The idea behind the first working telephone was discovered by accident in 1875 in Boston, USA, when Thomas Watson struggled with a jammed component in an early experiment by Scottish tutor to the deaf, Alexander Graham Bell. Watson inadvertently sent a sound signal over a wire which Bell heard, and recognised as the breakthrough he craved.

Watson’s fiddling showed the inventor that his system was too complicated, and in eight months he was able to refine it until conversations could be held over the wire. Watson noted down the first clear and understandable sentence — ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want you’ — but regretted, tongue-in-cheek, that Bell had not thought to say something more profound.

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