A device that needed an audience
In 1876 the telephone was a laboratory success and a commercial question mark. Alexander Graham Bell and his backers needed people to believe that a thin wire could carry a human voice, and that this was useful rather than a trick. For that reason the early history of the telephone is partly a history of demonstrations.
The Centennial Exhibition, 1876
In June 1876 the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, a large world’s fair marking a hundred years of American independence, gave Bell his first major audience. Judges visited his exhibit at a time when he was competing with thousands of other displays. Accounts say that Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil, who was visiting the fair, picked up the receiver and exclaimed in surprise, and that the scientist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, was also impressed and spoke well of the device afterward. Retellings differ on the exact words, and several are probably polished, but the general picture, that serious scientists and notable visitors took the device seriously, appears in many sources.
Bell’s exhibit stood among thousands of others, including giant steam engines and early typewriters, and the telephone was a small thing by comparison. The exhibition did not make the telephone a success on its own, but it brought attention at a critical time, and it won a favorable judges’ report.
Long lines and lecture halls
Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson then showed that the telephone worked over real distances. Tests in the second half of 1876 used ordinary telegraph wires between Boston and nearby towns. Bell also made a test call in Ontario in the summer of 1876 between locations a few miles apart.
In 1877 Bell gave public lectures with telephone demonstrations. In some of them, a wire connected the lecture hall to another town, and Watson, at the far end, sang, spoke, or played an instrument, which the audience then heard through a receiver connected to the hall. Reports in newspapers described an astonished audience. These shows were part science lecture, part entertainment, and they took advantage of the Victorian taste for popular science.
Many of the early receivers were weak, so the performances often involved a shouting or singing voice at one end and a listener holding the device to the ear. Music was easier for audiences to recognize than speech, and early demonstrations leaned on songs and cornet pieces.
The royal demonstration
In January 1878, Bell demonstrated telephones to Queen Victoria at Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. Wires connected rooms and nearby locations, and the queen listened to speech and singing. She is recorded as having been impressed, and her interest helped raise the device’s profile in Britain. Demonstrations like this gave the telephone social acceptance, since a device used by royalty was easier to take seriously.
Reactions: wonder, doubt and confusion
Reactions ranged widely. Some people regarded the device as a scientific marvel, some as a toy, and a few with suspicion, since a voice with no body attached seemed uncanny. In the first years, there were demonstrations that were called a “talking telegraph,” and the telegraph was the obvious reference for users and journalists. Many early supporters thought of the telephone as a telegraph substitute and expected it to be used by businesses with trained operators.
Others thought the telephone would be used to broadcast music or news, and this idea appeared in several early proposals. Telephone subscribers in the 1890s in a few places did receive music and news over wires, long before radio broadcasting. It did not become the main use, but it shows how open the future of the device seemed.
Learning how to use it
An unfamiliar tool needs customs. People had to learn how to start a call, how to speak into the transmitter, and what to say when the bell rang. Bell reportedly favored “Ahoy” as a greeting, while “hello” was promoted by others, including Thomas Edison, and it won out. The word was already used to attract attention, and it became the standard way to answer.
Users also learned that the early transmitter needed speech to be loud and clear. Early instructions told people to speak directly into the mouthpiece and not too close. Misunderstandings were common, and callers often repeated names and numbers. The practice of spelling difficult names or reading numbers back dates from this era.
From demonstration to business
Bell’s years of teaching the deaf also shaped his interests in sound, and the same concern with hearing later ran through the story of hearing aids. The Bell Telephone Company was formed in 1877, and the demonstrations helped to find the first subscribers, which were mainly businesses. Soon after, the first exchanges let users connect to many others. By 1878, instead of the public watching an exhibition, they were being offered a subscription.
The 1870s demonstrations thus served several roles at once: they proved that the technology worked, built public confidence, attracted capital, and began teaching a society how to use a telephone. What looks like a simple story of a wonderful invention was, in practice, a patient campaign of showing and explaining.