Bell Calls Watson, Coast to Coast

On January 25, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell stood in the Telephone Building at 15 Dey Street in Lower Manhattan and spoke into a line that had just been strung all the way across the country. On the other end in San Francisco was Thomas Watson, his old lab assistant, who had heard those same opening words in a Boston workshop back in 1876. President Woodrow Wilson listened in, and AT&T president Theodore Vail joined from Jekyll Island, Georgia. The transcontinental wire had actually been finished and voice tested the previous summer, but AT&T held the public unveiling for a date that lined up with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, a fair built partly to show off American engineering like this.