TheInventorsBook.com
Self-Guided Tours
One of the most enjoyable parts for Shawl of researching and writing The Inventors was visiting the key locations where this incredible story took place including Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Salem, Newark, New York City, Menlo Park (Edison, NJ), Phildelphia, and Washington DC.
This section of the website will continue to evolve and grow to include additional free, self-guided tours you can make of the key locations where The Inventors story took place. Explore these locations at your own pace and be a part of history!
Self-guided tours in Boston for The Inventors:
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Charles Williams’s Shop at 109 Court Street / Birthplace of the Telephone Marker
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Edison's and Bell’s Early Lodgings in Boston
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Bell’s Exeter Street Lodgings and Laboratory
Charles Williams’s Shop at 109 Court Street
Charles Williams’s shop in central Boston was the business headquarters for Thomas Edison’s Double Transmitter and his other early inventive efforts in 1868 and 1869. Williams’s attic workshop was also the site where Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson made the first telephone transmission of speech on June 2, 1875, and where over a hundred thousand Bell Telephones were produced from 1877 to 1882.
109 Court Street was the epicenter of entrepreneurial electromechanical invention in the United States when Edison arrived in Boston. Next door to Charles Williams’s business was the shop of Moses Farmer and George Miliken where they manufactured highly innovative compound wire which combined the strength of iron with the superior conductivity of copper. Farmer was the inventor of an early fire alarm system and Milliken produced telegraphic devices including the successful “Milliken repeater” which extended the range of long telegraph lines. Edison and Bell gained tremendous inspiration from these older inventors and they spent countless hours at Williams’s shop, groping their way towards momentous inventions which would change society.
Williams’s shop was just two blocks west of Faneuil Hall and a few blocks northeast of the Massachusetts State House. The handsome red brick building, including the attic space within the mansard roof, was five stories tall. The building faced Scollay Square which included a fountain and had two streetcar lines down the center. A throng of shops and businesses lined both sides of the street.
Charles Williams
Left: the building at 109 Court Street as it looked in 1868 when Edison first arrived in Boston. Bell and Watson first communicated with the telephone in 1875 between the attic space on the 5th floor and Williams's shop below.
Right: 109 Court Street faced Scollay Square which had two street car lines.
Map of Boston from the 1890s showing Court Street area and Palace Theatre building (red circle) which originally housed Charles Williams’s workshop. Bulfinch Street and Bulfinch Place, where Edison and Bell resided, are just a block away.
Edison at 109 Court Street
When Edison arrived in Boston, one of the prominent inventors and telegraph men there was Joseph B. Stearns who was President of the Franklin Telegraph Company which competed with Western Union with a line between Boston and New York City. Edison had come to Boston with the intent to become a full-time inventor and to launch his revolutionary “double transmittor” which could send two messages at once over a single wire. But very shortly after Edison’s arrival, J.B. Stearns patented and launched his “duplex telegraph” which could also send two messages at once over a single wire. But Edison soon learned that Stearns’s duplex sent the two messages in opposite directions while his double transmitter could send the two messages in the same direction which was more desirable.
Edison contracted Charles Williams to manufacture his revolutionary new device in his 109 Court Street shop. Edison advertised his new Double Transmittor in the two prominent industry newspapers, The Telegrapher and Journal of the Telegraph. Unfortunately, Edison published the ad before he had succeeded in getting his device to work over existing long distance telegraph lines and his initial test between Rochester, New York and New York City was a miserable failure.
Bell at 109 Court Street
The first telephone transmission by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson took place on June 2, 1875. Watson was stationed in the building’s attic to listen as Bell spoke from downstairs in Williams’s main shop. Watson marveled at the result. “I could unmistakably hear the tones of his voice and almost catch a word now and then.” Watson ran downstairs and excitedly shouted to Bell, “I could hear you! I could hear your voice! I could almost make out what you said!”
It was far from perfect: the transmitted words were muffled and not perfectly intelligible at the receiving end, but Bell had in fact achieved the astounding feat of transmitting speech via electricity at Court Street. Watson and Bell spent the entire month of June improving their prototype telephone and putting it through its paces.
When Gardiner Hubbard and Bell were ready to commercially launch the telephone in 1877, they hired Charles Williams to manufacture all Bell Telephones. For several years, 109 Court Street served as the Bell Telephone factory. Thomas Watson was hired to be the company’s superintendent in 1877 and he examined and tested each telephone that Williams built, and then affixed a “serial number” before the unit was shipped to the sales agent or end customer. Williams’s business was acquired by Western Electric in 1882, and the combined company would continue to manufacture all Bell Telephones, although the telephone production at Court Street was moved to another Western Electric factory in 1884.
109 Court Street After Charles Williams
After Charles Williams’s consolidation with Western Electric, the building at 109 Court Street became home to the Palace Theatre in the late 1880s. The Palace Theatre featured burlesque performances, and then after the turn of the century became a movie theatre which showed Charlie Chaplin comedies and other early movies. The building at 109 Court Street was eventually demolished in the early 1930s. Then the entire Court Street and Scollay Square area was demolished when the Boston City Hall and Government Center complex was constructed in the 1960s.
109 Court Street as it looked in the 1920s after it had been transformed into the New Palace Theatre with a prominent facade. However, the roof and attic look largely the same as it did in 1875 when Bell and Watson made the first telephone transmission there.
Birthplace of the Telephone Marker
Although the building at 109 Court Street and surrounding area was demolished in the early 1960s, a plaque now marks the location of Charles Williams’ shop from whence Edison developed and marketed his Double Transmitter and Bell developed and marketed his telephone.
A bronze plaque which reads “Birthplace of the Telephone” sits atop of a three-foot-tall pedestal on the former site of Charles Williams’s shop.
Using a GPS map, you can find the marker at:
31 Cambridge Street
Boston, MA 02114
An alternate address, for the nearby JFK Federal Building is:
15 Sudbury Street
Boston, MA 02203
There are a dozen parking garages in every direction within a few blocks of the Birthplace of the Telephone marker and street parking, although most spaces on the street in central Boston are usually full.
The Birthplace of the Telephone marker can be found on the southwest corner of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building. There are some thick hedges in between Cambridge Street and the marker which is also about 20 to 30 feet from the horizontal blue sign which marks the “John Fitzgerald Kennedy Federal Building.”
Google map showing location of “Birthplace of the Telephone” marker where Charles Williams’s workshop stood and Bell and Watson first took turns speaking to each other on their telephone. This is also where Thomas Edison first went into business as an inventor in 1868.
The bronze Birthplace of the Telephone marker reads:
“Here, on June 2, 1875, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sounds over wires. This successful experiment was completed in a fifth-floor garret at what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of worldwide telephone service.”
The face of the “Birth of the Telephone” pedestal includes a relief carving of the original “gallows telephone” that Bell and Watson first built. In the relief, the gallows telephone is depicted in a position with the mouthpiece facing down. The actual gallows telephone that Bell and Watson brought to life at 109 Court Street was set on its side to enable the caller to speak into the mouthpiece. The vibrations of the speaker’s voice set the parchment diaphragm in motion, moving a metal armature and inducing a sympathetic current in the electromagnet coil. The resulting “undulating current” would carry the changing volume and multiple frequencies of the speaker’s voice over the transmission wire. Another gallows telephone would then convert the current back into vibrations of the diaphragm which the listener held to their ear.
Close up of the relief sculpture of the Gallows Telephone on front of the “Birthplace of the Telephone” marker.
Gallows telephone positioned with mouthpiece facing down. The device resembles gallows in this position.
Bell’s gallows telephone positioned with mouthpiece opening at the side so a user can speak into it.
Author of The Inventors, Shawl Lobree, in front of the “Birthplace of the Telephone” marker.
Edison and Bell’s Early Lodgings in Boston
A very short two block walk from the Birthplace of the Telephone marker, former site of Charles Williams’s shop on Court Street, will bring you to Bulfinch Place. This is where Bell lived when he first moved to Boston in 1872 and adjacent to the former Bulfinch Street where Edison lived when he arrived in Boston in 1868. Bulfinch Street was demolished in the 1960s when the Government Center was built.
There is not much to see on Bulfinch Place, it is more of an alley than an active street. But walking it will give you the feel for what it was like for Edison or Bell to roll out of bed, pull on their clothes, and make their way in a few minutes to Charles Williams’s shop.
Google map showing the 0.1 mile / 3 minute walk from The Birthplace of the Telephone marker to Bulfinch Place where Bell lived. Edison lived a hundred feet away on Bulfinch Street, which is no longer there.
Thomas Edison lodged at 4 Bulfinch Street and Alexander Graham Bell resided at 2 Bulfinch Place which the map from the 1880s show (black circle) were perpendicular to each other, and just 500 feet from Charles Wiliams’s shop (Palace Theatre, red circle).
Bell’s Exeter Place Lodgings and Laboratory
A walk or Uber/Lyft ride of 0.7 miles will take you from the former site of Charles Williams’s shop to Alexander Graham Bell’s lodging at Exeter Street, the location of his famous “Watson Come Here!” telephone call on March 10, 1876.
The walk takes about 15 minutes and really gives one the feeling for Bell's daily routine shuttling between his lodging and Charles Williams's shop.
Map showing walk from The Birthplace of the Telephone Marker to the Hyatt Regency Boston. The two markers for Bell’s lodging and laboratory at 5 Exeter Street are directly across the street from the entrance to the Hyatt Regency at 1 Avenue de Lafayette # 1, Boston, MA 02111.
It was here that the first fully intelligible sentence was transmitted by Bell and clearly heard by Watson. Bell and Watson had built a liquid, variable resistance transmitter which they used for the first time at Bell’s makeshift lab in his Exeter Street apartment.
Bell had moved his telephone lab and prototypes from the attic above Charles Williams’s shop to his apartment at Exeter Place because he believed that other inventors were spying on his work and he had not yet obtained a patent.
Bell and Watson were so loud one night celebrating a successful test of the telephone at Bell’s apartment, that the next morning Bell’s landlady told them, “I don’t know what you fellows are doing up in that attic but if you don’t stop making so much noise nights and keeping my lodgers awake, you’ll have to quit them rooms.”
A bronze plaque embedded in the wall of the current building marks the spot where Bell’s apartment house at Exeter Place once stood. The plaque reads:
Here Alexander Graham Bell transmitted to Thomas Augustus Watson the first complete and intelligible sentence by telephone March 10, 1876.
The Bostonian Society and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company placed this tablet March 10, 1916.
There is a second, smaller plaque which reads:
IEEE Milestone in Electrical Engineering and Computing
First intelligible voice transmission over electric wire, 1876
The first transmission of intelligible speech over electrical wires took place on March 10, 1876. Inventor Alexander Graham Bell called out to his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson, “Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you.” This transmission took place in their attic laboratory located in a building near here at 5 Exeter Place.
Two bronze plaques mark the spot where Bell’s Exeter Street apartment once stood where he transmitted the first intelligible sentence on March 10, 1876 (see red arrow).
The Lafayette Public Parking Garage and the Hyatt Regency Boston Hotel at 1 Avenue de Lafayette # 1, Boston, MA 02111 are directly across the street from the wo commemorative plaques for Bell’s 5 Exeter Place lodging and laboratory. The plaques are located at the intersection of Avenue de Lafayette and Harrison Avenue Extension and are mounted in the corner of the building directly across the street (see red X on map).
Future Self-guided Tours
We will continue to add new tours to the website including ones for Menlo Park (Edison, NJ), Cambridge, Salem, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Brantford Ontario and other locations where this incredible story took place. Sign up to our Mailing List to be notified when new self-guided tours are added.