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| Image courtesy time.com |
On this day, in 1915, words spoken in Arlington, Virginia were almost instantly heard in Paris, France for the first time. In 1915, telephone calls were nothing new. Alexander Graham Bell had first asked his assistant to come to his office in 1876 and the first wireless call had traveled over 650 feet between buildings at Bell's Laboratory complex just four years later.The first telephone exchange was established in Hartford, Connecticut in 1877 and calls were zinging back and forth between Boston and New York by 1883. The first pay phone was established in 1889. But even though the technology of telephones was making leaps and bounds throughout the turn of the twentieth century, it was still pretty limited in scope. You could only call someone who was part of the network and the network was still slowly expanding out of the Northeast part of the United States. Your aunt down in Alabama or your cousin in California or your business partner in France were still unavailable by phone. Not that technicians at the American Telegraph and Telephone Company weren't hard at work trying to fix that.
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| Image courtesy mcmahanphoto.com |
A good deal of the success of early radio (and therefore early telephone) innovations can be given to the ego of Alexandre Gustav Eiffel. When he designed and built his famous tower for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, he got pretty attached to it. He knew that it would have to remain useful if it was going to be allowed to stick around so, in 1898, he added an antenna to the top of it. Paris agreed that he'd made a good addition and, rather than tear it down for scrap metal, allowed the Eiffel Tower to remain. Not only was that an aesthetically good decision in the long run, it also provided a boost to tinkerers in radio waves around the world. Nothing like having the tallest man made structure to work with.
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| Image courtesy fineartamerica.com |
AT&T technicians had developed equipment powerful enough to jump the Atlantic by 1913 when they made the first radio transmission between their labs in Virginia and the Eiffel Tower. That was simply a series of signals testing the difference in longitude of the two end points. Two more years would pass before technology was able to handle the human voice. On the morning of October 21, 1915, an AT&T engineer by the name of B.B. Webb said "hello" into a radio mouthpiece in Arlington and had it beamed into the atmosphere. Shortly thereafter, two other technicians at the Eiffel Tower, A.M. Curtis and H.E. Shreeve, heard not only Webb's greeting but several other phrases ending with "Goodbye, Shreeve." A new era in communication had begun. Sort of.
AT&T put out a press release touting the decidedly one way conversation. It was only one sided in that the guys in Paris couldn't respond though. The same transmission had been detected in the opposite direction in Honolulu, Hawaii. The company did acknowledge, however, that atmospheric conditions had to be pretty perfect and that existing equipment needed to be improved quite a bit, but it was a good start. And indeed it would take eleven more years before the first two way conversation spanning an ocean would occur between New York and London. Can you guess what the topic of that 1926 chat was about? The weather, of course.
Also on this day, in Disney history:
Mary Blair
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