A Call That Made History, 100 Years Ago Today

alphadogg writes These days, making a call across the U.S. is so easy that people often don't even know they're talking coast to coast. But 100 years ago Sunday, it took a hackathon, a new technology and an international exposition to make it happen. The first commercial transcontinental phone line opened on Jan. 25, 1915, with a call from New York to the site of San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Alexander Graham Bell made the call to his assistant, Thomas Watson. Just 39 years earlier, Bell had talked to Watson on the first ever phone call, in Boston, just after Bell had patented the telephone.

Comments

Done without negative feedback

[wiredlogic]

Notably, this was accomplished before the negative feedback amplifier was invented in 1927.

First ever phone call? Doubt it

[spiritplumber]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

However, the Canadians got really mad about it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The Bell Telephone: Patent Nonsense?

[lippydude]

"On May 22, 1886 .. Zenas F. Wilber, a former Washington patent examiner, swore in an affidavit that he'd been bribed by an attorney for Alexander Graham Bell to award Bell the patent for the telephone over a rival inventor, Elisha Gray, who'd filed a patent document on the same day as Bell in 1876." ref

Bell's telephone sketch

Elisha Gray's sketch of a telephone

Notable achievement, but hardly revolutionary

[alleycat0]

With all due respect to the accomplishment, recall that transcontinental telegraphs had been operating for over half a century prior to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Telegraph), and the transcontinental telephone was strictly a wealthy person's luxury at the time, with a 3-minute call costing USD $20.70 at the time (worth something on the order of USD $400 in today's currency)...