Let’s dial back in time: Celebrating Alexander Graham Bell day

Celebrate Alexander Graham Bell Day on March 7, honouring the inventor of the first telephone nearly 150 years ago.

Can’t imagine a day without your phone? You have Alexander Graham Bell to thank for that. He invented the first telephone on March 7, 1876 nearly 150 years ago. To honour his contributions to science and technology, March 7 is celebrated as Alexander Graham Bell Day.

It was on this day that the first words were spoken over a telephone. “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” Alexander Graham Bell called out to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson. Both were scientists and they worked on the design and patent of the first practical telephone.

Alexander was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, as the second of three sons to his parents. Since both hid brothers Melville and Edward had middle names and he didn’t, he got himself one at the age of 10: Graham. Quite the little inventor, he created a device to de-husk wheat for his neighbour’s grain mill. The gadget was used for years in the mill.

Encouraged by his mother to study literature and music, he became the family pianist at 16. He and his brother tried their hand at building a talking robot. It was at that time he joined his father in his work for the hearing impaired. He was deeply affected by his mother’s gradual hearing loss.

Bell began trying his hand at a device for telegraph transmission of several messages. Then he got interested in transmitting human voice by electricity. At an exhibition in Philadelphia, Bell demonstrated the telephone and Brazil’s Emperor Don Pedro II exclaimed in delight, “My God, it talks!” A microphone, invention of Thomas Edison, was added to the gadget and one didn’t have to shout any more on the phone to be heard.

Within ten years of the invention, over 1,05,000 people in the U.S. alone owned a telephone and Bell became a hero. However, Bell himself did not owe a telephone as he didn’t want to be distracted from his scientific work. He would often describe himself simply as “teacher of the deaf”.

Following the shooting of the U.S. President James A. Garfield in July 1881, Bell got to work on what he called an electrical bullet probe. He improvised on American inventor Thomas Edison’s phonograph and received a patent in 1886 for his gramophone, a device that could record and playback sound.