science · 29 July 1914 · 110 years ago
In 1914, transcontinental telephone service began. It was celebrated with a telephone conversation between Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco and Alexander Graham Bell in New York City repeating their historic conversation from 1876. Wendover, Utah, was the site of the completion of the first transcontinental telephone line in 1914. The day's state-of-the-art in signal transmission technology, loading coils, had reached its limit, barely able to deliver a faint voice from New York to Denver until Western Electric's high-vacuum tube for amplifying sound in telephone cables was developed in 1913.
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