Charles Williams Jr.

Charles Williams Jr. owned the workshop where the telephone was built, and the first telephone line ran to his house. He was an electrical manufacturer in Boston with a shop at 109 Court Street, making telegraph instruments, fire-alarm equipment and burglar-alarm apparatus in the decades when electrical engineering was still a trade learned at a bench. His shop was the place inventors in New England went to have things made. Thomas Watson was one of his machinists, and it was there that Alexander Graham Bell arrived with drawings for an apparatus he could not build himself. The famous call of March 1876 - Bell in one room and Watson in another - happened in a boarding house, but the instruments came out of Williams's shop, and it manufactured telephones for the Bell company from the beginning. In 1877 he had a line strung from the shop to his house in Somerville, about three miles, which is generally counted the first telephone line installed for ordinary private use rather than demonstration. He took stock in the Bell Telephone Company as payment, which made him wealthy, and his works were eventually absorbed into what became Western Electric - the manufacturing arm of the Bell system and for most of a century the largest electrical manufacturer in the United States. The shop itself is the point. Nineteenth-century electrical invention depended on a handful of instrument makers who could work to a drawing, and Boston had one; a city without such a shop did not get the industry that grew around it. He is a useful corrective to how invention gets told. The patent, the lawsuit and the name belong to Bell; the capacity to turn a drawing into a working object belonged to a shop full of machinists, and without one the other is a diagram.

• Lived: 1830 CE – 1908 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: business