Historedia
Episode 3 of 3

First Successful Call

When
March 10, 1876
Where
Bell's laboratory
Part of
Bell patents the telephone and makes the first successful call

Bell made the first successful telephone call to Thomas Watson in Boston on March 10, 1876.

Bell used the instrument in Boston to call Thomas Watson, who was in another room but out of earshot. Watson was Bell's assistant and had worked in a Boston machine shop since 1872. Bell never used Gray's liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or commercial use after this date.

Sources

  1. Alexander Graham Bell Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-08
  2. Thomas A. Watson Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-13

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.