On This Day

Today in History, March 10th

On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call to Thomas Watson. Plus the Mexican War treaty and Tibet's uprising.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published March 10, 2026 · Last updated November 10, 2026

March 10 is best known for 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell got his new telephone to carry a spoken sentence to his assistant, Thomas Watson. The date also saw the U.S. Senate approve the treaty ending the Mexican-American War in 1848 and the start of the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

The big story: “Mr. Watson, Come Here” (1876)

Alexander Graham Bell was a teacher of the deaf with a side obsession: sending the human voice over a wire. He filed his patent application on February 14, 1876, just hours before rival inventor Elisha Gray filed a notice of his own, and the patent office granted Bell patent No. 174,465 on March 7. Three days later, in his rooms in Boston, Bell tried the device again. Speaking into the transmitter, he called to Thomas Watson, the skilled mechanic who had spent many late nights building his gear, in another room: “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” Watson heard him and came. It was a modest message for a big moment, the first clearly understood sentence sent by telephone. Within a few years telephone lines were spreading across cities, and Bell’s patent became one of the most valuable, and most fought over, in American history.

More events on March 10

Year	What happened
1848	The U.S. Senate approved the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, with amendments. Mexico gave up more than 525,000 square miles, including present-day California, for $15 million.
1864	The Union’s Red River Campaign got under way in Louisiana. The push toward Texas failed and ended major Union operations west of the Mississippi.
1906	An explosion at the Courrières coal mine in northern France killed 1,060 miners, one of the worst mining disasters on record.
1922	British authorities arrested Mohandas Gandhi in Bombay on a sedition charge. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
1959	Crowds surrounded the Dalai Lama’s summer palace in Lhasa, fearing he would be seized, and the Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule began. Within days he left for exile in India.
1977	Cornell astronomers flying aboard NASA’s Kuiper Airborne Observatory discovered the rings of Uranus while watching the planet pass in front of a star.
1997	Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered on the WB network.
2000	The Nasdaq index hit its dot-com era peak above 5,000. By October 2002 it had lost about 77 percent of its value.
2006	NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter went into orbit around Mars, seven months after launch.
2017	South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, removing her from office.

Born on March 10

1503: Ferdinand I, Holy Roman emperor who signed the Peace of Augsburg in 1555.
1903: Bix Beiderbecke, jazz cornetist from Davenport, Iowa.
1903: Clare Boothe Luce, playwright, congresswoman and diplomat.
1947: Kim Campbell, the first woman to serve as prime minister of Canada.