Off-beat: the first phone call in the world happened 140 years ago this week
Without Alexander Graham Bell, you would not be sitting at your computer or with your phone reading Pocketnow.com.
It was 140 years ago yesterday that the Scottish luminary made the very first phone call from an office in downtown Boston, telling his assistant Thomas Watson:
Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.
But from the start, it took a community of wits, craft and a willing investor to pull it all together and make sounds like the one below possible.
After moving to Canada for fear of the tuberculosis that killed his two brothers, Bell found a calling from his father, who taught elocution. He moved south to tutor at a school in Boston where he also happened to enjoy the company of high academia — especially with those looking into the science of transmitting sound.
How this came down to him acquiring and being rushed by a patent lawyer who filed an application to the Patent Office merely minutes before one of his competitors did so is quite the story. Check out our source link for an interview with a historian on the cunning man that was Alexander Graham Bell.