My interview with William Caughlin, the head of AT&T Archives and History Center, started with an ironic twist. Our Microsoft Teams video call failed, so we ended up talking over the “regular” phone.
Perhaps “regular” isn’t entirely accurate, given the infrastructure. But it was fitting for the topic of our conversation: the very first phone call, which occurred exactly 150 years ago.
On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made a famous exclamation to his assistant: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” That sentence crossed a single copper wire to the next room. Though the technology that enabled the call has changed drastically over the past century and a half, the experience was fundamentally the same. Two people in two different locations were having a conversation — and seeking a connection — in real time.
Caughlin told me that Bell had been working on experiments for a year by then. But even
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