In one of those historical moments when a revolutionary invention dovetailed perfectly with the period that ensconced it, Alexander Graham Bell's March 1876 invention of the telephone functioned as the ideal accessory to America's then-burgeoning (and then-nascent) industrial age. In the process, this invention permanently displaced the telegraph as the chief method of interpersonal communication across lengthy distances. The History Channel documentary Man, Moment, Machine: Alexander Graham Bell and the Astonishing Telephone ventures back to the 1870s for a biographical portrait of Bell and a detailed account of how the telephone came about. The program touches on such subtopics as Bell's discovery of the invention amid his ambitious attempt to cure deafness, and his rivalry with fellow inventor Elisha Gray - a competition that almost caused Bell to be written out of history forever.
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