The short answer
Maybe, but no reliable record of it exists. What is certain is that in 1876 Brazil’s emperor, Pedro II, opened the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia beside President Ulysses S. Grant, and that Alexander Graham Bell showed him the new telephone there. The exclamation “My God, it talks!” is tradition: a good story, not a documented quotation.
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An emperor at the fair
In 1876 the United States marked a hundred years of independence with a world’s fair in Philadelphia, the Centennial Exhibition. Brazil’s emperor, Dom Pedro II, was traveling across the country that year, the first Brazilian monarch ever to set foot there. On May 10 he opened the exhibition beside President Ulysses S. Grant, and the two of them set in motion the giant Corliss steam engine that powered Machinery Hall. A sketch by Theodore R. Davis, now in the Library of Congress, shows the pair at the engine.
He was an unusual royal tourist, a monarch who studied languages before dawn and had collected photographs since his teens. New machines were exactly his kind of thing.
Bell’s new device
Also at the exhibition was Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born teacher of the deaf working in Boston. That March he had received his U.S. patent for a new device, the telephone. In Philadelphia, Bell showed it to the emperor.
Where the line comes from
The exclamation, “My God, it talks!” in English and “Meu Deus, isto fala!” in Portuguese, became the shorthand for the scene, and it has been told and retold in both languages. It is a good line, and it suits both men. The problem is the source: there is no reliable record that Pedro II said it. He may have. Later tellers may have polished it. It belongs with “I want it now!”, the answer tradition gives the 14-year-old Pedro on the day he was declared of age: famous, and only attributed.
What is certain
- March 7, 1876: Bell receives U.S. Patent No. 174,465 for the telephone.
- May 10, 1876: Pedro II and Grant open the Centennial Exhibition.
- At the exhibition: Bell shows the emperor the telephone.
- No reliable record: the words “My God, it talks!”
Why the story stuck
The scene has everything a legend needs: a white-bearded emperor from a faraway country, amazed by the machine that would change the world. It also fits the image Pedro II built for himself, the scholar-emperor, as the historian Lilia Schwarcz has shown in As barbas do imperador (“The Emperor’s Beard”). In 2026, the telephone’s 150th year, the anecdote is worth telling, with the caveat.
The rest of his life, from the boy emperor of 1831 to the exile of 1889, is in Who was Dom Pedro II?, and how it ended, in What happened to Pedro II after the Republic was proclaimed?
Sources
- U.S. Patent No. 174,465, Alexander Graham Bell, March 7, 1876
- Theodore R. Davis, “Our Centennial: President Grant and Dom Pedro starting the Corliss engine” (1876), Library of Congress
- Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (1973)
- Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, As barbas do imperador: D. Pedro II, um monarca nos trópicos (1998)