March 10:

1876 : SPEECH TRANSMITTED BY TELEPHONE:

On this day, 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 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.

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.

In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company with two investors, and
the first commercial applications of the telephone took place. Within
a few months, the first of hundreds of legal challenges to Bell's
telephone patent began. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld
Bell's claims, and the Bell Telephone Company enjoyed a monopoly on
the telephone until the expiration of the patent in 1894. After 1878,
however, the legal battles were out of Alexander Graham Bell's hands
because he sold his company to a group of financiers. The company,
which after 1899 was led by the parent American Telephone and
Telegraph Company (AT&T), eventually grew into the largest corporation
in the world.

Alexander Graham Bell continued his experiments in communication,
inventing the photophone, which transmitted speech by light rays, and
the graphophone, which recorded sound. He continued to work with the
deaf, including the educator Helen Keller, and used the royalties from
his inventions to finance several organizations dedicated to the oral
education of the deaf. He later served as president of the National
Geographic Society. Beginning in 1895, he experimented with the
possibility of flight and built giant man-carrying kites and a
hydrofoil craft. He died in 1922 at his summer home and laboratory on
Cape Breton Island, Canada.

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