Today marks a hundred years since the first transcontinental telephone call

January 25 marks the 100th anniversary of a landmark event in the world of communications. In 1915, the first transcontinental telephone call was made. Alexander Graham Bell , one of the founders of telephony and the founder of Bell Labs, spoke with his assistant Thomas Watson. At the same time, Bell was in New York, and Watson was in San Francisco. The event was specially prepared for the Panamanian Pacific International Exhibition .

39 years earlier, Bell had made the first telephone conversation in the world with the same Watson, who was just in another room. Now, to talk across the continent, serious infrastructure was required. Now to call or send a message to another place in the world is a usual and quick affair. Old-timers remember the fuss with long-distance and international calls a few decades ago, when they had to “order calls”. But in 1915 it was almost a hackathon.


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In 1915, the call took 10 minutes, since all station operators had to manually make the necessary inclusions along the way. The connection was on copper wires with a length of 11,000 kilometers, which was, in fact, a single circuit that could only support one call at a time. The conversation lasted for 3.5 hours and made an indelible impression on visitors to the exhibition, who heard the voice of a man at the other end of the continent.

After the conversation, the visitors of the exhibition could try the novelty themselves for several days - pick up the phone and hear the Atlantic Ocean, sounds from another coast, and various musical numbers. After this event, a commercial telephone service was officially launched. The three-minute call cost $ 20.7, which is about $ 485 at current prices.