The Call That Changed the World
James Stewart | September 17, 2026
The first call was made by Alexander Graham Bell in March 1876. His first words were, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” This revolutionized how people communicated even more than the telegraph. You could speak using your voice; you didn’t have to be trained for Morse code.
In 1875, Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson discovered how to turn electricity into sound with a simple receiver. On March 7, 1876, a few days before finishing the telephone, Bell received a patent for it.
In 1877, he started the Bell Telephone Company. The first transcontinental phone call was placed in 1915. Bell, in New York City, called Watson in San Francisco.
The first telephone worked by turning sound waves into fluctuating electrical signals. This allowed it to be passed over a wire. On the other end, the receiver changed the electrical signals back into sounds able to be heard by the human ear. Bell used science to invent the telephone, and he made modern communication more efficient.