“Mr. Watson, come here”

On March 10, 1876, the first telephone call was made. Alexander Graham Bell said "Mr. Watson, come here -- I want to see you" to his assistant Thomas Watson. From the article:

"“Mr. Watson, come here”

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, from the room next door.

Bell had an interest in sound from his earliest years. His father was an expert on speech mechanics who often gave elocution courses. His mother was a pianist with a hearing impairment that would motivate Bell’s own research in audiology.

In 1875, while working to send telegraph signals over the same wire, he heard a murmur. This led him to investigate whether his electrical apparatus could be used to transmit the sound of a human voice. Bell’s journal, now at the Library of Congress, contains the following entry for March 10, 1876:

“I then shouted into 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.

I asked him to repeat the words. He answered, ‘You said ‘Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.’ We then changed places and I listened at the speaker while Mr. Watson read a few passages from a book into the mouthpiece. It was certainly the case that articulate sounds proceeded from S. The effect was loud but indistinct and muffled.”

What’s extraordinary about the first phone call is its banality. It was a business call. One made to set up a meeting that would change the course of communications history.

Bell was, after all, not only a keen businessman but an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word. He founded the first telephone network, the Bell Telephone company. A company that, after a bitter trademark challenge, would become the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, now commonly known as AT&T. Ostensibly, Bell was the founder of the telecoms industry at large.

His work and entrepreneurial spirit continues to impact the way contemporary mobile network operators innovate and function.

By 1880 Bell began to turn business matters over to his wife so he could pursue developing a range of inventions and carrying out his academic pursuits. Later that year he established the Volta Laboratory, an experimental facility devoted to scientific discovery. He also built aircraft and boats while he continued to improve the telegraph.

It’s this spirit of invention and discovery that the telecommunications industry was founded on. To this day we can see its impact on research and development in the offices of the world’s leading mobile network operators, chipset designers, and device makers.

From developments in IoT, to embracing eSIM, telecommunications companies would do well to operate in the spirit of Bell and his counterparts. We have a historical mandate to challenge business as usual, to innovate and to imagine more efficient connected futures.

If we won’t innovate, we should spare Watson the effort of walking into the room where that first phone call was made."