October 2026

On March 10, 1876, in the attic room of a boarding house at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell was tinkering with a crude device in an attempt to transmit his voice to a distant room over an electrical wire. It was a feat no one had ever successfully accomplished, although many had tried. Bell had been working on similar experiments for three years and transmitted a garbled voice the previous June, but no one had ever successfully conveyed intelligible speech over wire.

On that day, Bell’s assistant waited at the far end of the wire with an equally crude electromagnetic receiving device. As Thomas Watson later wrote in his autobiography, “I was astonished to hear Bell’s voice coming from it distinctly saying, ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!’” 

Editor's Note: Edwin S. Grosvenor is the Editor-in-Chief of American Heritage and author of Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Inventor of the Telephone and numerous articles about Bell. He has been interviewed about the telephone by CBS Sunday Morning, Discovery, PBS, NPR, CBC, AP Radio, and other media, and given talks at the Smithsonian, Boston Museum of Science, Museum of Natural History, and numerous other venues.