First Telephone Call (1876)

Hello there. My name is Alexander Graham Bell, but my friends called me Aleck. Ever since I was a little boy, I have been fascinated by sound. You see, my mother was deaf, and I wanted to find new ways for people to hear. My whole family worked with speech and sound, so I was always tinkering with new ideas. In my time, we had something called a telegraph. It could send messages using little taps—dots and dashes—over a long wire. It was clever, but I had a bigger dream. I thought, what if we could send a whole voice through a wire? What if you could hear someone’s words, their laughter, and their feelings from miles away? I wanted to create a 'talking wire,' and I spent all my time in my workshop trying to figure out how.

My laboratory in Boston was a wonderfully messy place, filled with wires, batteries, and strange-looking gadgets. I had a fantastic assistant named Mr. Thomas Watson. He was very clever and helped me build my inventions. We worked day and night, trying to make my dream a reality. On a day I will never forget, March 10th, 1876, we were working on our latest machine. It had a part you could speak into and another part you could listen to, connected by a long wire. Mr. Watson was in another room, waiting by the listening end, while I was in the workshop with the speaking end. As I was carefully working with some batteries, I made a mistake. Splash. I accidentally spilled some burning battery acid right onto my trousers. 'Ouch.' I cried out without even thinking, 'Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.'. I wasn't trying to use the machine, I just needed help. But my mouth happened to be right next to the transmitter.

In just a moment, the door flew open. But Mr. Watson wasn’t looking at my spilled acid. His eyes were wide with excitement. He rushed in and shouted, 'Mr. Bell, I heard you. I heard your voice through the wire.'. He hadn't heard me shouting through the walls; he had heard my words perfectly through the machine in his ear. We both stopped and stared at each other. Then, we started cheering and dancing around the room. We had done it. It was an accident, but it was the most wonderful accident in the world. Those were the very first words ever spoken on a telephone. That one little moment, born from a clumsy spill, showed that we could send our voices across distances and connect the world in a brand new way. It just goes to show that you should never give up on your big ideas, because you never know when a little 'oops' might change everything.