AT&T celebrates 150 years since the first telephone call
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AT&T's pop-up museum offers a history lesson about telephones. Photo: Courtesy of AT&T
A phone call made in Boston 150 years ago laid the foundation for the telecommunications industry we know today.
Why it matters: Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell's first phone call to his assistant Thomas Watson on March 10, 1876, led to the establishment of the Bell Telephone Co., which evolved into the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., now known as AT&T.
Driving the news: AT&T is hosting a pop-up museum at its Dallas headquarters this week to share the telephone's history with the public.
Flashback: Bell and Watson explored transmitting voice over telegraph lines for almost 10 years before their breakthrough, competing with other inventors trying to do the same.
- Bell received his first telephone patent on March 7, 1876. Three days later, Bell and Watson made their first phone call at their lab in Boston.
- "Watson, come here, I want you!" Bell said during the call, per Watson's notes, which are now part of AT&T's archives in San Antonio.
How it worked: The phone used in that first call was a cone-shaped device with a liquid transmitter that conducted Bell's voice, turned it into an analog signal, and passed it through a phone wire connected to a receiver in another room.
- The first phones were initially used as private lines for businesspeople, lawyers and doctors to communicate internally in their offices, Bill Caughlin, AT&T's corporate archivist, tells Axios.
- The invention of the switchboard made it possible to connect entire communities with phones.
Zoom out: AT&T's archives have more than 1 million photographs, around 100,000 lab notebooks, and roughly 15,000 artifacts documenting Bell's and others' inventions, such as transistors and Telstar satellites sent to space.
- "It's just amazing that there's been that forethought to save what are clearly globally significant materials," Caughlin says.
If you go: Bell's original patent document and telephone wire will be on display from 10am-7pm Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 308 S. Akard St., the building with the AT&T Discovery District's big video board.