Alexander Graham Bell  (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) at
the opening of the long-distance line from New York to
Chicago in 1892.

On this day in 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for
his revolutionary new invention…the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the
deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the
younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for
the Deaf.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse’s invention of the telegraph in 1843 made communication possible between two distant points and Bell, wanting to
improve on this, created a “harmonic telegraph,” a device that combined
aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to
each other from a distance.
 

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype of his first telephone. Three days after filing the patent,
the telephone carried its first intelligible message–the famous “Mr. Watson,
come here, I need you”–from Bell to his assistant. (A&E Television)

Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent drawing, March 7, 1876.