More than any other, the telephone art is a product of American institutions and reflects the genius of our people. The story of its wonderful development is a story of our own country. It is a story exclusively of American enterprise and American progress, for, although the most powerful governments of Europe have devoted their energies to the development and operation of telephone systems, great contributions to the art have not been made by any of them. With very few exceptions, the best that is used in telephony everywhere in the world to-day has been contributed by workers here in America.
It is of peculiar interest to recall the fact that the first words ever transmitted by the electric telephone were spoken in a building at Boston, not far from where Benjamin Franklin first saw the light. The telephone, as well as Franklin, was born at Boston, and, like Franklin, its first journey into the world brought it to Philadelphia, where it was exhibited by its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, held here to commemorate the first hundred years of our existence as a free and independent nation.
It was a fitting contribution to American progress, representing the highest product of American inventive genius, and a worthy continuance of the labors of Franklin, one of the founders of the science of electricity as well as of the Republic.
Nothing could appeal more to the genius of Franklin than the telephone, for not only have his countrymen built upon it an electrical system of communication of transcendent magnitude and usefulness, but they have made it into a powerful agency for the advancement of civilization, eliminating barriers to speech, binding together our people into one nation, and now reaching out to the uttermost limits of the earth, with the grand aim of some day bringing together the people of all the nations of the earth into one common brotherhood.
On the tenth day of March, 1876, the telephone art was born, when, over a wire extending between two rooms on the top floor of a building in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell spoke to his associate, Thomas A. Watson, saying: "Mr. Watson, please come here. I want you." These words, then heard by Mr. Watson in the instrument at his ear, constitute the first sentence ever received by the electric telephone. The instrument into which Doctor Bell spoke was a crude apparatus, and the current which it generated was so feeble that, although the line was about a hundred feet in length, the voice heard in the receiver was so faint as to be audible only to such a trained and sensitive ear as that of the young Mr. Watson, and then only when all surrounding noises were excluded.