Mr Watson, come here

Some inventions arrive as a thunderclap and some as a kept appointment. The telephone arrived as the second kind. For three years a young Scottish professor of vocal physiology had been writing the apparatus on paper, tuning reeds, drawing diaphragms, charting the human larynx as if it were a coastline. The patent had been granted seventy-two hours earlier. The hypothesis was already public property. What remained was the smallest and most exacting thing: to prove, in a single sentence spoken in an ordinary voice, that the wire would carry the voice.

THE EDINBURGH INHERITANCE

Alexander Graham Bell was born at 16 South Charlotte Street, Edinburgh, on the third of March 1847, into a household where the human voice was the family trade. His grandfather had taught elocution in London; his father, Alexander Melville Bell, had devised Visible Speech, an alphabet that wrote down not words but the positions of the tongue and lips that produced them. To grow up a Bell was to grow up watching speech as a mechanism. The boy who built a speaking machine of gutta-percha and a sheep's larynx at fifteen, who taught his terrier to growl the syllables how are you, grandmama, who later sat with deaf children at the Pemberton Avenue school in Boston and showed them how to shape an a or an o with their hands on his throat, was carrying a three-generation argument: that the voice was not magic but apparatus, and apparatus could be copied. By 1876 he held the chair of vocal physiology at Boston University and the assignment of U.S. Patent 174,465, dated the seventh of March, for the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically. The patent existed. The sentence did not.

THE GARRET AT 5 EXETER PLACE

The room was at the top of a four-storey wooden lodging-house on Exeter Place in Boston, two narrow garrets divided by a partition that ran along the east wall. The front garret was the workshop; the back one held the receiver-bench. A single iron wire passed between them, with a return through the ground. On the front bench stood the instrument-cup, a brass mouthpiece fixed above a small open beaker of dilute sulphuric acid, the variable-resistance liquid through which a needle dipped from the diaphragm above. It was twenty past five on the early evening of the tenth of March 1876. The March light was failing off the harbour; the room smelled of acid and oil and lamp-black. Bell, twenty-nine, was in shirt-sleeves over a waistcoat, no jacket, leaning over the cup. In the next room, behind the partition, Thomas Augustus Watson, twenty-two, the machinist who had built every brass fitting on the bench, sat with the second diaphragm held to his right ear, waiting, as he had waited a hundred evenings before, for a tone or a hum.

A SECOND OF TIME IN BOSTON

The acid went over. A careless movement of the hand, the beaker tipping, a wet stain spreading down the front of the trousers and the first cold prick of the burn rising under the cloth. The professor's instinct was to step back from the bench and call out for help, and the professor's discipline was to stay. The calibration of the apparatus had taken the better part of an hour; to break the line now would be to begin again tomorrow. He registered, with the precision of a man trained to watch his own larynx, that Watson was eight feet away through a wooden partition and might as well have been in another city, since the door between the rooms was closed and the receiver was at Watson's ear. He registered, with the same precision, that the apparatus on the bench was, by every measurement of the last hour, transmitting voice. He had transmitted tones. He had transmitted the modulated buzz of a Scottish vowel. He had not yet, in any room in the world, transmitted a sentence. The patent claimed the sentence as a property of the method. The method had not yet performed the claim. He thought, in the slow exact way the burn permitted, that if he called Watson on the apparatus, and Watson came, the wire would have done the work of a corridor, and the apparatus would have moved from theory to practice in the next ten seconds. He put his lips to the speaking-cup. He said, in his ordinary speaking voice, neither raised nor pitched for effect, the sentence that the moment supplied: Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.

THE OTHER ROOM

Watson, by his own account written half a century later, dropped the diaphragm and ran. He came through the partition door at speed and stood in the doorway of the front garret with a face Bell would remember for the rest of his life. I heard you, sir. He repeated the sentence back, word for word, as a sailor repeats a course. Bell took both of Watson's hands in his and shook them. They went to the bench and reversed positions. They sat at the apparatus for the next four hours, alternating speaker, transmitting passages from a copy of Wordsworth that lay on the desk and lines of the Lord's Prayer, Watson taking notes in pencil on the back of an India-rubber apron because no paper was within reach. The burn on the trousers, by Watson's old-age telling, was forgotten until the lamps were lit.

THE NOTEBOOK

Late that night, by the lamp, Bell wrote up the day in the laboratory notebook he had kept since his arrival in Boston. The page is dated March 10th, 1876, in his own hand. I then shouted into M, he wrote, meaning 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. He underlined the word understood. The notebook entry made no mention of spilt acid; the acid is Watson's detail, added in Exploring Life, his memoir of 1926, when Watson was seventy-two and Bell four years in the grave. Both accounts agree on the sentence. The sentence is the artefact.

THE WIRES ACROSS THE CONTINENT

The Bell Telephone Company was formed in July 1877. By 1878 there were two hundred and thirty Bell telephones in private American houses. By 1880 there were about thirty thousand. By 1885 the company had been reconstituted as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and by 1900 its long-distance wires had been laid from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and beyond. Patent 174,465 became, by general assent of the courts and the historians, the most valuable single patent ever issued by the United States. Bell married Mabel Hubbard, who had been deaf since the age of five from scarlet fever, in July 1877; he taught her speech-reading himself, with his hand on her throat in the manner his father had taught him. He held, to the end, that the education of the deaf was his proper work and the telephone a distraction from it. The last decades he spent on hydrofoils and tetrahedral kites at his estate at Beinn Bhreagh above Baddeck on Cape Breton Island, where he is buried, looking out over the salt water of the Bras d'Or.

RETURN

Some inventions wait for the right room. The garret at 5 Exeter Place was demolished in 1922, the year of Bell's death; what stands in its place today is a federal-government building, and on its outer wall a bronze plaque the size of a tea-tray records the sentence and the date. The notebook is in the Library of Congress, in a temperature-controlled case, and on its open page the underlined word understood is still legible in the brown ink of a Boston evening in 1876. Watson's India-rubber apron is at the Smithsonian. The wire that ran between the two rooms is gone, but the corridor it opened has never since been closed.