Mar 10, 1876: Speech transmitted by telephone
Alex Bell using his telephone device
134 years ago, on this day in 1876, the first discernible speech is transmitted over a telephone system when inventor Alexander Graham Bell summons his assistant in another room by saying, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." Bell had received a comprehensive telephone patent just three days before.
Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, a leading authority in public speaking and speech correction.
The young Bell was trained to take over the family speech therapy business, and while still a teenager he became a voice teacher and began to experiment in sound.
In 1870, his family moved to Ontario, Canada, and in 1871 Bell went to Boston to demonstrate his father's method of teaching speech to the deaf. The next year, he opened his own school in Boston for training teachers of the deaf and in 1873 became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.
In his free time, Bell experimented with sound waves and became convinced that it would be possible to transmit speech over a telegraph-like system. He enlisted the aid of a gifted mechanic, Thomas Watson, and together the two spent countless nights trying to convert Bell's ideas into practical form.
In 1875, while working on his multiple harmonic telegraph, Bell developed the basic ideas for the telephone. He designed a device to transmit speech vibrations electrically between two receivers and in June 1875 tested his invention. No intelligible words were transmitted, but sounds resembling human speech were heard at the receiving end.
On February 14, 1876, he filed a U.S. patent application for his telephone. Just a few hours later, another American inventor, Elisha Gray, filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office about his intent to seek a similar patent on a telephone transmitter and receiver. Bell filed first, so on March 7 he was awarded U.S. patent 174,465, which granted him ownership over both his telephone instruments and the concept of a telephone system.
Alexander Graham Bell makes the ceremonial call to open telephone service between New York and Chicago, Oct. 18, 1892.
Three days later, on March 10, Bell successfully tested his telephone for the first time in his Boston home. In May, he publicly demonstrated the invention before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston, and in June at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In October, he successfully tested his telephone over a two-mile distance between Boston and Cambridgeport.
The company Bell founded and built, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) eventually became the world's largest corporation. For most of the 20th century, AT&T subsidiary AT&T Long Lines enjoyed a near-total monopoly on long distance telephone service in the United States.
AT&T's lines and metallic circuit connections. March 1, 1891.
AT&T also controlled 22 Bell Operating Companies which provided local telephone service to most of the United States. While there were many "independent telephone companies", General Telephone being the most significant, the Bell System was far larger than all the others, and widely considered a monopoly itself.
The telephone monopoly lasted until January 8, 1982, the date of settlement of United States v. AT&T, a 1974 United States Department of Justice antitrust suit against AT&T. Under the settlement AT&T ("Ma Bell") agreed to divest its local exchange service operating companies, in return for a chance to go into the computer business. AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent Regional Bell Operating Companies known as "Baby Bells".
