Rhodesia Philately: 1976 Centenary of First Telephone Transmission (1876-1976)

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 3rd March, 1847, and studied at the University of Edinburgh and the University of London. He emigrated to Canada in 1879 for health reasons.

Like his father and grandfather, young Bell had been devoting his life to educating the deaf, and he had acquired a considerable knowledge of the physiology of human speech and hearing. In 1872 he went to and settled in Boston in the United States of America and there opened a school for training teachers of the deaf. He also became Professor of Vocal Physiology at the University of Boston, but began to devote more and more time to work on the simultaneous transmission of a number of telegrams over the same circuit. A system of simultaneous two-way telegraphy had been developed and Bell hoped that the method he was working on would lead to a better system of multiplex telegraphy and bring him fame and fortune.

While Bell was working on his circuits during the afternoon of 2nd June, 1875, a reed on one of his instruments adhered to its electromagnet. Bell told his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, to pluck the sticking reed away and, when this was done, it was found that the corresponding reed on the other inter-connected instrument had begun to vibrate and produce a sound of the same pitch. Bell deduced from this simple phenomenon that, if a single sound could be transmitted electrically, so could complicated human speech and even music. He devised an instrument consisting of a circular piece of gold-beater’s skin stretched over a small cylinder into which one could speak, with the skin being connected to a reed associated with an electro-magnet. After tests, the first complete sentence spoken into this instrument and conveyed over the connecting wire to another instrument was: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you”. This first telephone transmission was made on the 10th March, 1876.