On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell conducted the first successful experiment with the telephone. This breakthrough, during which he uttered his famous directive to his assistant, Thomas Watson, is recorded in the March 10 entry of his Lab Notebook. That same day, an ebullient Bell wrote his father of his "great success" and speculated that "the day is coming when telegraph [phone] wires will be laid on to houses just like water and gas -- and friends converse with each other without leaving home."
Born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell was the son and grandson of authorities in elocution and the correction of speech. Educated to pursue a career in the same specialty, his knowledge of the nature of sound led him not only to teach the deaf, but also to invent the telephone.
Bell's unceasing scientific curiosity led to invention of the photophone, to significant commercial improvements in Thomas Edison's phonograph, and to development of his own flying machine just six years after the Wright Brothers launched their plane at Kitty Hawk. As President James Garfield lay dying of an assassin's bullet in 1881, Bell hurriedly invented a metal detector in an unsuccessful attempt to locate the fatal slug.
In 1915, fifty-four years after telegraph lines connected America's coasts, transcontinental telephone lines were completed. Invited to play a role in the formal dedication of the line in New York, Bell used a duplicate of his 1876 telephone to speak to his former assistant, Thomas Watson, in San Francisco. Echoing his famous words of March 10, 1876, Bell again commanded, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." Watson replied that it would take him a week to do so.
- The first release of the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers contains correspondence, scientific notebooks, journals, blueprints, articles, and photographs documenting Bell's invention of the telephone and his involvement in the first telephone company, his family life, his interest in the education of the deaf, and his aeronautical and other scientific research. Use the Time Line to learn more about the inventor or peruse some of the Collection Highlights. To dig deeper into the collection, browse the different series of papers or search on terms of special interest
- In 1887, Alexander Graham Bell befriended seven-year old Helen Keller. Deaf and blind from age nineteen months, Keller later described Bell as "the door through which I should pass from darkness into light." Leonard C. Bruno of the Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress describes the relationship between Bell and Keller in his feature on Keller's 1893 poem "Autumn." Keller's poem is included in the collection Words and Deeds in American History.
- Read Today in History features on inventors Elias Howe, Charles E. Minches, and Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre.
