My interview with William Caughlin, the head of AT&T Archives and History Center, started with an ironic twist. Our Microsoft Teams video call failed, so we ended up talking over the "regular" phone.
Perhaps "regular" isn't entirely accurate, given the infrastructure. But it was fitting for the topic of our conversation: the very first phone call, which occurred exactly 150 years ago.
On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made a famous exclamation to his assistant: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you." That sentence crossed a single copper wire to the next room. Though the technology that enabled the call has changed drastically over the past century and a half, the experience was fundamentally the same. Two people in two different locations were having a conversation -- and seeking a connection -- in real time.
Caughlin told me that Bell had been working on experiments for a year by then. But even though he was able to transmit speech sounds over copper wire in 1875, it was inarticulate. "Watson could hear noises, sounds, but he couldn't really make out what Bell was saying. But Bell knew he was on the right path at that point," Caughlin said.
Those experiments culminated on March 10, when the sounds became clear.
Read more: AT&T Says It's Pumping $250 Billion Into New Infrastructure Improvements
Artifacts of the future
To celebrate the anniversary of that first transmission, AT&T created a pop-up exhibit at its Dallas headquarters, open to the public through Thursday, March 12.
Some notable artifacts on display from this day 150 years ago include the copper wire over which the message was sent, which in 1914 was wrapped in a loose spool and set behind glass. There's also Thomas Watson's notebook, where he recorded those historic first words.
"It's one of the greatest treasures in our collection," said Caughlin.
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