In March 1876 Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born teacher of the deaf in Boston, received a patent for the telephone, and a few days later spoke to his assistant through it: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”
Encyclopedia › Meanwhile in the world
In the Bible · c. AD 95 (by tradition) · Patmos, in the Aegean Sea
John on Patmos
On the small island of Patmos, off the coast of Asia Minor, John sees the visions written in the book of Revelation.
John 1:1–5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.At the same time in the world
Until then Russians heard the Bible in Church Slavonic, the language of worship, which many readers found hard to follow. A first Russian translation, by the Russian Bible Society, was stopped in 1826. By the 1870s railways, steamships and telegraph cables were joining the continents. Here is the world of the 1870s.
The AmericasThe telephoneAD 1876
Greece and RomeGold at MycenaeAD 1876
Heinrich Schliemann dug inside the walls of Mycenae and found royal shaft graves full of gold. The finest gold mask became known as “the Mask of Agamemnon”, though it is some three centuries older than any date given for a Trojan War.
EgyptThe Suez CanalAD 1869
The Suez Canal opened in November 1869, joining the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Ships from Europe to India no longer had to sail around Africa.
ChinaChina’s first railwayAD 1876
A short railway from Shanghai to Wusong, built by British merchants, opened in 1876. The Chinese government bought it the next year and had it taken up; railways in China began in earnest only in the 1880s.
Eastern Europe and the steppeMendeleev’s tableAD 1869
In St Petersburg the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the known elements by weight and properties in a periodic table, leaving gaps for elements not yet found. Three of them — gallium, scandium and germanium — were discovered within the next 17 years.
ElsewhereAround the world in eighty daysAD 1872
The French writer Jules Verne published Around the World in Eighty Days, the story of a bet that railways and steamships could carry a traveler around the globe in less than three months.
