In today's world, mobile phones are like a part of our bodies and it's unimaginable to live without one. But the world's first telephone call — specifically, the first successful transmission of a human voice over a wire to another person — only happened exactly 150 years ago on March 10, 1876. On that day, Alexander Graham Bell said to his assistant Watson: "Watson, come here. I want to see you" — and it became a historic moment. On the streets of Boston where this historic event occurred, people today walk by with phones in hand, unaware that they are passing through the birthplace of the telephone. Interestingly, Bell — born in Scotland — never originally intended to invent the telephone. He was a teacher of deaf students, and while studying to improve the slow and expensive telegraph system of the era, he accidentally invented a device that could transmit sound. Bell and his assistant Watson successfully designed a liquid transmitter using acid. The device looked like an oddly shaped little machine — nothing like modern phones. Yet that little machine revolutionized communication 150 years ago. After that, other brilliant inventors like Thomas Edison continued to refine and improve upon Bell's original design. From that funnel-shaped device to today's modern smartphones, telephones have advanced remarkably over the decades. If Bell could see today's wireless phones packed with cameras, the internet, and everything else, he would surely be astonished. And if he knew that AT&T — descended from the Bell Telephone Company he founded in 1877 — still stands strong in the telecommunications world today, he would undoubtedly feel immense pride. Ref: WBUR