Today in 1878, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his new invention, the telephone, to Queen Victoria at her Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight.
The Science Museum, London:
Bell gained welcome publicity for his new device by demonstrating it to Queen Victoria, Princess Beatrice, and the Duke of Connaught in the Council Room at her residence, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. Bell explained how the telephone worked and gave a demonstration, assisted by Colonel W.H. Reynolds of the US Army and civil and telegraph engineer Charlton James Wollaston. The mouthpiece was also the earpiece, and the user had to listen and speak alternately.
The UK’s first glimpse of the telephone was in September 1876, when Bell’s invention was exhibited in Glasgow at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Sir William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) dubbed it “the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph”. Bell was awarded his UK patent on 9 December 1876.
Bell’s telephonic demonstrations for Queen Victoria were the UK’s first publicly witnessed long-distance calls, placed from Osborne House on the Isle of Wight to London, Cowes and Southampton. The then-magical potential of the telephone had been expressed enticingly in an 1877 flyer: “Persons using it can converse miles apart, in precisely the same manner as though they were in the same room.”
Following the demonstration before Queen Victoria, one of the her staff wrote to Bell to inform him “how much gratified and surprised the Queen was at the exhibition of the Telephone.”