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150 years ago, nine words changed the world

Why the telephone is the most important technology you’ve stopped thinking about.

On March 10, 1876, a 29-year-old Scottish immigrant named Alexander Graham Bell sat in a modest laboratory at 5 Exeter Place in Boston and did something no human being had ever done: He spoke into a wire, and someone in the next room heard his voice. His exact words, recorded in his laboratory notebook: “Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you.” His assistant, a 22-year-old mechanic named Thomas Watson, came running.

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That was it. Nine words, shouted through a crude device that used a vibrating wire dipped in acid water to convert sound to electricity. At the time, it worked only one way. The sound, Bell admitted, was “loud but indistinct and muffled.” And yet those nine words launched a revolution in how human beings connect with each other — one that, 150 years later, may still be one of the most underappreciated good-news stories of the modern era.

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The telephone took off fast. By around 1880, there were roughly 130,000 phones in the United States; by 1900, 1.4 million; by 1910, nearly 6 million. Bell himself demonstrated the device at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil picked up the receiver and reportedly exclaimed: “My God, it talks!” (The telegraph company Western Union, less impressed, reportedly declined to buy Bell’s patent for $100,000 — a business decision that ranks alongside passing on the Beatles.)

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In the US, the telephone quickly became indispensable. During the 1918 flu pandemic, New York City’s phone traffic spiked to 3.2 million calls a day as quarantined residents relied on the telephone for groceries, medical advice, and human contact. In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of students were set up to receive instruction partly by phone during school closures — arguably the first remote learning. A New York Times editorial marveled: “Less than forty years ago the telephone was an amusing toy … Now, nobody can understand how we lived without it.”

By 1946, half........

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