First long_distance telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell 1847_1922, centre performing the first long_distance telephone call in 1876. The conversation took place between Boston, Massachusetts, USA, and the town of Salem, some 22 kilometres away. Bell was a speech therapist who worked with the deaf. His experiments on the transmission of sound led to his designs for the multiple telegraph and the telephone. Bell won a lengthy legal battle with Elisha Gray, who filed a similar telephone patent on the same day. After this he became a rich man, and founded the company that became AT and T. Illustration taken from La Telegraphie Historique 1888, by Alexis Belloc.