The first practical telephone line was a copy of the best telegraph line of the day. A line wire was strung on the poles and housetops, using the ground for the return circuit. Electrical disturbances, coming from no one knows where, were picked up by this line. Frequently the disturbances were so loud in the telephone as to destroy conversation. When a second telephone line was strung alongside the first, even though perfectly insulated, another surprise awaited the telephone pioneers. Conversation carried on over one of these wires could plainly be heard on the other. Another strange thing was discovered. Iron wire was not so good a conductor for the telephone current as it was for the telegraph current. The talking distance, therefore, was limited by the imperfect carrying power of the conductor and by the confusing effect of all sorts of disturbing currents from the atmosphere and from neighboring telephone and telegraph wires.
These and a multitude of other difficulties, constituting problems of the most intricate nature, impeded the progress of the telephone art, but American engineers, by persistent study, incessant experimentation, and the expenditure of immense sums of money, have overcome these difficulties. They have created a new art, inventing, developing, and perfecting, making improvements great and small in telephone, transmitter, line, cable, switchboard, and every other piece of apparatus and plant required for the transmission of speech.
As the result of nearly forty years of this unceasing, organized effort, on the 25th of January, 1915, there was dedicated to the service of the American public a transcontinental telephone line, 3,600 miles long, joining the Atlantic and the Pacific, and carrying the human voice instantly and distinctly between San Francisco and New York and Philadelphia and Boston. On that day over this line Doctor Bell again talked to Mr. Watson, who was now 3,400 miles away. It was a day of romantic triumph for these two men and for their associates and their thousands of successors who have built up the great American telephone art.
The 11th of February following was another day of triumph for the telephone art as a product of American institutions, for, in the presence of dignitaries of the city and State here at Philadelphia and at San Francisco, the sound of the Liberty Bell, which had not been heard since it tolled for the death of Chief-Justice Marshall, was transmitted by telephone over the transcontinental line to San Francisco, where it was plainly heard by all those there assembled. Immediately after this the stirring tones of the "Star-spangled Banner" played on the bugle at San Francisco were sent like lightning back across the continent to salute the old bell in Philadelphia.
It had often been pointed out that the words of the tenth verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus, added when the bell was recast in 1753, were peculiarly applicable to the part played by the old bell in 1776. But the words were still more prophetic. The old bell had been silent for nearly eighty years, and it was thought forever, but by the use of the telephone a gentle tap, which could be heard through the air only a few feet away, was enough to transmit the tones of the historic relic all the way across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Thus, by the aid of the telephone art, the Liberty Bell was enabled literally to fulfil its destiny and "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof."
The two telephone instruments of 1876 had become many millions by 1916, and the first telephone line, a hundred feet long, had grown to one of more than three thousand miles in length. This line is but part of the American telephone system of twenty-one million miles of wire, connecting more than nine million telephone stations located everywhere throughout the United States, and giving telephone service to one hundred million people. Universal telephone service throughout the length and breadth of our land, that grand objective of Theodore N. Vail, has been attained.
While Alexander Graham Bell was the first to transmit the tones of the human voice over a wire by electricity, he was also the first to transmit the tones of the human voice by the wireless telephone, for in 1880 he spoke along a beam of light to a point a considerable distance away. While the method then used is different from that now in vogue, the medium employed for the transmission is the same—the ether, that mysterious, invisible, imponderable wave-conductor which permeates all creation.
While many great advances in the wireless art were made by Marconi and many other scientists in America and elsewhere, it remained for that distinguished group of American scientists and engineers working under my charge to be the first to transmit the tones of the human voice in the form of intelligible speech across the Atlantic Ocean. This great event and those immediately preceding it are so fresh in the public mind that I will make but a brief reference to them here.
On April 4, 1915, we were successful in transmitting speech without the use of wires from our radio station at Montauk Point on Long Island to Wilmington, Delaware.
On May 18th we talked by radio telephone from our station on Long
Island to St. Simon Island in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of
Georgia.