Mr. Watson Heard the First Sentence Ever Spoken Over the Telephone
Of course in our struggle to expel the imps from the invention, an immense amount of experimenting had to be done, but it wasn’t many days before we could talk back and forth and hear each other’s voice. It is, however, hard for me to realize now that it was not until the following March that I heard a complete and intelligible sentence. It made such an impression upon me that I wrote that first sentence in a book I have always preserved. The occasion had not been arranged and rehearsed as I suspect the sending of the first message over the Morse telegraph had been years before, for instead of that noble first telegraphic message—“What hath God wrought?” the first message of the telephone was: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” Perhaps, if Mr. Bell had realized that he was about to make a bit of history, he would have been prepared with a more sounding and interesting sentence.
Soon after the first telephones were made, Bell hired two rooms on the top floor of an inexpensive boarding house at No. 5 Exeter Place, Boston, since demolished to make room for mercantile buildings. He slept in one room; the other he fitted up as a laboratory. I ran a wire for him between the two rooms and after that time practically all his experimenting was done there. It was here one evening when I had gone there to help him test some improvement and to spend the night with him, that I heard the first complete sentence I have just told you about. Matters began to move more rapidly, and during the summer of 1876 the telephone was talking so well that one didn’t have to ask the other man to say it over again more than three or four times before one could understand quite well, if the sentences were simple.