"An amazing invention—but who would ever want to use one?"
Rutherford B. Hayes, U.S. president (1877-1881)
In the 1870s Edinburgh-born Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) was working on a way to improve the telegraph. Although this was well established as a means of long-distance communication, the fact that only one message could be sent at any one time made it extremely limited. Bell's original idea was to develop a "harmonic telegram," using multiple pitches to transmit more than one message at the same time. While working on this, an idea came to him for a more elaborate system—one that could transmit not only the dots and dashes of Morse code, but actual speech.
Several other teams were also pushing to transmit sounds via electricity, and there remains some controversy as to whether ideas were "borrowed" from other inventors, but it is undisputed that it was Bell who built the first working model—and all before his 30th birthday. Along with his assistant Thomas Watson, Bell honed his ideas and on March 10, 1876, he made the first-ever telephone call—"Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." The call was to his assistant in the next room, and according to Bell's own accounts, he had to shout into the apparatus to get it to work, but the technology had been proven. The Bell Telephone Company was founded the following year and within ten years some 150,000 households in the United States owned telephones.
Early telephones were far from practical—the first systems requiring battery acid—and they were used merely as a curiosity, with Watson and Bell putting on displays of the novelty aspect of their invention. Soon, however, they developed their invention into one of the most important modes of communication in the modern world, and the technology for sending information via electrical signal forms the basis for modern communications systems.
