THAT experiment showed him that the complex apparatus he had thought would be needed to accomplish that long dreamed result was not at all necessary. It is, however, hard for me to realize now that it was not until the following March that I heard a complete and intelligible sentence. It made such an impression upon me that I wrote that first sentence in a book I have always preserved.
The occasion had not been arranged and rehearsed as I suspect the sending of the first message over the Morse telegraph had been years before, for instead of that noble first telegraphic message — “What hath God wrought?”* the first message of the telephone was: “Mr Watson, come here, I want you.”
Perhaps, if Mr Bell had realized that he was about to make a bit of history, he would have been prepared with a more sounding and interesting sentence.*
abridged
The message ‘What hath God wrought’ was sent in Morse code at the first demonstration of Samuel Morse’s pioneering Baltimore to Washington telegraph line, America’s first long-distance system, on May 24th, 1844. It was a reference to Numbers 23:23. Watson adds a question mark but in keeping with the Authorised Version from which it is taken it ought to be an exclamation mark, indicating astonishment.
Psalm 19:4, perhaps: “Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.”