It's the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call, made this day by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant, Thomas Watson. Or not. Like everything the story is not so black and white, and others including Antonio Meucci worked on similar devices, with Meucci transmitting his voice over wires some twenty years earlier. Even Thomas Edison had a hand in the early history of telephones.
But Bell's success at the patent office and his technology has secured his place as the father of the telephone, probably one of the great revolutionary technologies of the modern era, for how it has transformed our lives.
I wonder what Mr. Bell would think if he could be transported into our world today, and see the ubiquitous cell phones, my relatively cumbersome satellite phone that allows me to talk anywhere in the world from near by a nesting Peregrine Falcon, Blackberries, iPhones, and all the technology that his brief call made.
I'm lucky that even though I live far away from my family, in place where communication was almost always face to face in the past, that I can simply pick up a phone and talk to them. I can even use those first words that Bell used when he spoke for that first time on his invention – "Come here – I want to see you!" I wonder if they would?