Phone call that started a worldwide revolution

They were the first words ever spoken on the telephone on this day, March 10, 1876, as Alexander Graham Bell experimented with his device, which he had patented only three days earlier.

Seconds after completing that pioneering call the phone unexpectedly rang, and Bell picked it up to hear a robotic voice declare: “This is a message from Amazon. Your account is going to be automatically renewed at a cost of £399.99...”

I jest of course, but only to make the point that not everything that has flowed from Bell’s great invention has been good.

In fact Bell did not speak into the phone on that historic day at his Boston laboratory. He shouted.

To his delight his assistant, Thomas Watson, duly appeared from the next room. They then changed places and Bell listened at the speaker while Watson read some passages from a book, which Bell was able to hear, although it was muffled and indistinct.

But Watson’s “Mr Bell, Do-You-Un-Der-Stand-What-I-Say?” came over quite clearly.

A breakthrough had been made and communications were to be revolutionised forever.

Bell wrote to his father about his success and prophetically speculated that “the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water and gas — and friends converse with each other without leaving home.”

Bell and Watson reprised that famous message in 1915 in the formal opening of the completed transcontinental telephone lines connecting America’s East and West coasts.

Picking up the phone in New York, Bell said: “Mr Watson, come here, I want you.”

This time Watson did not immediately appear to answer the summons – he was in San Francisco.

“It would take me a week now,” he replied.

Incidentally Watson’s own recollection of the wording of the very first call was different to that of Bell, although only slightly. He recorded it in his journal as: “Mr Watson come here – I want you.”

The Scottish-born Bell had a lifelong interest in the nature of sound. He was born into a family of speech instructors, and his mother and his wife both had hearing impairments.

Whether he can rightly be called the inventor of the phone is a matter of controversy as another inventor, Elisha Gray, was working on exactly the same ideas.

Bell gained primacy as he got in his patent first, and was to see the commercial potential when others did not.

When he offered to sell his patent to America’s largest telegraph company, Western Union, the company president supposedly responded: “We are not interested in a scientific toy.”

Bell’s inventive mind was to move on to other things. When the US president James Garfield was shot in the back by an assassin, the doctors were unable to find the bullet, and called in Bell to try to locate it using a metal detector he had developed.

Unfortunately he failed to find the bullet – he suspected that it was because the president was lying on a bed containing steel wires – and Garfield eventually died. His device however was improved and went on to be used successfully by battlefield surgeons for decades.

A public telephone service was introduced in the UK in 1879 in the City of London, initially with just seven subscribers. Britain’s first phone book appeared in January 1880, but it didn’t contain any phone numbers. It contained 248 personal and business names in London, and to ring them you rang the exchange and asked to be connected.

By 1914 the phone book was the largest single printing contract in the UK, with 1.5 million books being printed each year.

The operator was a key part of the phone system until fairly recently. It was not until 1979 that the STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialling) system, that had started to be rolled out in 1958, was completed, allowing direct dialling between all UK subscribers.

And it should also be remembered that for much of the 20th century having a phone was quite expensive, with the result that it was mainly the better off who had phones, and other folk might resort to using the local phone kiosk and putting in their money.

Today even small children are among the ranks of those who hold the ability to communicate around the world in the palm of their hand.

Phones brought with them phone etiquette. When answering people used to confirm their number by saying something like: “Tipton 2179.” Nowadays nobody gives their number when answering the phone.

Communications consumption today is insatiable, although the way we are doing it is changing. Over 90 per cent of UK adults own a mobile phone, and there has been a decline in the proportion of households with a landline.

A significant proportion which do still have landlines only do so as part of their broadband deal, and many of those who are ditching landlines complain of being fed up with scammers and cold callers.

On the funeral of Alexander Graham Bell in 1922 all telephone services in the United States and Canada were silenced for one minute as a mark of respect.

It wouldn’t happen today – such is the all-encompassing impact of his invention, silencing phones even for a minute would probably be an impossibility.