America’s Centennial and the 1876 Election Crisis | The American Story | Ep 20

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Glenn Beck** (0:27)
It's March 10th, 1876 Inside a cramped laboratory in Boston, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell hunches over a tangle of wires and a liquid transmitter. For months, he and his assistant Thomas Watson had chased an impossible dream. Sending the human voice across wires as clear, continuous sound. Failures had piled up. Rival inventors were racing to solve the same problem. But today is the breakthrough day.
Alexander Graham Bell's life had been shaped by sound, silence and relentless curiosity. He was born in Scotland. He grows up in a family of speech experts. His father creates a groundbreaking system to help deaf people communicate. Young Alexander absorbs every lesson about how voices work and how they fail. His mother is deaf, which deepens his obsession with acoustics. Personal tragedy strikes when both of his brothers die of tuberculosis. So, in 1870, the family moves to Canada in search of a healthier climate.
A year later, Bell moves to the United States and settles in Boston, teaching at a school for deaf children and training other instructors in speech methods. In Boston, Bell also experiments with harmonic telegraph, trying to send multiple messages at once over a single wire using different sound frequencies. He's hired a skilled mechanic named Thomas Watson, and together they push beyond the telegraph entirely, imagining a device that actually would carry a voice. In February 1876, Bell files his patent application for an improvement in telegraphy at the US Patent Office, just before rival Elisha Gray submits a similar idea. Three weeks later, on March 7th, Bell is granted a US patent that becomes one of the most valuable patents ever issued. It is the legal foundation for the telephone empire that would follow.
Now, March 10th, Bell and Watson test their latest version in separate rooms connected by wire. Bell leans towards the transmitter and says, Mr. Watson, come here.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:38)
I want to see you.

**Glenn Beck** (2:40)
Watson hears every syllable. He rushes in stunned. Bell has just completed the first successful telephone call.
He records the moment in his laboratory notebook with quiet triumph.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:52)
To my delight, he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.

**Glenn Beck** (2:59)
Later that year, still glowing from the breakthrough, Bell writes to his father with a prophetic certainty.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:05)
The day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas, and friends will converse with each other without leaving home.

**Glenn Beck** (3:15)
It feels almost inevitable that this world-changing moment arrives in 1876 This is America's centennial year.
The nation marks 100 years since the Declaration of Independence, a century already packed with technological change, including the Mechanical Reaper, steam engine, railroad, and telegraph. The centennial year also overflows with many of the world's most famous legends of the American Wild West. And it brings the most contentious, trying presidential election in the country's 100-year history, one that would threaten the Republic itself.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:54)
This is the American Story, The Beginnings, adapted from the book of the same title by David Barton and Tim Barton. Episode 20, The 1876 Election Crisis.

**Glenn Beck** (4:16)
In May 1876, America threw itself a major birthday party and invited the world. Philadelphia became the nation's showroom, the Centennial Exposition, the first World's Fair ever held in the US. It spread across 285 acres at Fairmount Park. 200 buildings were constructed for the event, and the centerpiece was the main hall, which covered 35 acres, stretching one-third of a mile in length, the largest building ever constructed at the time.
On opening day, more than 186,000 people poured in through the gates. Emission was 50 cents, that's about $15 today. President Grant presided over the opening ceremony, standing at the center of an America that was still healing from the Civil War, and stepping confidently into the future. Inside the fairgrounds, visitors had their senses overwhelmed with new sights and sounds. They saw the first public demonstration of typewriters, sewing machines, and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone carrying a human voice across a room. They tasted root beer and popcorn for the first time. They gawked at displays of scientific and industrial power that seemed to announce the Republic was alive, well and accelerating toward the next century. The engrossed parchment of the original Declaration of Independence was transported from Washington, DC and displayed under glass. Also displayed were the massive hand and torch of the future Statue of Liberty well before the full statue rose in the New York Harbor. And in anticipation of the Centennial, a new Liberty Bell was cast from four melted-down Revolutionary and Civil War cannons. That Centennial Bell replaced the original Liberty Bell in the Tower of Independence Hall. It remains there today. When the fair closed its gates six months later, ten million people had visited.