On March 10, 1876, a 29-year-old Scottish immigrant named Alexander Graham Bell sat in a modest laboratory at 5 Exeter Place in Boston and did something no human had ever done: He spoke over a wire, and someone in the next room heard his voice. His exact words, recorded in his lab notebook: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” His assistant, a 22-year-old mechanic named Thomas Watson, came running.
That’s all. Nine words, shouted through a crude device that used a vibrating string immersed in acidic water to convert sound into electricity. At that time, it only worked one way. The sound, Bell admitted, was “loud but confusing and muffled.” And yet, those nine words launched a revolution in the way humans connect with each other, a revolution that, 150 years later, may still be some of the most underrated good news of the modern era.
The phone took off quickly. Around 1880, there were approximately 130,000 telephones in the United States; in 1900, 1.4 million; in 1910, almost 6 million. Bell himself demonstrated the device at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil lifted the receiver and reportedly exclaimed, “My God, speak!” (The Western Union telegraph company, less impressed, refused to buy Bell’s patent for $100,000, a business decision on par with leaving the Beatles.)
In the United States, the telephone quickly became indispensable. During the 1918 flu pandemic, New York City’s telephone traffic increased to 3.2 million calls per day as quarantined residents relied on the telephone for shopping, medical advice, and human contact. In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of students received instruction partially by phone during school closures, possibly the first remote learning. A New York Times editorial marveled: “Less than forty years ago the telephone was a fun toy… Now no one can understand how we lived without it.”
In 1946, half of American homes had telephones. In 1970, more than 90 percent did. And as Andrew Heisel pointed out in a great article this week in the New York Times, for all the disruptions it brought (scammers, pranksters, concerns about transmitting disease through microphones), the telephone caused very little of the technological panic seen with similarly transformative inventions like the automobile. He was simply too useful to be afraid of.
A leap into the future
But despite all that, the most important telephone story of the last 150 years has nothing to do with America at all. It’s about what happened when the telephone finally went mobile and reached billions of people who had been completely left out of the wired revolution.
In 2000, all of sub-Saharan Africa had fewer phone lines than Manhattan. In the entire region there were approximately 1.6 landline telephone connections per 100 inhabitants. South Asia was hardly better. For much of the developing world at the dawn of the 21st century, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention, already more than a century old, was not yet part of their reality.
Its explosive growth is one of the most extraordinary in the history of technology adoption. Sub-Saharan Africa went from about 2 mobile subscriptions per 100 people in 2000 to 89 in 2023. South Asia went from less than 1 to 84. Globally, there are now more than 9 billion mobile subscriptions – more connections than there are humans on the planet. The developing world skipped the telephone era and went straight to mobile telephony.
A phone call to get out of poverty
These weren’t just phones. They were economic lifesavers.
The most famous example is M-Pesa, a mobile money system launched by Safaricom in Kenya in 2007. M-Pesa allows users to send money, pay bills and save, all through a basic mobile phone, without the need for a bank account.
A landmark 2016 study published in Science Economists Tavneet Suri and William Jack found that M-Pesa had been adopted by at least one person in 96 percent of Kenyan households. Most notably, access to M-Pesa lifted some 194,000 households out of extreme poverty (about 2 percent of the country). The effects were strongest in female-headed households: some 185,000 women moved from subsistence farming to commercial occupations. Today, mobile money platforms handle $1.68 trillion in annual transactions globally, with more than 2 billion registered accounts.
Or consider Robert Jensen’s now classic study of fishermen in the Indian state of Kerala. Before mobile phones arrived in the late 1990s, fishermen would land their catch on the nearest beach without having any idea what prices were like elsewhere. Some markets would have a glut; others, scarcity. Waste reached 8 percent.
But when mobile coverage was implemented, fishermen were able to call ahead to check prices and choose the best market. Waste fell to almost zero. Its profits rose 8 percent. Consumer prices fell 4 percent. The phones paid for themselves in two months.
The overall numbers are staggering. World Bank research has estimated that moving from a region without mobile coverage to full coverage boosts GDP growth by between 1.8 and 2.3 percentage points. The GSMA, the global mobile industry body, puts it this way: In 2025, mobile technologies and services will generate $7.6 trillion for the global economy, equivalent to 6.4 percent of global GDP.
Mobile health programs have improved medication adherence of HIV patients in Africa. SMS reminders have increased vaccination rates and prenatal care visits. In the developing world, the phone in your pocket can be a bank, a clinic, a classroom and a market, sometimes all before lunch.
I can hear the objection: What about all the bad things? What about teen mental health, doomscrolling, and the algorithmic attention trap? What about tiktok!
Jonathan Haidt The anxious generation made a compelling argument that the shift toward a “phone-based childhood” between 2010 and 2015, driven by smartphones and social media, has contributed to rising rates of depression and anxiety among adolescents. The data on adolescent mental health is truly alarming: Federal survey data shows that 20 percent of American youth ages 12 to 17 experienced a major depressive episode. And as Heisel wrote, the smartphone (with the Internet inside and algorithms designed for interaction) is qualitatively different from the old landline, whose cord literally kept you tied down.
The science on this is more controversial than the headlines suggest, as my Vox colleague Eric Levitz wrote in 2024, but I don’t think it takes peer-reviewed studies to realize that smartphones have made many aspects of life worse, especially for young people.
Still, what gets lost in the conversation about smartphone anxiety: the people who benefit most from mobile telephony – and those who could benefit – are precisely the ones who appear least in Western coverage of the topic.
Some 885 million women in low- and middle-income countries still lack access to mobile Internet. Closing that gap alone would add roughly $1.3 trillion to GDP through 2030. For a Kenyan market vendor or an Indian fisherman, a mobile phone is not a source of anxiety. It is the most empowering technology they have ever had.
Nine words, 150 years later
Alexander Graham Bell couldn’t have imagined any of this. He said he wanted the standard telephone greeting to be “Ahoy!” (Thomas Edison wisely overrode it with a “Hello.”) I couldn’t have imagined M-Pesa, or a fisherman checking sardine prices from a boat off the coast of Kerala, or a pregnant woman in rural Ghana receiving prenatal reminders by text message. I definitely couldn’t have imagined TikTok.
But what Bell would have realized from the beginning is that his invention could destroy distance. And in just a century and a half, his invention and its successors have connected billions, lifted millions out of poverty, saved lives, and created economic opportunity on a scale Bell could never have dreamed of when he shouted those nine words at Thomas Watson.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Register here!