This idea was clear in Bell’s mind by the summer of 1871, but he did not then know how to reduce it to practice. On June 2, 1875, he succeeded in doing so. In adjoining attic rooms at 109 Court Street, Boston, he and Watson were trying out several pairs of harmonic telegraph instruments each consisting of an electromagnet with a steel organ reed vibrating over it. One reed stuck. Watson plucked it with his finger to start it again, but it did not come free, so Bell heard an unusual sound. Instead of hearing a series of electric pulsations, he recognized the twang of a vibrating reed! He knew then that, as Watson has put it, “he was hearing, for the first time in human history, the tones and overtones of a sound transmitted by electricity.” That afternoon Bell directed Watson to make the instrument that was to be the first Bell telephone. This instrument transmitted voice tones, but not until March 10, 1876, did Bell succeed in transmitting an intelligible sentence of speech.
The telephone talks
On the evening of that day, as the young inventor prepared a crude experimental transmitter to try to send his voice over a wire to a room down the hall where Watson was listening, he upset the acid of a battery. It spilled over his clothes. Impulsively, Bell called out, “Mr. Watson, come here: I want you!” An instant later Watson burst into the room shouting “Mr. Bell, I heard every word you said—distinctly!”
Bell exhibited and demonstrated his telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial in June, 1876, where it won the enthusiastic approval of leaders in the scientific world. But the general public showed little interest. The young inventor had no financial backing other than that of Thomas Sanders and Gardiner C. Hubbard. In the fall of 1871 these men had agreed to supply funds for Bell’s telegraph experiments in return for a share in whatever patent rights might result from his experiments. His telephone patents were later included in this agreement.
Bell’s first telephone patent had been granted on March 7, 1876, but was earning no return. Sanders and Hubbard had advanced all they could. In order to eke out his small personal income as a teacher, and to provide funds for further experimentation, Bell began, early in 1877, to give lectures at which he demonstrated the telephone. These were well attended, and accounts of them were widely published. A few forward-looking people began to realize the usefulness of the telephone. In May, 1877, the first telephones were put into use on a commercial basis. Soon people throughout the country began to inquire about how to get into the telephone business.
How the Bell System was formed
The commercial development of the telephone had begun and the time had come for a more definite organization than the rather informal arrangement that had been made between Bell, Sanders and Hubbard, into which Watson had by this time been admitted.
This took the form of a trusteeship, instituted in July, 1877, by these four owners of the patents. Hubbard was trustee and virtual executive head of the enterprise. It was he who introduced the policy of leasing instruments instead of selling them and who introduced the system of licenses to authorized agents or licensees throughout the country for the commercial development of the telephone, laying the foundation for the Bell System of today.
Telephones first were leased in pairs. The lessee put up his own wire to connect his telephone with that of a friend or neighbor, or ran the line between his home and place of business. There was no way he could talk by telephone with others in the community who leased instruments.
