Hemispheres Magazine

THIS MONTH IN 1876, at his lab in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell made the world’s first telephone call, to assistant Thomas Watson. In the decades that followed, the U.S. has seen the rise and fall of pay phones, the laying and abandonment of landlines, and most recently the marked and perhaps terminal decline of the phone call itself. (Not to worry: We’ll have perfected telepathy in the next century anyhow.)

ILLUSTRATION BY SECTION DESIGN

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