Of course in our struggle to expel the imps from the invention, an
immense amount of experimenting had to be done, but it wasn’t many days
before we could talk back and forth and hear each other’s voice. It is,
however, hard for me to realize now that it was not until the following
March that I heard a complete and intelligible sentence. It made such an
impression upon me that I wrote that first sentence in a book I have
always preserved. The occasion had not been arranged and rehearsed as I
suspect the sending of the first message over the Morse telegraph had
been years before, for instead of that noble first telegraphic
message—“What hath God wrought?” the first message of the telephone was:
“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” Perhaps, if Mr. Bell had realized
that he was about to make a bit of history, he would have been prepared
with a more sounding and interesting sentence.
Soon after the first telephones were made, Bell hired two rooms on the
top floor of an inexpensive boarding house at No. 5 Exeter Place,
Boston, since demolished to make room for mercantile buildings. He slept
in one room; the other he fitted up as a laboratory. I ran a wire for
him between the two rooms and after that time practically all his
experimenting was done there. It was here one evening when I had gone
there to help him test some improvement and to spend the night with him,
that I heard the first complete sentence I have just told you about.
Matters began to move more rapidly, and during the summer of 1876 the
telephone was talking so well that one didn’t have to ask the other man
to say it over again more than three or four times before one could
understand quite well, if the sentences were simple.