Actor portraying Alexander Graham Bell in an AT&T promotional film (1926)

Today in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell gave a public demonstration of  his new invention, the telephone, at the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “Bell demonstrated three induction telephones to a select jury that included Sir William Thomson, perhaps the best-known British electrical scientist and Dom Pedro, emperor of Brazil. It made an enormous hit: Dom Pedro expressed everyone’s astonishment with the new machine by exclaiming (so legend has it), ‘My God, it talks!’