In March 1876, a Scottish-born inventor named Alexander Graham Bell was working in his lab in Boston with his assistant, Thomas Watson. Bell was testing a device that used a thin metal disc to turn sound into an electrical signal, send it down a wire and turn it back into sound at the other end.
The story goes that Bell knocked over a beaker of acid and shouted into the device for Watson, who was in another room. Watson rushed in saying he had heard Bell’s voice clearly through the receiver. Those panicked words became the first sentence ever spoken on a telephone.
Within ten years, telephones were popping up in homes and offices across America. People used to send messages by letter or by tapping out telegraph codes, and most letters took days to arrive. Suddenly two people could talk over hundreds of miles like they were in the same room. It changed daily life almost overnight.
