On this Date: World's First Phone Call Made in Canada

It's more-than likely that the telephone used by Alexander Graham Bell on August 3, 1876, when he conducted the world's first definitive telephone tests, would be unrecognizable to today's phone users. And even though phones have gotten smaller and portable, and the device is used for more than just talking, we still owe a debt to the great Bell and his invention. On that August day, Bell made the first intelligible building-to-building telephone call, at Mount Pleasant, near Brantford. In a one-way transmission, he hears his uncle David Bell recite Hamlet's "to be or not to be."

There are a number of books related to the invention of the telephone held here at the Fisher, many of them within the library's extensive history of science collection. Examples of these holdings can be viewed below (click on the image for a larger view).