Thomas A. Watson

Thomas Watson was the man on the other end of the first telephone call, and he later built battleships. He was a carpenter's son from Salem, Massachusetts, left school at fourteen, and was working as a machinist in Charles Williams's electrical shop in Boston when Alexander Graham Bell came in with drawings he could not make work. Watson became his assistant in 1874 and built the apparatus. On 10 March 1876 Bell, in another room, spoke the sentence asking Watson to come, and Watson heard it through the receiver; the story that Bell had spilled acid on himself comes from Watson's own memoir and is not in the laboratory notebook. He devised the polarised ringer, so that a telephone could be called rather than listened to continuously, and he strung and tested lines himself. He held about sixty patents and a substantial share in the Bell company, and retired from it at twenty-seven, wealthy. He then bought a shipyard at Braintree that became the Fore River Ship and Engine Company, which built destroyers and battleships for the United States Navy and grew to employ four thousand men before he sold out in 1904. He studied geology at MIT, took up acting in his fifties, joined a Shakespeare company in England, and went on the stage in Boston. In 1915 he took the receiver in San Francisco for the first transcontinental call, with Bell in New York repeating the original sentence, and answered that it would now take him a week. He wrote an autobiography, Exploring Life, published in 1926. He stood unsuccessfully for office in Massachusetts as a socialist. He is buried at Braintree, in the town his shipyard had employed.

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