The First Telephone Call: From Bell's Liquid Transmitter to Modern Cellphones

These days, our phones are basically extensions of our bodies. An MIT historian of science and technology takes us back to Alexander Graham Bell's famous first telephone call on March 10, 1876. These days, our phones are basically extensions of our bodies, but the world's first telephone call was made 150 years ago today. That address from a 1939 movie about Bell doesn't exist anymore, but two plaques mark spots where he toiled over his telephone in downtown Boston. Pedestrians clutching cellphones are largely unaware of Bell and his history here, including Tori Gralla. I don't know a lot about Alexander Graham Bell. My guess is that he invented something. Well, he invented something that everybody... Wait. Was it a telephone? Yes. OK. Gregory Gurenich learned about Bell's invention as a kid, but... I didn't know this was all Boston. I mean, I use his technology every day. I think that people just take the telephone for granted. Florencia Pierri is associate curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum. She says Bell was born in Scotland. His mother was hearing impaired. His father taught elocution. In the 1870s, Bell moved to Boston, taught deaf students and became a speech professor at Boston University. He was also an inventor, and he starts to tinker with things, and they all have to do with speech and sound. Bell might have used this tuning fork now housed at the museum's collection center because he also did research at MIT. Late 1800s Boston was like a Victorian-era Silicon Valley. Pierri says other inventors were working on transmitting sound over electric wires. Western Union had a monopoly on printed telegraph messages, but they were slow and expensive. Bell didn't set out to create a telephone. He set out to create a better telegraph. But that still has this idea of, like, wouldn't it be cool if I could talk to somebody, even if I wasn't right there in the room with them? Bell and his partner, Thomas Watson, labored to create a speaking telegraph and eventually devised a liquid transmitter. Pierri walks past rows of 10-foot-tall storage shelves to pull out an historical replica from the museum's telephone collection, and snaps on some gloves. So it's a object that, at first glance, you would not peg as a telephone. We've got a metal cone. It is open on one end. For the liquid. Pierri says this type of device changed the telephone game 150 years ago. As the story goes, Watson and Bell were in different rooms. And all of a sudden, Bell yells into this transmitter saying, Watson, come here. I want to see you. So then we have the first intelligible speech transmitted from one place to the other. What did you do? I put two drops of sulfuric acid in the water. That made the water a conductor for the electric current transmitting the voice. Ah. From a cone-shaped device to the rotary dial... The MIT Museum's telephone trove captures how Bell's device evolved. Pierri suspects the inventor would be proud and befuddled by today's ubiquitous cellphones that a lot of us use for everything but talking.