1876; his famous first call — 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you' — launched the Bell Telephone Company and the global telephone network.
The son and grandson of elocutionists, he devoted his life to the deaf — his mother and his wife were both deaf — and the telephone grew out of his experiments with visible speech and the transmission of sound. He would call it an intrusion on his real work.
Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh into a family obsessed with speech: his father developed 'visible speech', a system of symbols showing how sounds are made. After two brothers died of tuberculosis, the family emigrated in 1870 — first to Canada, then to Boston, where Bell taught deaf children.
In Boston he met Mabel Hubbard, a deaf former pupil sixteen years his junior, whom he married in 1877. Teaching the deaf to speak remained, in his own words, his life's work; the telephone was a byproduct.
Working on a 'harmonic telegraph' that could send multiple messages down one wire, Bell realized a membrane vibrating with the human voice could vary an electric current continuously — transmitting speech itself. On March 10, 1876, in his Boston laboratory, he spilled battery acid on his trousers and shouted into the liquid transmitter: 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.' Thomas Watson heard him in the next room.
His US Patent 174,465, filed on February 14, 1876 — hours before a rival filing by Elisha Gray — became the most valuable patent in history. The Bell Telephone Company, founded in 1877, grew into AT&T, the largest corporation on earth.
Bell considered the telephone a distraction and kept inventing: the photophone of 1880, which carried voice on a beam of light — the ancestor of fiber optics; an early metal detector; hydrofoil boats that set water-speed records; work on flight with the Aerial Experiment Association.
He co-founded the National Geographic Society and served as its president. He died in 1922 at his estate in Nova Scotia; as his funeral began, every telephone in North America fell silent for one minute.
