Telephone | American History Lives at American Heritage

Why do we need a national nonprofit membership society for American history?

“Save America’s Treasures” has been totally eliminated—the largest Federal program supporting preservation of such treasures as the original Star Spangled Banner and George Washington’s tent.
65% of Americans don’t know what happened at the Constitutional Convention, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
The “Teaching American History” grants—the largest Federal program supporting history education—have been completely eliminated.
Visits to the Top 20 Civil War battlefields have dropped in half from 1970 to 2009 according to official National Park Service statistics.
40% of Americans can’t identify whom we fought in World War II, according to a recent survey by Newsweek.
A quarter of Americans believe Congress shares power over U.S. foreign policy with the United Nations, according to a recent Annenberg survey.
“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country,” John F. Kennedy wrote in American Heritage.
The “We the People Program,” which touched some 30 million students and 90,000 teachers over 25 years, has been completely eliminated.
Two-thirds of Americans could not correctly name Yorktown as the last major military action of the American Revolution, according to a recent national Gallup survey.
The National Heritage Areas and Scenic Byways program, the only major Federal program encouraging visits to historic places, has been completely eliminated in Congressional committee.

After Watson tweaked a transmitter reed, Bell invented the telephone

Edwin S. Grosvenor

Winter 2010

On a hot day in June 1875, 28-year-old Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, were toiling in adjacent workshops at 109 Court Street in Boston. Under sloped attic walls of rough-sawn wood, the two men hunched over benches covered with curled wires and jar-shaped batteries filled with acid. A few years before, an inventor named Joseph Stearns had made a fortune selling Western Union a device capable of sending two telegraphs simultaneously over one wire.Read more »

Post Haste

The urge to move documents as fast as possible has always been a national pre-occupation, because it has always been a necessity. Fax and Federal Express are just the latest among many innovations for getting the message across.

Robert L. O’connell

September/october 1989

Reaching out and touching someone hasn’t always been easy—especially if it was necessary to hand that person something in the process. Yet there have always been Americans who absolutely and positively had to have it the next day, week, month, at any cost, and this in turn has always drawn others with the dollars and determination to make it happen.Read more »

Breaking The Connection

The story of AT&T from its origins in Bell’s first local call to last year’s divestiture. Hail and good-bye.

Peter Baida

June/july 1985

The history of telephone communications in the United States is also, in large measure, the history of an extraordinary business organization. On January 8, 1982, that organization announced that within two years it would tear itself apart, and on January 1, 1984, it made good on its promise. Read more »

Hindsight, Foresight, And No Sight

Peter Baida

June/july 1985

Late in 1876, William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, rejected an opportunity to purchase from Alexander Graham Bell and his associates all patents relating to Bell’s telephone for $100,000. Since Bell’s patents are generally considered the most valuable ever issued by the United States Patent Office, Orton’s refusal to buy them earned him an odd immortality: he is the man who made the worst decision in American business history. Read more »

THE VOICE HEARD ROUND THE WORLD

"My God, it talks!” said the Emperor of Brazil. So the new invention did—but not until Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant had solved some brain racking problems

Lincoln Barnett

April 1965

On the afternoon of June 2, 1875, two young men bent over work benches in the hot and stifling garret of a five-story brick building occupied by the electrical workshops of Charles Williams, at 109 Court Street, Boston. They did not speak to one another, for they were in separate rooms some sixty feet apart, at opposite ends of the floor. Between the rooms ran a length of wire. Read more »

Thanks, But No Thanks, Mr. Bell

The powerful Speaker of the House missed not one but two chances to invest in AT&T in the early days

Joseph G. Cannon

April 1962

When ex-Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon of Illinois retired from politics in 1923, he had served almost continuously in the House of Representatives for nearly fifty years, and was regarded as a master political strategist and a shrewd judge of men. But, as he sorrowfully confessed to his longtime secretary and biographer, L. White Busbey, his discernment did not extend to inventors and their get-rich-quick schemes. Read more »

American Heritage

Collections, Travel, and Great Writing On History