“Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Hardly momentous words, but their implications were enormous.
Spoken by Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell in his Boston laboratory on March 10 1876, they were the first intelligible words to be transmitted electrically through a wire from one place to another. With that, the telephone age began.
Thomas Watson, Bell’s assistant, received that call only in the next room – but Bell’s ambitions ran much further. The 29-year-old professor of vocal physiology at Boston University was sure he had invented a technology that would change history. Now he just needed to convince the rest of the world.
