Official report by Sir William Thomson upon Mr. Graham Bell’s Telephone, exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876.

Quoted in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, Vol. XII, 1878; page 4.


Mr. Alexander Graham Bell exhibits apparatus by which he has achieved a result of transcendent scientific interest—the transmission of spoken words by electric currents through a telegraph wire. To obtain this result, Mr. Bell perceived that he must produce a variation of strength of current in the telegraph wire as nearly as may be in exact proportion to the velocity of a particle of air moved by the sound, and he invented a method of doing so—a piece of iron attached to a membrane, and thus moved to and fro in the neighbourhood of an electric-magnet—which has proved perfectly successful. The battery and wire of this electro-magnet are in circuit with the telegraph wire and the wire of another electro-magnet at the receiving-station. This second electro-magnet has a solid bar of iron for core, which is connected at one end by a thick disc of iron to an iron tube surrounding the coil and bar. The free circular end of the tube constitutes one pole of the electro-magnet, and the adjacent free end of the bar core the other. A thin circular iron disc, held pressed against the end of the tube by the electric-magnetic attraction, and free to vibrate through a very small space without touching the central pole, constitutes the sounder by which the electric effect is reconverted into sound. With my ear pressed against this disc I heard it speak distinctly several sentences. * * * I need scarcely say I was astonished and delighted; so were others, including some judges of our group who witnessed the experiments and verified with their own ears the electric transmission of speech. This, perhaps, the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the electric telegraph, has been obtained by appliances of quite a homespun and rudimentary character. With somewhat more advanced plans and more powerful apparatus, we may confidently expect that Mr. Bell will give us the means of making voice and spoken words audible through the electric wire to an ear hundreds of miles distant.