The Telephone

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words ever transmitted by telephone — "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you" — and a machine that could carry the human voice over a wire was born. Within a generation it had rewired how Americans lived, worked, and spoke to one another.

Bell won the patent in one of the most valuable and contested races in invention history, filing on the same day in 1876 as a rival, Elisha Gray. The Bell Telephone Company he founded grew into AT&T, which would become one of the largest corporations in the world and the operator of a vast national network.

The telephone collapsed distance. Business sped up, families separated by the country's vast geography could hear one another's voices, and a web of wires and operators spread across the continent. It made instant personal communication an ordinary part of life for the first time.

More than almost any other device, the telephone set the pattern for the connected world to come — a direct ancestor of every later technology that shrank distance, from the long-distance line to the mobile phone in every pocket.