Mr Watson, come here

The first sentence sent down a telephone was Alexander Graham Bell asking his assistant to come into the next room, and the reason is disputed.

The traditional story is that he had spilled acid on himself. His own notebook entry does not say so, and the patent that made him rich had been filed three days earlier, containing a margin note about a liquid transmitter of the kind his rival Elisha Gray had described in a caveat filed the same day. The lawsuits went on for years.