Bell · 1876
Mr Watson, come here
On the early evening of the tenth of March 1876, in the upstairs garret of a four-storey lodging-house at 5 Exeter Place, Boston, Massachusetts, Alexander Graham Bell, twenty-nine years old, Edinburgh-born, professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, lately granted U.S. patent number 174,465 for *the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically*, spilled a amount of dilute sulphuric acid from the receiver-cup of his experimental telephone onto the front of his trousers. He spoke into the apparatus, into the next room, the line that has been the central artefact of telecommunications history ever since. *Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.* Thomas Augustus Watson, his twenty-two-year-old assistant, in the back garret with the receiver to his ear, heard the sentence over the line clearly. He came, on the run. The two men sat at the apparatus for the rest of the evening transmitting passages of the Lord's Prayer to each other, of which Watson took notes in pencil on the back of his apron. Bell's notebook entry, in his own hand, dated the tenth of March 1876, is in the United States Library of Congress.
It is twenty past five on the early evening of the tenth of March 1876, in the upper-front garret of the four-storey wooden lodging-house at 5 Exeter Place, Boston, in the failing March light off the harbour. He is twenty-nine years old. He is Alexander Graham Bell, born at 16 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, on the third of March 1847, professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, son of Alexander Melville Bell the elocutionist (whose Visible Speech alphabet had been the family business in three generations), with the U.S. Patent Office's grant of patent number 174,465 in his pocket since the seventh of March on a method of transmitting voice telegraphically. He is in shirt-sleeves over a waistcoat with no jacket, leaning over the instrument-cup on the front bench, with a open beaker of dilute sulphuric acid on his right hand for the variable-resistance liquid transmitter.
In the next room, behind the partition that runs along the east wall of the garret, his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson is sitting at the receiver-bench with the second of the two diaphragms held to his right ear. The line between the two rooms is a single iron wire and a return ground.
He thinks, looking at the spilled acid on the trousers and the burn coming up: I cannot leave the bench to change the trousers. The setup is in calibration.
He thinks: Watson is in the other room. Watson can come and bring me a clean rag.
He thinks: the apparatus is, by the calibration of the last hour, transmitting voice. The hypothesis of the patent is that the apparatus transmits voice. I have not yet, in fact, transmitted a sentence as voice. I have transmitted tones and modulated buzzes.
He thinks: if I call Watson on the apparatus and Watson hears the call, the apparatus has made the transition from theory to practice in this room in the next ten seconds.
He puts his lips to the speaking-cup. He says, in his ordinary speaking voice: Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.
Watson, in the next room, by the testimony of his autobiography of 1926, drops the diaphragm at the sentence and runs through the partition door and into the front garret. Bell is at the bench. Watson says, in the doorway: I heard you, sir. I heard you say it. Word for word. Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you. Bell, by Watson's memoir, takes both of Watson's hands in his and shakes them.
They worked at the bench for the next four hours, transmitting passages from a copy of Wordsworth Bell had on the desk and several lines of the Lord's Prayer, alternating speaker. Watson's notes, in pencil on the back of an India-rubber apron, are preserved in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian. Bell's own laboratory notebook for the day, with the entry I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the following sentence: 'Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.' To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said, is in the Library of Congress.
The Bell Telephone Company was formed in July 1877. By 1878 there were two hundred and thirty Bell telephones operating in private American houses; by 1880 about thirty thousand; by 1885 the company became American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) which by 1900 had laid the long-distance wires across the continent. The patent of the seventh of March 1876, by general assent, became the most valuable single patent ever issued in the United States. Bell himself, by his own statement on the fiftieth anniversary in 1926, regarded the telephone as a distraction from his proper work, which was the education of the deaf. He had married Mabel Hubbard, deaf since the age of five, in 1877; he taught her speech-reading himself; the rest of his life was spent on aviation experiments at his estate at Baddeck on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, where he is buried. The garret at 5 Exeter Place is a bronze plaque on the side of a federal-government building today; the house was demolished in 1922. The phrase Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you is, by every history of communication, the founding sentence of the modern world. The dilute sulphuric acid on the trousers is the version of the story Watson told in old age; Bell himself, in his notebook, did not mention it.