Inventing Telephones at the Centennial

In June of 1876, two weeks before the nation’s centennial, a young Alexander Graham Bell arrived in Philadelphia. He was staggered by what he saw. He had come to demonstrate his inventions at the Centennial Exposition, the first world’s fair hosted on American soil, with exhibits stretched massively across more than 200 buildings in Fairmount Park. “It grows upon one,” Bell wrote his soon-to-be wife, Mabel. “It is so prodigious and so wonderful … just think of having the products of all nations condensed into a few acres of buildings.”

Like any of the era’s world’s fairs, the exhibition was a breathless celebration of progress, a spectacle of industry and commerce, art and culture. Nearly 10 million visitors attended. Those visitors may easily have passed by Bell’s telephone, but the impression of the nation’s burgeoning industrial power was unmistakable. On the grounds stood the colossal Machinery Hall, enclosing 14 acres of exhibits and a three-story Corliss steam engine that powered every noisy machine inside. There, according to one account, one found “fire, smoke, sweat, and labor; whirring and whizzing, banging and clanging, pounding and puffing, tinkling and jingling” and machines that produced everything from “a tooth-brush to a locomotive.”

Bell’s telephone barely functioned then, and even he admitted it was still in an embryonic stage. Still, his demonstration went well. In a private showing for a small group of notables, Bell had shouted and recited and sung into the telephone from a distant room, only partially heard. At one point, after Bell asked, “Do you understand what I say,” the physicist later known as Lord Kelvin barreled toward him, announcing excitedly that he had heard the words “what I say.”

In the mythology that followed, this became a pivotal moment, the first public demonstration of a single device that broke sharply with past technology, brought forward by one brilliant inventor.

Yet real invention is seldom so straightforward. That version of the telephone’s origin is less a historical story than a legal one — a series of bold claims, made ex post facto, meant to defend a lucrative patent for Bell and his backers. “In that sense,” historian Christopher Beauchamp writes, “the invention of the telephone belongs to the lawyers.”

The real story was messier. Elisha Gray, an electrical engineer who later became Bell’s most formidable rival, was also at the exhibition that day. Earlier that year both men had alerted the U.S. Patent Office to their efforts, as Gray put it, to transmit “vocal sounds telegraphically.” But Bell and Gray were really on hand to promote their high-capacity telegraphs, not their half-formed telephones. Thomas Edison was present for the same reason. Samuel Morse’s brilliant success decades earlier had produced a telegraphic network bursting at the seams, and fragments of solutions to increase capacity buzzed through the air. In 1876, the telephone was still a side project, less urgent than enhancements to the telegraph system. But it was in the air as well, and soon Bell, Gray and Edison had all set their sights on improving it, with legal battles over credit and financial reward to come.

Americans have embraced stories of invention as points of national pride, from Franklin’s lightning rod to Morse’s telegraph, Bell’s telephone to the Wright Flyer.

The quiet thoughts of a lone inventor make for a good story, but the cacophony of invention as it more often happens, incrementally and in collaboration, is just as powerful, and just as American.