| That’s not strictly true. That was the first coast-to-coast call on the long-lines system. The first cross country call was made by Alexander Graham Bell to his old assistant Thomas Watson in January 1915. From then until November 1951, this was an operator-assisted process (and much longer than that for much of the country). You would call the operator, tell them who you wanted to talk to, the city they’re in, and their phone number (if you knew it). If the call is close enough, you’d stay on the line while they connected you. Otherwise, you would be instructed to hang up and wait for an operator to call you back and let you know they’d gotten your party on the line (or not). This could take 5 minutes, or a few hours, depending on the distance, complexity of the route, availability of trunks, etc. By the 1920s you could even call London from the US, but the radio link only had capacity for like 12 calls and it worked better in the evening. There was also a network of ship-to-shore radiotelephone links that operated on HF and VHF. It would have been entirely possible, but extraordinarily expensive to have a multi-party conference call between someone in London, someone on a ship in the Pacific, a third person riding a train between New York and Washington DC, and a fourth on a mobile phone in a car in Chicago at least as early as 1947.[1] I’d ballpark the cost of that call at around $100/min in 1947 dollars. The Wikipedia article on long distance has an excerpt from Dragnet of a call from LA to a rural party line in Utah. It’s worth a listen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-distance_calling [1] Transatlantic telephone service began in 1927 between NYC and London, VHF mobile service began in 1946 in St. Louis and then Chicago, telephone service on trains began in 1947 (at least as provided by the Bell system, independents and train companies may have gotten there first), ship-to-shore via AT&T High Seas Service was available by the mid 1930s. |
Which turns out to be $1337 in 2022 dollars which seems appropriate.