In 1909, AT&T agreed to demonstrate the first transcontinental phone call at the 1915 Panama-Pacific fair in SF.

There was only one problem.

No one at the company knew how it was going to be possible. The longest call at that point was from NYC to Denver.

So what happened?

Let's dive in 🚀

After Theodore Vail, the CEO of AT&T, committed to establishing a working cross-country call by the time of the exposition, Frank Jewett, a senior executive, immediately got to work. He had 5 years to make it happen (the date for the exposition was originally 1914).

The toughest part of the challenge was ensuring that the sender's voice would be amplified all the way so the receiver could actually hear the words. A major problem at that point was that most voices would fade away after a certain distance.

Jewett went to a long time friend of his, Professor Millikan, who was researching electron charges at The University of Chicago. He explained the challenge ahead and asked for the labs brightest researchers. Harold Arnold ended up moving to the northeast and joined the Bell Labs team to make the magic happen. Arnold took Lee Dee Forest's audion invention and enhanced it over several years of experimentation in order to amplify the sounds transmitted through phone lines.

The audion was the first amplifier that was a triode meaning it had a cathode, anode, and a grid in the middle. This invention was probably the most important in enabling the communications industry to truly go global. In the 6 year timeline, "more than 730,000 pounds of copper had been strung out across the network" (Computer World). By the time the world fair came around in 1915, AT&T had successfully hit their goal

Alexander Graham Bell, who was in NYC, made the first trans-continental phone call to his former assistant Watson who was in SF at the fair! That same day, the mayors of NYC & SF spoke with each other and even President Wilson hopped on the phone. All of America was officially connected. If you want a more detailed account of the story, I highly recommend reading chapter one of Gertner's Idea Factory.

What was most impressive to me about this whole story was the fact that Vail made a commitment without having any idea of how it was going to be possible.

This reminded me of Parkinson's Law. Set a time frame and the work will expand to fill its time span. If the science fair in SF hadn't been happening in 1915, there's a high chance that the Bell Labs team wouldn't have had the proper motivation and would have assumed that the task would take 10, 20, maybe even 30 years. That would have set back international phone communication by decades. But Vail said 6 years and the team completed a task they initially thought was impossible.

Additionally, I loved the fact that it was a science fair that made this happen! Incredible to see how excited people and institutions were for the advancement of technology in that era. Imagine Brian Armstrong claiming that in 6 years every US citizen will have transacted in USDC with their crypto wallet. The government and most major institutions would ridicule and dismiss him.

We need more science fairs and we need more support for the development of technology in this decade. I believe we still have visionary and ambitious tech leaders like Vail, but unfortunately those founders have to cross 10x as many obstacles to make it happen.

In 1909, AT&T agreed to demonstrate the first transcontinental phone call at the 1915 Panama-Pacific fair in SF.

There was only one problem.

No one at the company knew how it was going to be possible. The longest call at that point was from NYC to Denver.

So what happened?

Let's dive in 🚀

After Theodore Vail, the CEO of AT&T, committed to establishing a working cross-country call by the time of the exposition, Frank Jewett, a senior executive, immediately got to work. He had 5 years to make it happen (the date for the exposition was originally 1914).

The toughest part of the challenge was ensuring that the sender's voice would be amplified all the way so the receiver could actually hear the words. A major problem at that point was that most voices would fade away after a certain distance.

Jewett went to a long time friend of his, Professor Millikan, who was researching electron charges at The University of Chicago. He explained the challenge ahead and asked for the labs brightest researchers. Harold Arnold ended up moving to the northeast and joined the Bell Labs team to make the magic happen. Arnold took Lee Dee Forest's audion invention and enhanced it over several years of experimentation in order to amplify the sounds transmitted through phone lines.

The audion was the first amplifier that was a triode meaning it had a cathode, anode, and a grid in the middle. This invention was probably the most important in enabling the communications industry to truly go global. In the 6 year timeline, "more than 730,000 pounds of copper had been strung out across the network" (Computer World). By the time the world fair came around in 1915, AT&T had successfully hit their goal

Alexander Graham Bell, who was in NYC, made the first trans-continental phone call to his former assistant Watson who was in SF at the fair! That same day, the mayors of NYC & SF spoke with each other and even President Wilson hopped on the phone. All of America was officially connected. If you want a more detailed account of the story, I highly recommend reading chapter one of Gertner's Idea Factory.

What was most impressive to me about this whole story was the fact that Vail made a commitment without having any idea of how it was going to be possible.

This reminded me of Parkinson's Law. Set a time frame and the work will expand to fill its time span. If the science fair in SF hadn't been happening in 1915, there's a high chance that the Bell Labs team wouldn't have had the proper motivation and would have assumed that the task would take 10, 20, maybe even 30 years. That would have set back international phone communication by decades. But Vail said 6 years and the team completed a task they initially thought was impossible.

Additionally, I loved the fact that it was a science fair that made this happen! Incredible to see how excited people and institutions were for the advancement of technology in that era. Imagine Brian Armstrong claiming that in 6 years every US citizen will have transacted in USDC with their crypto wallet. The government and most major institutions would ridicule and dismiss him.

We need more science fairs and we need more support for the development of technology in this decade. I believe we still have visionary and ambitious tech leaders like Vail, but unfortunately those founders have to cross 10x as many obstacles to make it happen.