On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell sent the first clear telephone message--all the way to the next room. "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you" was the sentence that launched voice telecommunications.

What do we know of Watson? Thomas Augustus Watson was born in Salem, MA in 1854. At age 14, while working in an electrical shop, he met Bell. In 1877, when the Bell Telephone Company was formed, he received a share in the business and became its head of research and technical development.

After leaving Bell in 1881, Watson started a new business constructing engines and ships, receiving a government contract in 1896 for two destroyers. During the eight years that followed, until his retirement in 1904, Watson's shipyard at Quincy, Mass., built lightships, cruisers, battleships, schooners, and other vessels. Watson died in 1934.

As for Bell, he was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847. His family had long been recognized as leading authorities in elocution and speech correction. Bell and his two brothers were trained to continue the family profession.

In 1871, Bell spent several weeks in Boston, lecturing and demonstrating the system of his father's Visible Speech, published in 1866, as a means of teaching speech to the deaf. Each phonetic symbol indicated a definite position of the organs of speech such as lips, tongue, and soft palate and could be used by the deaf to imitate the sounds of speech in the usual way.

On March 7, 1876, the United States Patent Office granted Bell Patent Number 174,465 covering "The method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sounds."

Hundreds of lawsuits followed the commercial introduction of the telephone. Indeed, Bell's phone patents were the subject of the most involved patent litigation in history. The two most celebrated of the early actions were the Dowd and Drawbaugh cases wherein the fledgling Bell Telephone Company successfully challenged two subsidiaries of the giant Western Union Telegraph Company for patent infringement.

The outcome of all the litigation, which persisted throughout the life of his patents, was that Bell's claims were upheld as the first to conceive and apply the undulatory current.

A true Renaissance man, Bell's achievements did not end with the telephone. In 1898 he succeeded his father-in-law as president of the National Geographic Society.

As interest in the possibility of flight increased after the turn of the century, he experimented with giant man-carrying kites. At Beinn Bhreagh, his Nova Scotia retreat, Bell entered new subjects of investigation, such as sonar detection, solar distillation, the tetrahedron as a structural unit, and hydrofoil craft, one of which weighed more than 10,000 pounds and attained a speed record of 70 miles per hour in 1919.

He was constantly working on a variety of projects. Until a few days before his death in 1922, Bell continued to make entries in his journal. During his last dictation he was reassured with "Don't hurry," to which he replied, "I have to."

These days, when athletes and entertainers become famous, and are paid millions for dubious accomplishments, when even a US president can't seem to stay out of trouble, we should be thankful for the high achievers of the past, who are still role models for our kids.