Mr Watson, come here please. I want you.’ The inventor Alexander Graham Bell spoke these words to his assistant, Thomas Watson, in March 1876. This short sentence is one of the most famous in the history of inventions. Why? Because they were the first words spoken and heard on the telephone. Alexander Bell was born in Edinburgh in 1847. He and his father went to live in Canada in 1870 and then, two years later, to the USA and Bell started work on an invention to help deaf people hear. During his work he accidentally discovered the principle of the telephone. Bell knew that other scientists were working on the same invention. He had to work fast. He wanted to be first! He and his assistant, Mr Watson, rented two cheap rooms in a hotel in Boston and worked day and night trying to transmit messages between the rooms. On the afternoon of March 10th Watson was in the downstairs room with the receiver to his ear. Suddenly he heard this first clear sentence: ‘Mr Watson, come here please. I want you.’ He threw down the receiver, ran upstairs into Bell’s room and shouted ‘I heard you! I could hear what you said!’ In the same year Bell took his invention to a large exhibition in Philadelphia. No one paid much attention to his telephone until the Emperor of Brazil, Don Pedro, picked up the machine. At the other end of the line Bell spoke the famous lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet – ‘To be or not to be …’. ‘It speaks!’ cried the Emperor excitedly. After this the whole world soon knew that it was possible for two people to speak to each other from different places. And Bell himself? He hated his invention. A ringing telephone stopped him working. ’I never use the beast!’ he once said