A Look Back at How and When
the Telephone Got Its Start
T
he month of March was significant to Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was born on
March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. After many years of inventing—starting at
age 11 when he invented a machine that could clean wheat—Bell received his first patent
on the telephone on March 7, 1876. A few days later, on March 10, Bell’s experiments
with his assistant Thomas Watson finally proved
successful at transmitting actual speech. Sitting
in one room, Bell accidentally spilled acid on
himself and spoke into the telephone to Watson
in another room, saying the now famous words:
“Mr. Watson, come here. I need you.”
Bell had been working on the idea of transmitting speech since he was 18. He was educated
largely through numerous experiments in sound and the furthering of his father’s work
on Visible Speech for the deaf. (His mother was hearing impaired). In 1874, while working
on a multiple telegraph, Bell developed the basic ideas for the telephone. He later said that
if he had understood electricity at all, he would have been too discouraged to invent the
telephone. Everyone else “knew” it was impossible to send voice signals over a wire.
In 1877, Bell and his investors Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders formed the Bell
Telephone Company to operate local telephone exchange operations. In 1882, American
Bell acquired a controlling interest in the Western Electric Company, which became its
manufacturing unit. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was incorporat-
ed on March 3, 1885 as a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Bell, chartered to build
and operate the original long distance telephone network.
In all, Bell held 18 patents in his name alone and 12 that he shared with collaborators.
He died on August 2, 1922, in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Who Invented TV
and the Internet?
Unlike the telephone, television and
the Internet had no single “inventor.”
Instead, both communications tech-
nologies evolved over time.
The Internet got its start in 1969 when
the most basic form of electronic
communication—a single message
transmitted between two computers
—first occurred. The message “lo”
was sent by UCLA computer science
professor Leonard Kleinrock from a
computer at his school to a com-
puter at another institution. (The
intended message was “login,” but
the system crashed after the first two
letters). In the 1970s, the networking
method Transmission Control Proto-
col/Internet Protocol was developed,
making the Internet possible. The
1980s produced the browser and the
addressing system including “.com”
and other suffixes.
The idea for television began to
germinate as early as the 1820s and
in 1880, a speculative article on the
subject appeared in The Scientific
American magazine. At the dawn of
the twentieth century, the American
laboratories of Bell, RCA, and GE were
the leaders in television development.
But it was 21-year-old Philo Farnsworth
who produced the first electronic tele-
vision picture in 1927. Yet RCA’s David
Sarnoff first marketed this invention to
the public and became known as the
father of television.
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In 1874, while working
on a multiple telegraph,
Bell developed the basic
ideas for the telephone.
