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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.