Long Distance Telephony: "A Continent is Bridged" 1940 American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T)

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'Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. On telephone developments, 1876-1940.' Fragment of a larger film. Produced by Audio Productions.

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-distance_calling

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

In telecommunications, a long-distance call (U.S.) or trunk call (U.K.) is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are typically charged a higher billing rate than local calls. The term is not necessarily synonymous with placing calls to another telephone area code.

Long-distance calls are classified into two categories: national or domestic calls which connect two points within the same country, and international calls which connect two points in different countries. Within the United States there is a further division into long distance calls within a single state (intrastate) and interstate calls, which are subject to different regulations (counter-intuitively, calls within states are usually more expensive than interstate calls). Not all interstate calls are long distance calls...

Before direct distance dialing (DDD), all long distance calls were established by special switchboard operators (long distance operators) even in exchanges where calls within the local exchange were dialed directly. Completion of long distance calls was time-consuming and costly as each call was handled by multiple operators in multiple cities. Recordkeeping was also more complex, as the duration of every toll call had to be manually recorded for billing purposes.

In many less-developed countries, such as Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and Egypt, calls were placed at a central office the caller went to, filled out a paper slip, sometimes paid in advance for the call, and then waited for it to be connected. In Spain these were known as locutorios, literally "a place to talk". In towns too small to support a phone office, placing long distance calls was a sideline for some businesses with telephones, such as pharmacies.

In some countries, such as Canada and the United States, long-distance rates were historically kept artificially high to subsidize unprofitable flat-rate local residential services.[citation needed] Intense competition between long-distance telephone companies narrowed these gaps significantly in most developed nations in the late 20th century.

The cost of international calls varies dramatically among countries. The receiving country has total discretion in specifying what the caller should be charged (by the originating company, who in a separate transaction transfers these funds to the destination country) for the cost of connecting the incoming international call with the destination customer anywhere in the receiving country. This has only a loose, and in some cases no, relation to the actual cost. Some less-developed countries, or their telephone company(s), use these fees as a revenue source...

In 1892, AT&T built an interconnected long-distance telephone network, which reached from New York to Chicago, the technological limit for non-amplified wiring. Users often did not use their own phone for such connections, but made an appointment to use a special long-distance telephone booth or "silence cabinet" equipped with 4-wire telephones and other advanced technology. The invention of loading coils extended the range to Denver in 1911, again reaching a technological limit. A major research venture and contest led to the development of the audion—originally invented by Lee De Forest and greatly improved by others in the years between 1907 and 1914—which provided the means for telephone signals to reach from coast to coast. Such transcontinental calling was made possible in 1914 but was not showcased until early 1915, as a promotion for the upcoming Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in the spring of the same year.

On January 25, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell ceremonially sent the first transcontinental telephone call from 15 Dey Street in New York City, which was received by his former assistant Thomas A. Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco. This process, nevertheless, involved five intermediary telephone operators and took 23 minutes to connect by manually patching in the route of the call...