Alexander Graham Bell’s phone patent is 150 years old on Saturday
5 Mar 2026
Author
Martin Croft
PR & Marketing Manager
Image credits: By Dig deeper - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, By E. J. Holmes - National Portrait Gallery, By Alexander Graham Bell
Saturday, March 7th, 2026, is the 150th anniversary of the granting by the US Patent Office of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for an ‘Improvement in Telegraphy’ – what would become better known as the telephone.
Although it has been called by some the most valuable patent in history, Bell himself wasn’t that interested in the telephone and actually tried to sell it to Western Union (the giant US telegraph company) for $100,000 (equivalent to just over $3m today). Western Union turned him down, as they thought it was just a toy. Two years later, Western Union’s President admitted to colleagues that he would happily pay $25m (in 1876 dollars – roughly $760m today) for Bell’s patent, but Bell and his partners no longer wanted to sell.
As so often happens with major technological innovations, there was considerable argument about whether Bell had in fact been the first person to invent the telephone; but successive legal challenges to his patent were defeated.
One of Bell’s telephone-related innovations that did not survive, however, was his preferred greeting on answering the phone – he thought people should say ‘Ahoy’! It was rival inventor Edison who argued for ‘Hello!’ Edison won that round. Bell also refused to have a phone installed in his study at home.
The USPTO is celebrating the upcoming anniversary today (March 5th, 2026) with a celebratory half day seminar/webinar, Alexander Graham Bell's Telephone Patent: 150 years, a world of connection. The online element runs from 1.30pm to 4.00pm Eastern Time (6.30pm to 9.00pm GMT). Among the speakers will be Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and one of the key figures in the development of the Internet over the past 50 years.
If you want to find out more about the story of Bell, his patent, and the fight over who actually invented it first, law firm Marks & Clerk published an excellent article on it a year ago. Or just use your mobile phone to search the internet…
