Pocket Gamer celebrates the anniversary of the first ever telephone call

In a previous incarnation I worked as an electronics engineer, and even though I’m liable to forget my own birthday and never know what day of the week it is, for some inexplicable reason March 10th always sticks in my mind.

It’s the anniversary of the first ever bidirectional telephone call, in which Alexander Graham Bell famously transmitted a message to his assistant in 1876, saying, “Watson, come here! I want to see you!”

And so I thought it was the ideal moment for Pocket Gamer to take a few minutes to reflect on our purpose, which began around eight months before that first phone call, when Bell accidentally discovered the method of transmitting proportional electromagnetic currents through a wire.

While attempting to recreate the movements of an iron reed as part of a new form of telegraphy, Bell’s new system stopped working.

He sent Watson to check it out, believing that the iron reed had stuck to the electromagnet at the other end. Watson gave the reed a flick, and to his astonishment, Bell heard the exact same vibrations transmitted through the reed at his end of the apparatus.

It prompted him to not only come up with the notion that sound could be transmitted in exactly the same way, but that the circuit he believed was being switched on and off was actually in continual operation. Without this fundamental realisation, the telephone would never have worked.

We might also ponder Bell’s first transmitted phrase. You and I would probably have just said “hello”, but rather surprisingly this wasn’t a common greeting in the English language at the time. The word “hello” did exist - it just wasn’t used very much, and, even when it was, it was more of an exclamation than a greeting.

As Bell was putting together his first experiments for the transmission of sound, a Hungarian inventor called Tivadar Puskás caught wind of Bell’s invention, which caused him to re-evaluate his own work. Within months of the telephone’s patenting, Puskás had conceived and realised the telephone exchange - an invention as important as the telephone itself.

During its first successful testing phase, Puskás shouted “hallom!” when the telephone call connected - a Hungarian word meaning “I hear you!”. Bell had previously favoured the maritime greeting “Ahoy hoy!”, but Thomas Edison’s partnership with Puskás quickly popularised the telephonic greeting of “hallom”, which was soon associated with the English exclamation of “hello” and entered into the dictionary accordingly in 1883.

Around 15 years ago, I saw an interview with Arthur C. Clarke, in which he was questioned about the next technological breakthrough of the human race.

Obviously the reporters - and viewers such as myself - had their fingers crossed for talk of space exploration, flying cars, laser guns or teleportation, but Clarke’s answers was, at the time, rather disappointing.

He insisted that we were on the cusp of a communications revolution not seen since the telephone, the telegraph or the printing press. That soon, people would be able to communicate, immediately, with anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, and that system would grow to carry information as well as audio.

As pale as that prediction was in comparison to colonising Mars, Clarke was incredibly prophetic. Looking at the mobile phones we’re already taking for granted, it’s genuinely awe inspiring how the world has changed in the last 10 years alone.

And this encourages us to ponder the impact Alexander Graham Bell has had on the world over the last 133 years, to this very day.

Bell never saw the impact his invention would have, but it’s nice to think that pocket gamers such as ourselves might stop for a few minutes every March 10th to remember the pioneers that set these amazing wheels in motion.

We’ll let Bell have the final word, in a quote he printed on the inside cover of the first ever telephone engineer’s installation and service manual:

“The telephone is so important that, one day, every town will have one.” - Alexander Graham Bell.