Essay 20-B: Alexander Graham Bell, the Invention of the Telephone, and the People

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

In many ways, Alexander Graham Bell had been preparing since childhood for the epic moment that occurred in Boston on March 10, 1876. 

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland to extraordinary parents – a father who specialized in oration and elocution, and a deaf mother who trained herself to be an accomplished pianist – Bell from a young age possessed enormous curiosity about human speech and how it was transmitted and received. By sixteen, he was teaching music and elocution at a boys’ boarding school. Blessed with a resonant voice as he matured, he devised a unique system for communicating with his mother – unlike most people who spoke to Mrs. Bell through an ear tube, Bell placed his lips very close to her forehead and spoke in low, sonorous tones. He believed his mother could “hear” him through the vibrations his vocal tones would create. 

In 1871, at the age of 24, Bell moved to Boston to teach at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes, and a year later, opened his School of Vocal Physiology. He quickly became known as a voice and speech expert, and his services were in great demand. Later that same year, Boston University appointed Bell professor of vocal physiology and elocution at its School of Oratory, where one of his students, Mabel Hubbard, would become his future wife.

At BU, Bell conducted acoustics experiments and worked on plans for a “harmonic telegraph,” which would allow the transmittal of multiple telegraph messages over a single wire using different sound-wave frequencies. Early in 1874, he met a young Boston electrical machinist named Thomas Watson – one account called the chance meeting “one of the most fortuitous in technological history” – and shared with Watson his dream of perfecting another machine that would allow the human voice to travel over wires. The pair forged a partnership and, while Bell was on sabbatical to conduct research, began work on a transmitting and receiving device. At one point in June 1875, the invention transmitted a “twang” from one room to another. An excited Bell believed the complex overtones and timbre of the twang to be similar to those in the human voice. Perhaps it wasn’t just sounds, but spoken words that could be transmitted. 

Initially, Bell had referred to his machine as an “advanced telegraphy instrument,” but within a very short time he re-named it to the household word by which it would become known: the telephone. 

Bell and Watson threw themselves into their work during the summer and fall of 1875. Bell maintained a relentless work schedule and became ill from exhaustion in the late fall. Still, he raced to perfect his telephone and on March 7, 1876 – three days before he achieved success with his new invention – he filed specifications with the U.S. Patent Office and was granted one of the most famous patents in American history: No. 174,465. 

On March 10, in the Boston workshop, Watson heard the sound he and Bell had been waiting for.

What made the moment so special was that the sound was a human voice – not a hum or a vibration, but, as Bell wrote to his father, “articulate speech.” Bell recounted in his notebook that remarkable afternoon: 

“Mr. Watson was stationed in one room with the Receiving Instrument. He pressed one ear closely against [it] and closed the other ear with his hand. The Transmitting Instrument was placed in another room and the doors of both rooms were closed.”

Bell then uttered the words that would become an iconic phrase in American history: “Mr. Watson, come here – I want to see you.” A jubilant Watson raced into the other room and told the inventor, to Bell’s “delight,” that he had heard and understood the message. 

Bell’s voice had traveled just ten yards along a wire from one room to another, but in a letter to his father Bell presciently recorded the momentousness of the occasion: “Dear Papa…I have constructed a new apparatus operated by the human voice…the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.” 

For Bell and the telephone, there was no looking back.

But both Bell and his key investor – and father-in-law – Gardiner Greene Hubbard, realized that the inventor needed a much wider, public venue to demonstrate his invention, attract greater interest and additional capital, and launch the telephone across America. The timing was perfect: Bell decided to showcase his telephone at the massive 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which millions would visit. 

Bell conducted his Philadelphia experiment before about fifty people, including Scottish mathematician Sir William Thomson and Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro, and met with “glorious success,” as he wrote to his parents a few days later. Pedro reportedly exclaimed “My God, it talks…I have heard, I have heard,” as Bell recited Hamlet’s soliloquy from another building one hundred yards away. When Bell asked, “Do you understand what I say?” Sir William jumped up and shouted, “Yes – ‘Do you understand what I say?’ Where is Mr. Bell? I must see Mr. Bell!” 

But mostly Bell envisioned his breakthrough invention bringing people together from all areas of the U.S. After becoming an American citizen in 1882, Bell devoted himself to refining his telephone so it eventually linked his fellow Americans across towns, across mountains and prairies, and across the country. 

The gravitas of Bell’s invention in American history – in world history – cannot be overstated. 

This innovator, risk-taker, and entrepreneur had built a device that made it possible for people to speak to each other over long distances, and hear each other’s intonations, inflections, and intensity. In a way that was impossible with terse and truncated written telegraph messages, telephone users could connect on an emotional level with friends, loved ones, and business associates regardless of how far apart they were.

The telephone democratized person-to-person and business-to-business relationships. This marvelous invention was not merely available to the elites or the rich; soon Americans of virtually all economic and social strata had access to it. The telephone sped up commerce, reduced the number of communication errors, and served as an embodiment of American innovation, entrepreneurship, advancement, and freedom – indeed, of the American dream

Bell died in August of 1922 at the age of 76. His obituary in the New York Times called Bell’s telephone patent “the most valuable patent ever issued.” The paper recapped Bell’s historic 1876 breakthrough moment in his small Boston workshop and added: “The little instrument he patented less than fifty years ago, scorned then as a joke, was when he died the basis for 13,000,000 telephones used in every civilized country in the world.” On the day of Alexander Graham Bell’s burial, all telephone service in the United States was suspended for one minute in his honor. 

Stephen Puleo is an author, historian, teacher, and public speaker. He is the author of eight books, including his most recent, THE GREAT ABOLITIONIST: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union, published by St. Martin’s Press in 2024. His other books include VOYAGE OF MERCY, DARK TIDE, AMERICAN TREASURES, and THE CANING. He has made more than 740 appearances before thousands of readers, and is currently at work on his ninth book. He holds a master’s degree in history and has taught at the University of Massachusetts – Boston and Suffolk University. He and his wife, Kate, live South of Boston.

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