Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847. Voice and sound were major elements of his early life. His mother, a pianist, was deaf, and his father and grandfather both worked with the deaf, studying phonetics, speech, and elocution. Bell later moved to Boston and married Mabel Hubbard, the daughter of one of his financial backers. Mabel had been deaf since childhood.

Image courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Thomas Augustus Watson was born in Salem, MA, and attended school until the age of 14. He worked at the Boston shop of Charles Williams, Jr., telegraph manufacturer, who supplied equipment for Bell’s early experiments. Watson worked closely with Bell to develop the prototypes and the two formed a partnership.

On that day in March, Watson was elated to hear the sound of Bell’s voice coming through the machine for the first time. Bell said, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” Watson, who had no voice transmitter on his end, ran to where Bell was. According to Watson’s account, when he entered the room he saw that Bell had accidentally knocked over the phone, and the acidic liquid it contained, in the excitement.

George Rapp, painter commissioned by Western Electric.

Image Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center.

Working as a professor of Vocal Physiology at Boston University, Bell was interested in aiding speech for deaf students using machines activated by human voice. His first telephone prototypes were inspired by human anatomy, so that Bell went so far as to obtain a severed human ear from Harvard Medical School to study.

Image Courtesy of the Division of Work and Industry. National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

These sketches by Bell serve, in his words, as “the first drawings made of my telephone.” Watson had come on as an assistant through a telegraph shop that supplied equipment for Bell’s early experiments.

Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress Collection, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers.