Two places show Boston as birthplace of the telephone
(New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is chairman of The Boston Guardian.)
Two different locations in Downtown Boston both claim to be the site where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
Steps from City Hall, almost hidden in a courtyard between the John F. Kennedy Federal Building and Cambridge Street, a nondescript granite marker reads, BIRTHPLACE OF THE FIRST TELEPHONE.
Yet just half a mile away, embedded in the side of a building on Avenue de Lafayette, a plaque claims to mark the spot of the FIRST COMPLETE AND INTELLIGIBLE SENTENCE BY TELEPHONE.
So where in Boston was the telephone really invented? The answer, experts say, depends on how one chooses to define the term.
“I can see a convincing argument being made for either place,” said Peter Drummey, the Stephen T. Riley Librarian at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and one of the foremost experts on Boston’s history. “But it’s not particularly helpful that both markers are without a concrete explanation or any context at all.”
The root of these competing claims lies in Alexander Graham Bell’s paranoia that rival inventors would steal his design, according to Drummey and Vincent Valentine, director of The Telephone Museum in Waltham.
Originally from Scotland, Bell came to Boston to have his ideas prototyped by Charles Williams Jr., a manufacturer of telegraph equipment whose expertise turned Boston into a hotbed for inventors in the late nineteenth century.
Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson rented space in the attic of William’s factory at 109 Court Street, an address that no longer exists but roughly corresponds to the present day marker near City Hall. It was in that fifth floor lab that Bell and Watson were initially able to transmit sound over a wire, first a “twang” of a spring and then the indistinct sound of voices.
Concerned about prying eyes at the Court Street labs, Bell and Watson began testing their devices at night in rented rooms at a boarding house at 15 Exeter Street, or what is roughly now the Avenue de Lafayette. It was in these rented rooms on March 10 in 1876 that Bell, according to the story, called to Watson after spilling acid on his prototype and the assistant heard him clearly in the next room.
“15 Exeter is where they first got it to work,” said The Telephone Museum’s Valentine. “That’s where the first voice was transmitted.”
Both Drummey and Valentine said that any debate over which site is truly the birthplace of modern communications is a matter of semantics. However, they also said that the lack of a universally agreed upon location to commemorate the achievement played a role in why such an important moment is often left off Boston’s historical pantheon.
For a city that obsesses over its own history and takes pride in its outsized influence and innovation economy, Boston all but ignores one of the most significant achievements to have occurred here.
“People don’t know this happened in Boston,” said Valentine. “When people think of Boston, all anybody seems to care about is Paul Revere, but the telephone was invented right there downtown. And it’s the telephone. I mean, Holy Christ, everyone has one.”