1800s: First the phone

Thomas Watson was born Jan. 18, 1854 in Salem, Massachusetts, son of a livery stable foreman and thrifty housewife. Victim of an educational system that failed to captivate the intelligent young Watson while offering few skills beyond reading, he left school as a teen to work mostly in the retail trade.

But it was at Boston's Scollay Square District shop of Charles Williams that 18-year-old Watson learned to make telegraph and fire alarm equipment. He was rated as a skilled mechanic by the end of his second year on the job and soon was called upon by hopeful inventors to construct electrical equipment.

Soon thereafter in 1874, Watson met Alexander Graham Bell, then a young Boston University professor looking for help with his "harmonic telegraph." Bell felt the machine could send more than one message over a wire simultaneously.

The two were working on the machine on June 2, 1875, between two rooms on the top floor of 109 Court Street in Boston, when Watson began plucking one of the transmitting reeds with his fingers. Bell suddenly burst in demanding to know what Watson had done, because he had heard the sound of the reed, which had accidentally been too tightly adjusted.

The twang Bell heard spurred them on. On March 10, 1876, the two were working on a new type of transmitter in which a wire touched diluted sulfuric acid in a metal cup. Another wire ran between two rooms at 5 Exeter Place in Boston. While Watson waited in Bell's bedroom with his ear pressed to the receiving telephone, he was surprised to hear Bell's voice coming from it saying, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!" Watson dashed down the hall and found that Bell had upset one of the acid containers and the liquid spilled on his clothes. The accident was quickly forgotten when they realized the telephone had at last spoken.

Gardiner G. Hubbard, one of the project's investors, offered Watson a contract for a tenth interest in all of Bell's patents. Watson accepted and devoted all his time to the development of the harmonic telegraph and the telephone.

During the summer of 1876, Bell and Watson engaged in the first actual conversation by telephone between two stations on an outdoor wire. To raise money to carry on the work, Bell and Watson presented a series of lectures to explain and demonstrate the telephone. Watson's function was to furnish vocal entertainment that was transmitted to the hall from several miles away. He also made exhibition models of the new telephone for Bell to show at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in June 1876.

With all the publicity and popularity of the new invention, it was fortunate that Gardiner Hubbard had filed the patent application. U.S. Patent No. 174,465, generally considered the most valuable patent ever issued, was granted to Bell on March 7, 1876, three days before the first transmission of the first intelligible sentence.

Watson was very busy for the next four years. He designed and improved early transmitters and receivers, and issued instruction books to licensees describing how to use the equipment. He testified in many legal suits, made trips to inspect installations, and continued to work on improving the equipment.

Between 1877 and 1881, Watson filed applications that resulted in about 40 U.S. patents. In the spring of 1881, Watson resigned his position with the Telephone Company. By this time, 50,000 Bell telephones existed in the United States. Except for his subsequent testimony in legal suits involving the telephone and some lectures about the invention, Watson's telephone career was over at age 27, his interest diminished now that the pioneer work was completed.