On March 7, 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. He later
married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

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 had made nearly instantaneous
communication possible between two distant points.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop
employee, Bell developed a prototype.