The Journal · The Brantford Club
Why Is Brantford Called the Telephone City?
Brantford is called the Telephone City on the inventor’s own word. Alexander Graham Bell said that “the telephone was conceived in Brantford in 1874 and born in Boston in 1875,” and the world’s first long-distance telephone call ran from Brantford to Paris, Ontario, on August 10, 1876.
The Brantford Club has kept its rooms at 98 George Street since 1898, in a house built around 1855, which makes the house older than the telephone itself. The nickname is not a compliment the city paid itself; it is a record. Bell’s own account, the first call down the Grand River, a memorial unveiled by a Governor General, and one Resolution in the Club’s Minutes that could only have been written here. This entry sets out that record, dates attached.
What is Alexander Graham Bell’s connection to Brantford?
Alexander Graham Bell’s connection to Brantford runs through his family’s homestead above the Grand River, kept today as the Bell Homestead National Historic Site. It was there, in 1874, that the idea of the telephone came to him. Bell settled the birthplace question himself, in words the Dictionary of Canadian Biography preserves: “the telephone was conceived in Brantford in 1874 and born in Boston in 1875.” Boston received the workshop and the patent; Brantford kept the thought. The city has held to that distinction ever since, and it holds the paperwork: the homestead, a national memorial, and a name, the Telephone City, that the City of Brantford still writes into its own records.
The first long-distance call: Brantford to Paris, August 10, 1876
The world’s first long-distance telephone call ran from Brantford to the village of Paris, Ontario, down the Grand River, on August 10, 1876. Bell’s telephone had been born in Boston the year before; the proving of distance came home. Paris sits in the County of Brant, the same county that still brings its dinners, board meetings, and celebrations along the river roads into Brantford. A guest arriving from Paris, Cambridge, or Ancaster today covers much the same ground the first call did, in rather more comfort, and with rather less history riding on the connection.
The Bell Memorial, and the sculptor who went on to Vimy
The Bell Memorial in Brantford was unveiled on October 24, 1917, by the Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire, with Alexander Graham Bell himself present. A city paused in the middle of the Great War to honour a living inventor. The sculptor was Walter Allward, who went on to carve the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France, so the hands that shaped Brantford’s tribute to the telephone later shaped the country’s monument to its war dead. Brantford honoured its inventor while he could stand in front of the work and see it; that is the kind of thing this city does on the record.
The city the telephone built
The Telephone City the memorial celebrated was a working town. By the early 1900s Brantford stood third in Canada by value of manufactured goods exported, behind only Toronto and Montreal. Waterous had been building engines since 1844, Cockshutt ploughs since 1877, and Massey-Harris took its name from an 1891 merger with Brantford roots. The Brantford Club opened on the last night of 1898, twenty-four years after the telephone was thought of, and it is that era’s surviving room: the plow works closed, the great names passed into the history books, and the club that watched it all still sets its tables in the same house.
Telephone rules in the Telephone City: a house Resolution of 1911
The Brantford Club’s Minutes of May 28, 1911 settled how the telephone would be treated inside the house that watched it arrive: a member was never to be interrupted by the telephone. The boy took the number on a tab, and the member returned the call when he was ready. The Club’s centennial history tells it this way, and the rule reads better with every passing year. It was not that the Club had anything against the telephone; it preferred the person in the room. In the city where the instrument was first thought of, there was a room where it waited. The house is the same house, the address the same address, and a conversation at its tables still gets to finish.
The city that taught the world to talk kept one room for listening.
Questions the record answers
Did Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone in Canada?
Bell’s own answer was both. He said the telephone was conceived in Brantford in 1874 and born in Boston in 1875, where the working instrument and the patent followed. The idea was Canadian; the workshop was American.
What was the first long-distance telephone call?
The world’s first long-distance telephone call was placed between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, on August 10, 1876. The two communities sit along the Grand River in the County of Brant.
Where is the Bell Memorial?
The Bell Memorial stands in Brantford, Ontario. It was unveiled on October 24, 1917 by the Governor General, the Duke of Devonshire, with Bell present, and its sculptor, Walter Allward, later carved the Vimy memorial in France.
Why did Bell say the telephone was conceived in Brantford?
Because the idea came to him in 1874 at his family’s homestead above the Grand River, now the Bell Homestead National Historic Site. His one-line summary, preserved by the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, settled the birthplace question in Brantford’s favour.
Sources: the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Bell, in his own words); the City of Brantford’s heritage record; the Bell Homestead National Historic Site; and the Club’s centennial history, privately printed for the hundredth year, which preserves the Resolution of May 28, 1911.
The rest of what this house has watched since 1898, the five founders, the Charter, a signature in the Visitors’ Register, is in the Club’s history.
