Everyone Wanted Alexander Graham Bell to Debut the Telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. He Almost Avoided it Entirely

The inventor had to be persuaded to make the trip from Boston, then balked at the thought of a delay in debuting his device. But history interceded, and his American innovation got its proper accolades

Justin Tackett | Freelance contributor

June 25, 2026 11:05 a.m.

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1876 was already an eventful year.

In March, Melvil Dewey acquired copyright for his eponymous decimal system for organizing books. In April, the Boston Red Caps defeated the Philadelphia Athletics in the first National League baseball game. In early June, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. That same month, two more momentous events occurred in American history: the young Republican Party nominated Rutherford B. Hayes for president in Cincinnati, and on the other side of the country, joint forces of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho defeated Lieutenant Colonel George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry Regiment near Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory.

But for inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition overshadowed everything else that happened.

The opening ceremonies in May were a major celebration. Bells rang out across the city, and German composer Richard Wagner debuted an original commission for the occasion (it wasn’t well received). President Ulysses S. Grant opened the exhibition. Only “100 years ago, our country was new,” he intoned, but the exhibition would show what Americans had already achieved “in law, medicine and theology; in science, literature, philosophy and the fine arts.”

In Fairmount Park along the Schuylkill River, the exhibition sprawled across more than 200 structures. The main building was reportedly the world’s largest edifice, with an area of more than 20 acres. The exhibition was filled with wonders: more than 20,000 exhibits featuring everything from household items to revolutionary electric devices. Over 185,000 people attended that first day, and nearly 10 million attended by the time it closed in November.

Visitors could scale the torch-holding hand of the unfinished Statue of Liberty. They could taste Heinz ketchup for the first time. They could see John Roebling’s wire rope, which would soon be suspended between the Brooklyn Bridge’s two colossal towers then under construction.

The exhibition was “the work of the people of the United States,” James Dabney McCabe asserted in his illustrated history of that year, “conceived by them, carried forward to its close by them, and made by them the grandest success of the century.”

In the Machinery Hall, Grant started the 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engine, the largest of its kind ever built at nearly 70 feet tall, 650 tons, which generated enough energy to power the inventions on display. The New York Herald claimed that “strong men were moved to tears of joy” when it chugged into motion, and the crowd’s cheers were followed by the “tinkling of a thousand bells and the clinking and thudding and hammering of 13 acres of vast machinery” throughout the hall.

Bell, meanwhile, was debuting a wonder of his own: the telephone. Urged by his fiancée, Mabel Hubbard, and her father, Gardiner, Bell had finally paused his school examination work in Boston to demonstrate the new device in hopes of securing national and international recognition.

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For generations, the men in Bell’s family had devoted their lives to elocution. (George Bernard Shaw probably based Pygmalion’s Henry Higgins in part on the Bells.) The family had been shoemakers in St. Andrews, Scotland, until the first Alexander Bell—Bell’s grandfather—became a comic stage actor and moved to Edinburgh to perform. When his acting career waned and his children were born, including Bell’s father, Alexander Melville Bell, he returned to St. Andrews and became a speech instructor specializing in stammering.

Melville acquired these skills too, and when he was sent to Newfoundland to recover from illness—his first of several trips to Canada—he taught Shakespeare and corrected stammers alongside his clerking job. Upon fully recovering, Melville rejoined his father in Britain and returned to Edinburgh, where he married Eliza Grace Symonds in 1844. On March 3, 1847, Alexander Graham Bell was born, the middle of three sons. Though money was often tight, Melville earned enough from lecturing and teaching to purchase a home in Edinburgh to raise their family.

But the Bell brothers were also plagued by ill health, exacerbated by the smog of British cities. After two of Melville’s sons died of tuberculosis, he moved the family—his wife; widowed daughter-in-law and remaining adult son, Alexander—to the town of Brantford, Ontario, for fresher air in 1870. He purchased a farm, which would become the Bell Homestead. Alexander Graham Bell would quickly become friends with the local Mohawk chief George Johnson, who allowed Bell to record his Indigenous language in Visible Speech, a system of phonetic symbols developed by Melville that people who were deaf or hard of hearing could use to communicate orally.

For much of his youth, Bell was fascinated by science in addition to elocution. After settling in Canada, he frequently spent hours, long into the night, tinkering with electrical devices.

Throughout his life, Bell was motivated by his father’s approval but also frustrated by his domineering character. Melville had drilled Bell in Visible Speech and insisted that spreading its adoption should be his son’s priority. As a result of his father’s drive—and his mother’s deafness—Bell decided to dedicate himself to improving the lives of the deaf community, at least as he saw it.

When Bell had recovered from a bout of tuberculosis and became eager to work again, Melville helped him arrange various teaching posts at schools for deaf communities in Massachusetts. One such school was the Clarke Institution for Deaf Mutes in Northampton, whose president was Gardiner Hubbard, a patent lawyer who was politically and financially well connected.

In 1872, in his mid-20s, Bell opened his own school in Boston (a young Helen Keller would study with him), and Hubbard was impressed by Bell’s pedagogy, so he put his daughter Mabel—stricken deaf by scarlet fever—under Bell’s tutelage. Hubbard and the father of another student soon became Bell’s principal financial backers, and Bell and Mabel ultimately became engaged.

In the summer of 1874, Bell took a break from teaching and returned to the homestead, ruminating on ways to improve deaf education. For perhaps his oddest experiment, he had acquired from a doctor some human ear tissues that he connected to a phonautograph—a device that traced sound vibrations like a seismograph—to visualize the mechanics of listening.

During this time, he knew that many inventors were racing to devise a multiple telegraph that could transmit several signals simultaneously. Bell confronted this challenge too, but because his strong suit was acoustics and not electricity, he approached the problem through sound. He aimed at a “harmonic telegraph,” which could use different frequencies to transmit simultaneous signals.

He had a conceptual breakthrough: using a vibrating membrane like the one in his ear phonautograph, he could generate an undulating electric transmission. In contrast to the open/closed, stop/start currents of traditional telegraphy, this continuous, wavelike impulse could reproduce the human voice’s modulating sounds. As historian Charlotte Gray explained in her Bell biography, Reluctant Genius, “This extraordinary leap of the imagination is what put [Bell] ahead of the pack of inventors scrambling to advance the technology of communication. No one else knew enough about the human ear.” The principles of modern telephony were born.

The advantages telephony had over telegraphy would be numerous, but one of the biggest was privacy, says Harold Wallace, curator of the electricity collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “Telegraph communication was a mediated experience,” he explains. “You had to have someone who knew [Morse] code” transmit for you, and “as you’re sending a telegram, you’ve got to dictate or write that telegram” for a telegrapher. By necessity, then, telegraphers eavesdropped on conversations. Telephony circumvented this.

Because telephony held such great promise, Bell was by no means the first to propose transmitting the voice. From the 1840s through the 1870s, many others had imagined and built semi-successful (though unmarketable) apparatus. And Bell consulted many scientists about his ideas, including the first Smithsonian Institution Secretary, Joseph Henry, who urged him to acquire a better understanding of electricity. Bell’s attitude was that if “Morse conquered his electrical difficulties although he was only a painter,” he could do the same despite being an elocutionist. He soon enlisted the dexterous Boston machinist Thomas Watson to help construct components, and by early 1875, the two were working side by side.

While Bell and Watson toiled, electrical engineer Elisha Gray in Illinois conceived of a liquid transmitter that could theoretically also achieve voice transmission. Bell soon began to think along similar lines. Finally, on Valentine’s Day in 1876, within hours of each other, Bell’s lawyer filed a patent and Gray’s lawyer filed a caveat—a notice of intent to file a patent application later, designed to prevent someone else from patenting the same invention in the meantime. It’s been speculated that Bell’s lawyer learned of Gray’s caveat and rushed his own application to the patent office to beat him. The matter remains hotly contested.

In the years of litigation that followed, however, Bell’s patent was continually upheld. By some accounts, it became the most lucrative patent in history.

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But on that sweltering June day in Philadelphia, the matter was far from decided. As the first world’s fair held in the U.S., the Centennial Exhibition would put Bell and his telephone on the map. Bell had been reluctant to enter any sort of competition at the fair, however, deeming his instruments still experimental.

When Hubbard attended the exhibition and saw the displays of Gray, Thomas Edison and others, however, he telegraphed Bell in Boston to insist that he come. A committee led by Henry would judge telegraphic equipment on June 25, and Bell couldn’t afford to miss it. Exhibiting the telephone was critical to securing the invention as his. As a prominent Bostonian involved with the exhibition, Hubbard could secure him a last-minute spot.

But Bell contended he was swamped with school exams and couldn’t spare time for Philadelphia. Mabel, now his fiancée, interceded. Because her father was Bell’s benefactor and because Bell was perpetually in dire financial straits, their wedding hung in the balance. She prodded him to the train station, and at last, he relented.

The day of the demonstrations was scorching. The hall’s multipaned glass walls made the temperature inside even hotter. When Gray’s turn came, he explained the transmission of musical tones at some length, which impressed the audience. But he was unable to give a convincing demonstration of telephony; Bell detected that Gray had failed to strengthen the undulatory current.

At last, it was Bell’s turn. But by now, the perspiring judges were exhausted. Come back tomorrow, they said.

Bell was obviously disappointed. As he recalled 35 years later in a speech, “That meant that the telephone would not be seen, for I was not going to come back another day. I was going right back to Boston.” He had rushed to Philadelphia for nothing.

But Bell was friends with an emperor. After participating in the exhibition’s opening festivities, Brazil’s Pedro II had visited Boston at Bell’s invitation. On June 14, Dom Pedro observed Bell’s classes and, impressed with the system, requested copies of his father’s book on Visible Speech.

Less than two weeks later in Philadelphia, already familiar with Bell’s ingenuity, Dom Pedro would come see his new acquaintance’s telephone, even if the judges wouldn’t. As Bell recalled in his 1911 speech, he “took my arm and walked off with me, and, of course, where an emperor led the way, the other judges followed. And the telephone exhibit was saved.”

Bell displayed several objects, including an iron-box receiver, liquid transmitter, double-pole magneto telephone and single-pole magneto telephone.

In a demonstration of his invention, Bell hastened to the gallery’s far end to transmit while Sir William Thomson, the renowned Scottish electricity expert who helped design the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, took up the receiver. (Thomson later became Baron Kelvin, for whom units of absolute temperature are named.) As a fellow Scotsman, Bell particularly wanted to impress Thomson. When Bell sang into the telephone, Thomson couldn’t believe his ears.

Dom Pedro was eager to try. From the receiver, he heard Bell utter the ghostly words of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be, that is the question …” The emperor was shocked. “My God!” he cried. “It speaks!”

The astounded audience became frenzied, jostling for a chance to use the telephone. Even Gray stepped up to listen. “Aye, there’s the rub,” he repeated to the cheering crowd what he’d heard over the wires.

Bell’s presentation was an unqualified success. He had actually demonstrated an instrument whose functions Gray and others had struggled to produce. Henry effused that the telephone was “the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the telegraph,” and Bell was awarded a gold medal for electrical equipment, as well as for his display on Visible Speech.

In the coming weeks and months, he continued his telephone experiments, gradually expanding the distance of subsequent calls and transmitting “Yankee Doodle,” Robert Burns’ poetry, Macbeth, Hamlet, a Mohawk greeting from Chief George Johnson and other memorable messages. According to Robert Stanczyk, the curator of the Bell Homestead in Canada, Johnson may be the first Indigenous person to ever speak over the telephone. In July, calls were attempted from Boston to New York and other places. More successful calls were made from Brantford to Mount Pleasant, five miles away, using the Centennial Exhibition receiver. In October, the first two-way call took place between Boston and Cambridge.

Throughout 1877, commercial telephone adoption exploded in New England. Mark Twain became one of its earliest adopters, publishing his comical sketch “A Telephonic Conversation” in 1880. Listening to a telephone conversation “is one of the solemnest curiosities of modern life,” Twain wrote, but “I notice that one can always write best when somebody is talking through a telephone close by.”

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Why did Bell choose poetry or Shakespeare for his telephony experiments?

As elocutionists, the Bells knew poetry by heart, because having quotations handy was helpful for demonstrating proper pronunciation. Similarly, Shakespeare was universally regarded as worth knowing. Well-known verses—not just Shakespeare, but songs and nursery rhymes—were used to test and help new technologies succeed. Early transmissions were coarse, but listeners such as Dom Pedro could recognize poetry’s rhythms, rhymes and assonances, even if words themselves were unclear. For these reasons, Bell would also recite “Auld Lang Syne,” and other well-known songs during his many telephone demonstrations.

As telephony spread, commentators imagined systems for delivering plays, concerts, sermons and lectures, much like radio, in addition to business and personal conversations.

And their recitations of Shakespeare weren’t limited to telephony.

In the 1880s, Bell founded Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where he and his associates developed the graphophone to compete with Edison’s phonograph. In 2013, the Smithsonian, with help from scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), recovered an 1881 recording in which Melville Bell proclaimed, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy,” again from Hamlet. Carlene Stephens, curator of mechanisms, led the recovery team and was struck by Melville’s gravitas. While Bell worried that he would be “a one-hit wonder” and perhaps sounded more cautious, she explains, Melville’s belting of Shakespeare had “more of a presence” apropos of an experienced elocutionist.

Recordings made by Alexander Graham Bell Heard for the First Time

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With colleagues at LBL and the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian also recovered a recording of Bell reciting numbers, the only surviving evidence of his voice at the time. When Stephens’ team put it online, the widespread interest shocked her. The public was drawn to Bell’s voice “because in living memory, nobody knew what [he] sounded like. And there’s a huge irony, of course, that the man who brought us the telephone wasn’t a common voice in our ears.”

Justin Tackett | Read More

Justin Tackett is an assistant professor of English at North Carolina State University. His current book project is The Sound Era: Poetry’s Machinery in the Long Nineteenth Century, which addresses the relationships between poetry and sound technology. Tackett has appeared on BBC Radio and published work in Public Books, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books and others.