The telephone, the company that ran it for a century, and the club that gave the world the personal computer all share a birthday. 3 March is a good day to remember that most of what we use began as one person’s side project.
1847: Alexander Graham Bell
Bell was born in Edinburgh into a family obsessed with speech: his father, grandfather and brother all worked on elocution, and both his mother and, later, his wife were deaf. His research into hearing and speech led him to experiment with hearing aids, and it was that work — not a search for a telephone — that produced one. On 7 March 1876 the US Patent Office granted him the first patent for the telephone. He went on to work on optical communication, hydrofoils and aircraft, served as the second president of the National Geographic Society from 1898 to 1903, held British, Canadian and American citizenship in turn, and collected the Albert Medal (1902), the John Fritz Medal (1907) and the Elliott Cresson Medal (1912). He died on 2 August 1922. For the duration of his funeral, every telephone in North America fell silent for a minute.
1885: AT&T
On 3 March 1885 Bell, Gardiner Greene Hubbard and Thomas Sanders founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in New York. For most of the twentieth century it was the world’s largest telephone company and a legal monopoly, employing about a million people in the 1950s and 1960s, running the long-distance network, and, through Bell Labs, inventing the transistor, the laser, Unix and the C language. The US government broke it up in 1984; one of the fragments, the “Baby Bell” SBC, bought what remained in 2005 and took the name. The AT&T of today is that descendant.
1975: the Homebrew Computer Club
On 3 March 1975 Fred Moore and Gordon French gathered about thirty microcomputer hobbyists in a garage in Menlo Park, California, to look at the Altair 8800, a kit computer you built yourself from parts. The Homebrew Computer Club met every two weeks after that. Its members included Steve Wozniak, who showed the club the machine that became the Apple I, and dozens of others who founded the companies of the first personal computer boom. A garage full of enthusiasts swapping schematics is the least likely origin for a trillion-dollar industry and, in Silicon Valley, the standard one.
