Mr. Watson... Come Here... I Want to See You!

In the 1870s, two talented and competitive inventors, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, dreamed of creating a device that could transmit speech electrically. Both men toiled in their laboratories, racing to perfect telephone designs. It truly was a race to the wire: Gray and Bell hurried their exciting inventions to the patent office within hours of each other on the same day! Ultimately, Bell received the first telephone patent on March 7, 1876, and the rest is communications history. Our first National Telephone Day poem, written by twentieth-century Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, celebrates America's promise of equality for all people:

We're All in the Telephone Book

We’re all in the telephone book,

Folks from everywhere on earth–

Anderson to Zabowski,

It’s a record of America’s worth.

We’re all in the telephone book.

There’s no priority–

A millionaire like Rockefeller

Is likely to be behind me.

For generations men have dreamed

Of nations united as one.

Just look in your telephone book

To see where that dream’s begun.

When Washington crossed the Delaware

And the pillars of tyranny shook,

He started the list of democracy

That’s America’s telephone book.

-- Langston Hughes

Mr. Watson... come here... I want to see you! When Alexander Graham Bell tested his telephone and successfully called his assistant in an adjoining room, he could only imagine how the invention would change the way the world communicates. It's also safe to say that he probably never imagined Eletelephony! Our next poem uses silly word play and ridiculous rhyme to create some tongue twisty Telephone Day fun:

Once there was an elephant,

Who tried to use the telephant-

No! No! I mean an elephone

Who tried to use the telephone-

(Dear me! I am not certain quite

That even now I've got it right.)

Howe'er it was, he got his trunk

Entangled in the telephunk;

The more he tried to get it free,

The louder buzzed the telephee-

(I fear I'd better drop the song

Of elephop and telephong!

--Laura Elizabeth Richards

Let's celebrate National Telephone Day by building and testing a Tin Can Telephone. And hold the phone, Poetry Paraders! That's an idiom meaning wait a minute, don't rush into something. There's still time to dial up more National Telephone Day poems in the LMC... press 811 on your Dewey Decimal keypad.