Alexander Graham Bell died 100 years ago

The Hessian inventor Johann Philipp Reis, who handed over a telephone to the Physical Society in Frankfurt as early as 1861, had done the preparatory work. The spontaneously conceived fantasy phrase “The horse does not eat cucumber salad” is said to have been sent through the device during one of the first performances. But the device only worked in one direction – there was no answer.

Bell and his colleague Thomas Watson tried a different approach: using a membrane, they converted sound waves into electrical voltage fluctuations and sent them through an electrical conduit, after which they were converted back into sound. On June 2, 1875, they succeeded in transmitting a sound electrically for the first time. Nearly a year later, Watson reportedly heard the first sentence over a telephone in his study: “Watson, come over here, I need you.”

Born on March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Bell had already had a lot to do with language and communication. His father was a language teacher and teacher for the deaf, and his son took a job as a language teacher at a boarding school at the age of 16. A few years earlier, the family had emigrated to the United States. Two of Bell’s brothers had died of tuberculosis, and the family hoped to find a healthier climate across the Atlantic. Bell soon opened his own language school and then became a professor of speech physiology and language theory at Boston University.

Phone unnoticed at World’s Fair
The pioneering invention for the “Method and apparatus for the telegraphic transmission of spoken and other sounds, by producing electronic wave movements, comparable to the vibrations of sound-guided air” initially received little attention. Even at the World’s Fair in Philadelphia that same year, the device, which you had to alternately hold to your mouth and ear, went largely unnoticed. But Bell kept working to improve his phone. By the end of 1876, using leased telegraph lines, he was able to talk to his assistant Watson over a distance of 200 miles.

Interest followed. In April 1877, a businessman in the American metropolis of Boston on the East Coast had a permanent telephone line set up between his home and his business. In July 1877, Bell and his supporters founded a telephone company named after him – the “Bell Telephone Company”, which still exists today in a modified form as the telecommunications group “American Telephone and Telegraph Company” (AT&T). After just three weeks, the company was already renting out 25 new phones a day.

Berlin built one of the first public networks
One of the first public telephone networks was established in Berlin in 1881 with 48 subscribers. The connection to the switching center was established with a crank. The telephone would merge space and time, bring together the voices of people who were far from each other, find its way into film, theater and music and increasingly became a cultural and historical asset.

However, it initially remained a luxury item – and met with skepticism. The very early telephone book published in Berlin in 1881 was called the “Book of Fools”. “Now we’ve been trying to silence our neighbors for ages, and now you’re coming in and making it all that much harder,” American author Mark Twain, one of Hartford’s first phone owners, reportedly said.

Meanwhile, Bell continued to research, funded with the proceeds of his telephone company – including in airplanes. He married a former student and moved with her to the Canadian Atlantic province of Nova Scotia, where he died on August 1, 1922, at the age of 75. In his honor, all telephone service in the US was interrupted for a minute.