How the 1876 World’s Fair Launched the Telephone Revolution

About

The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was a spectacular celebration of the nation’s 100th anniversary, and the first world’s fair to be held in the United States. It also became an important platform for a new invention: the telephone. The Library of Congress holds extensive documentation of the telephone’s early history, from the manuscript collections of Alexander Graham Bell and Gardiner Hubbard to early telephone directories from across the nation and around the world. Researchers can find original correspondence documenting Bell’s demonstration of the telephone and reaction to the Exposition – “so prodigious and so wonderful” – his remarkably detailed laboratory notebooks, and his records from the device’s extensive patent litigation. Published telephone directories then chart the phone’s explosive growth, documenting communities in such detail that researchers now use them for everything from local business histories to family genealogy. Manuscript Division historian Josh Levy and Business Reference Specialist Ellen Terrell guide us through the story of the telephone’s earliest years, 150 years after its debut.

Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress: talks and concerts

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed