1915 Alexander Graham Bell began transcontinental phone service with a call to Dr. Watson in San Francisco.
This connected the world in a whole new way. No longer would people have to wait long intervals for news to reach across the world. The telegraph had previously connected cities through its intricate network of telegraph lines. Until 1877, all rapid long-distance communication depended upon the telegraph. That year, the rival technology developed that would again change the face of communication -- the telephone. By 1879, patent litigation between Western Union and the infant telephone system was ended in an agreement that largely separated the two services.
For five years AT&T had wanted to link the phone lines from one side of the country to the other. They finally found the device that could help them do it: Lee De Forest's "audions," the first vacuum tubes. They placed them along the 3,400 miles of wires connecting one coast to the other. As a voice signal traveled along the wires it naturally weakened. Every time it hit an audion, the signal was boosted. The first trial took place in July of 1914, when the president of the company, Theodore Vail, spoke from one coast to the other -- his voice boosted in Pittsburgh, Omaha, and Salt Lake City along the way.
But the big celebration didn't occur until January 25, 1915, at a meeting in San Francisco. Sitting in New York, Alexander Graham Bell said into the phone what he had once said decades before: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." But this time Watson, sitting in San Francisco, replied, "It will take me five days to get there now!"
With the world connected through phones, Internet, television and much more, we take our technology for granted. People today feel lost without the modern conveniences they have become accustomed to depend on. Imagine a world where fire light was the only way we could see in the dark. In this world, when you read about a newsworthy event it is already "old news". Communities welcomed travelers since they were the best way to get news from other places. Newspapers were not always reliable. Of course, the gossip network was only reliable as the person who contributed to it. Now we have blogs (like this one) where a whole new ' network of information is spread. Like the primitive "word of mouth" network of days gone by, blogs are only as reliable as the person who contributes to it. Of course, today, the reader is able to follow up with their own research and verification. Then again, if one person spreads something as truth and two people repeat it, then two more, and so on, people will start to believe it. It doesn't matter if it was by gossip or Internet. Sometimes they are the same thing.
