Bell’s Inspiration For The Telephone

Alexander Graham Bell – a name that’s synonymous with the telephone. What you may not know is that Bell's mother was deaf and he as an adult he worked with his father in London on a system for teaching the deaf to speak. When the Bell family moved to Boston, Alexander went to work as a teacher at a school for the deaf and ended up marrying one of his students.

With the invention of the telegraph – Bell wondered if it could be taken another step and instead of dots and dashes – you could transmit actual voices across wires. The major problem with the telegraph was you still had to hand-deliver messages and only one message could be transmitted at a time.

With the help of machine shop employee Thomas Watson, Bell developed a prototype – not too much different from the way a phone works today – electric current vibrating a diaphragm at both ends of a wire to reproduce sounds. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first message--the famous "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you."

The patent for Bell's idea for a telephone was filed on this date, March 7th, 1876.