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On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell successfully received a patent for the telephone and secured the rights to the discovery. Days later, he made the first ever telephone call to his partner, Thomas Watson. The telephone revolutionized communication by allowing conversations to take place between individuals at different locations.
Bell's March 10, 1876, laboratory notebook entry describing his first successful experiment with the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell had pioneered a system called visible speech, developed by his father, to teach deaf children. In 1872 Bell founded a school in Boston, Massachusetts, to train teachers of the deaf.
On October 9, 1876, Bell conducted a two-way test of his telephone over a 5-km (2-mile) distance between Boston and Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. In May 1877 the first commercial application of the telephone took place with the installation of telephones in offices of customers of the E.T. Holmes burglar alarm company.
