Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Alexander Graham Bell
America’s first female soldiers were Signal Corps telephone operators making sure critical messages got through, often while threatened by artillery fire.
The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, by Elizabeth Cobbs Read more >>
Alexander Graham Bell traveled to Italy at the turn of the 20th century on an audacious mission to rescue the remains of the man whose legacy endowed the Smithsonian Institution.
Alexander Graham Bell did not spend the Christmas season of 1903 in the festive tradition. On the contrary, the inventor of the telephone passed the holiday engaged in a ghoulish Italian adventure involving a graveyard, old bones, and the opening of a moldy casket. Read more >>
Alexander Graham Bell was able to invent the telephone after Watson tweaked a reed that transmitted sounds to the next room
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. Read more >>
A new book claims Alexander Graham Bell stole the telephone from Elisha Gray, despite all the evidence against that theory.
In his new book, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (Norton, 256 pages, $24.95), Seth Shulman states that the famous inventor “was plagued by a secret: he stole the key idea behind the invention of the telephone.” Read more >>
The story of AT&T from its origins in Bell’s first local call to last year’s divestiture. Hail and good-bye.
The history of telephone communications in the United States is also, in large measure, the history of an extraordinary business organization. Read more >>
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. Read more >>
The fastest man in the air competed with the Wrights for ten years, became rich, and awakened America to the air age.
America has long been celebrated as a nation of inventive tinkerers. Read more >>
The wrecker’s ball swings in every city in the land, and memorable edifices of all kinds are coming down at a steady clip.
There are places on this earth, in Europe particularly, where conservation is taken to mean the preservation of the notable works of man as well as nature. Read more >>
"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
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. Read more >>
The powerful Speaker of the House missed not one but two chances to invest in AT&T in the early days