 
Father of American Telecommunications
Theodore Newton Vail, born in Carroll County in
1845, oversaw construction of America’s first transcontinental telephone
system while president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. It
became operational in 1914, and offered transcontinental service a year later. It gave
AT&T an edge in long-distance telephone service that it held for almost a
century. Vail was firmly committed to scientific research and in 1907 organized
the famed Bell Telephone Laboratories, which had won a dozen Nobel Prizes and
done research that impacted the lives of millions of people.
Transcontinental Telephone
History: July 1914
For five years AT&T had placed audions (the first
vacuum tubes) along some 3,400 miles of wires that connected the U.S. coasts.
Because voice signals gradually weakened the further along they traveled, a
boost of the signal was needed to complete a "long distance" transmission. The audions boosted the signal as it passed along the wire, and
the
first trial
took place in July, 1914, when Theodore Vail (then President of AT&T) spoke for
the first time from one coast to the other. His voice was boosted in
several spots along the way. The previous record for a long distance call was
from New York to Denver - but this call required those on each end to shout.
The twist to the invention took place a year later, when Alexander Graham Bell
from New York spoke the words he had originally said to test the basic phone
decades earlier: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." This time, however, Thomas
Watson, was now in San Francisco, and replied, "It will take me five days to get
there now!" Not many years later, in 1923, transatlantic transmission was
demonstrated.
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