"What was that ?" shouted Bell.

What had happened was clearly manifest; a sound had been sent distinctly over an electric wire.

Bell's harmonic telegraph immediately went into the discard, and the young inventor--Bell was then only twenty-nine--became a man of one passionate idea.

Yet final success did not come easily; the inventor worked day and night for forty weeks before he had obtained satisfactory results.

It was on March 10, 1876, that Watson, in a distant room, picked up the first telephone receiver and heard these words, the first that had ever passed over a magnetized wire, "Come here, Watson; I want you." The speaking instrument had become a reality, and the foundation of the telephone, in all its present development, had been laid.
When the New York and San Francisco line was opened in January, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell spoke these same words to his old associate, Thomas Watson, located in San Francisco, both men using the same instruments that had served so well on that historic occasion forty years before.
Though Bell's first invention comprehended the great basic idea that made it a success, the instrument itself bore few external resemblances to that which has become so commonplace today.