June 1 — June 30, 2025
History Matters
Showing our children that their past is prelude to their future, with book recommendations
The First Sound Transmission by Alexander Graham Bell, June 2, 1875
In the summer of 1874, Alexander Graham Bell, a twenty-seven-year-old professor of vocal physiology at the University of Boston, was working with deaf children, when he conceived the idea of “an instrument by which the human voice could be telegraphed.” As he explained to his Canadian parents, “The vibrations of a permanent magnet will induce a vibrating current of electricity in the coils of an electromagnet.” Working by day, and experimenting in the evening at some Boston workshops, Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, constructed a mechanism using steel reeds—like tuning forks—that were interconnected with wires to electromagnets. The vibrations of one steel reed passed through the electromagnet to another reed, via intermittent currents created by batteries.
On June 2nd of the following year, the device was not functioning properly, so Bell instructed Watson—from the next room–to test the wires on one of the reeds. He was stunned when he heard the first sound. Adjustments followed, and the following month, Watson rushed into his room exclaiming ‘Why, Mr. Bell, I heard your voice very distinctly and could almost understand what you said.’ Realizing the importance of his invention, Bell filed–and received–a patent for the improved device. On March 10th, 1876, Bell spoke into the first telephone the famous words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
For more information about Alexander Graham Bell and the invention of the telephone, the Grateful American Book Prize recommends Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (1973), by Robert V. Bruce.
Bell at the opening of the long-distance line from New York to Chicago in 1892
The Hoboken Docks Fire of 1900
On June 30. 1900, the docks of Hoboken New Jersey—across the Hudson River in New York City—were swarmed with people, moored ships, and a myriad of activity. Suddenly a small fire started, possibly by a discarded cigar, in the cotton bales stacked near the piers of the Norddeutscher Lloyd (North German Lloyd) shipping company, had vessels nearby filled with crews, workers, families, and a group of women visiting from a Christian organization. The fire spread to the piled-up containers of oil, and turpentine, reached the wooden piers almost instantly, and swept through the area.
The scenes that followed were horrific. While several ships were engulfed in flames, hundreds of people were trapped below decks, unable to escape through the tiny portholes they had opened to scream for help. Some managed to make it on the decks and jump overboard; others who were too exhausted or injured to swim, and they drowned—or were burned alive.
Eventually, safety precautions were put in place to accommodate everything—from the size of ships’ portholes and pier construction, to how stores were stockpiled, but—in this instance—approximately 326 people were killed in the fire (probably an underestimate), and many were buried in a mass grave in the Flower Hill Cemetery in North Bergen, New Jersey.
For more information about Hoboken during the Age of Immigration, the Grateful American Book Prize recommends Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson’s, Immigrants in Hoboken: One-Way Ticket, 1845-1985 (2011).
NDL’s piers in 1909, after reconstruction
Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.
History Matters is a feature courtesy of the Grateful American Book Prize, an annual award for high quality, 7th to 9th grade-level books dealing with important events and personalities in American history.
