"Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you" , were the words of Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant Thomas Watson when on March 10, 1876, he called him from his home in Boston while Watson was in a different room. This was to be the first telephone call in history.

Three days earlier, on 7 March 1876, the US Patent Office had granted the Scottish scientist a patent for the device that 'transmits sound and voice by telegraph', beating the American Elisa Gray, who had almost simultaneously filed a patent application for a similar device.

Bell's telephone was very different from today's, as the device had no numbers and display, but a rubber membrane, attached to a wooden base, which was connected to a coil of wire that vibrated when sound waves, such as the human voice, were directed towards it.

In the following years the development of the telephone was rapid in America and throughout the world. In Greece, telephone communication, albeit on a limited scale, first appeared in 1880, when industrialists were "telephonically and privately connected". In 1892, the government of Charilaos Trikoupis passed the Law on Telephone Communications, setting the regulatory framework for the expansion of the country's telephone network.

Photo:

Slide showing Alexander Graham Bell. The image was intended for television (Museum Photograph Collection).