At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

on March 10, 1876, a week to the day after Bell’s twenty-ninth birthday, the most famous moment in telecommunications history occurred in a small lab at 5 Exeter Place in Boston, when Bell spilled some acid on his lap and sputtered, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” and an astonished Watson in a separate room heard the message clearly. At least that was the story Watson related fifty years later in a series of anniversary advertisements commemorating the telephone’s invention. Bell, who had died four years before the anniversary, had never actually mentioned spilled acid in any of his own recollections, and it would be odd, when you think about it, for a person startled by a searing pain in his lap to voice such a calm request, at normal volume, to someone who was not in fact present. Moreover, because of the prototype phone’s primitiveness, Watson could hear a message only when his ear was pressed to a vibrating reed, and it seems a touch unlikely that he would have had an ear cocked to a listening device on the off chance that Bell, seized by acidic pain, would call out to him. Whatever the precise circumstances, Bell’s notes confirmed that he did ask Watson to come to him and that Watson, in a separate room, heard the request clearly. History’s first telephone call had been made.