Nine words that changed the world

Alexander Graham Bell

“Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you.”

With these words, spoken on 10 March 1876 in his lab in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call. The US patent for the 'acoustic telegraph' had been issued to the Edinburgh-born inventor only three days previously, and now he had proved that electrical current could transmit the vibrations of human speech. The 'Watson' was Thomas A. Watson, an electrical designer with whom Bell had been working for several years on a multi-reed device that could send multiple tones on a telegraph wire.

Bell's was one of the great inventions of the modern age, but it was through his interest in human speech rather than technology that he stumbled upon the telephone. In fact, prior to his breakthrough he had made his name as a teacher of deaf children and pioneer of sign language. While people were amazed at its first demonstrations, the telephone did not make Bell's fortune immediately. In fact, the Western Union telegraph company refused to pay $100,000 for Bell's patent in 1876. Two years later the Western Union president admitted that if he could get the patent for $25m he would consider it a good deal.

Bell developed the telephone over the rest of his life, demonstrating it amongst others to Queen Victoria (who confessed it 'most extraordinary') amongst thousands of other astounded visitors at exhibitions around the world. By 1915 he had demonstrated the first transcontinental telegraph voice message. No longer in an adjoining room, Watson was this time 3,400 miles away in San Francisco. The New York Times reported that "Dr. Bell, the veteran inventor of the telephone, was in New York, and Mr. Watson, his former associate, was on the other side of the continent. They heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago."

Bell demonstrating the telephone

AGB also filed patents for the phonograph, dabbled in hydro engineering and anticipated the modern interest in magnetic media and renewable energy. Who better then, than to ring the opening bell of Rapid's Young Inventors competition?