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“Long Distance is beautifully shot and blends music and narration in an elegant way. It’s a great portrait of what AT&T’s network looked like and how it operated just before World War II…” – Rick Prelinger
NEW VERSION with improved video & sound:
Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization.
…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…
On 25 January 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. The New York Times reported:
“On October 9, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked by telephone to each other over a two-mile (3 km) wire stretched between Cambridge and Boston. It was the first wire conversation ever held. Yesterday afternoon the same two men talked by telephone to each other over a 3,400-mile (5,500 km) wire between New York and San Francisco. Dr. Bell, the veteran inventor of the telephone, was in New York, and Mr. Watson, his former associate, was on the other side of the continent. They heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago.”
At that distant time, long-distance calling was performed by manual patching in the route of the call by a series of long-distance operators; connecting a coast-to-coast call this way thus took up to 23 minutes.
The first self-dialed customer-connected long-distance telephone call in North America was made much later on November 11, 1951 when Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey called Mayor Frank Osborne of Alameda, California, using AT&T’s Direct Distance Dialing feature. This was the first call dialed with an area code, using what is now called 10-digit dialing, and was connected automatically within 18 seconds. In addition to area codes, this development also came with the introduction of a national seven-digit standard for local number length. However, self-dialed customer connected calls had been common in Europe decades earlier…
Until the early 1980s a called party could instantly recognize an incoming long-distance call by its hiss or low level, due to the inherent signal loss and introduction of noise common with all-analog long-distance telecommunication circuits of the era.[citation needed] The introduction of digital technologies such pulse-code modulation and T-carrier circuits by AT&T starting in 1961 (and adopted by their long-distance networks on a larger scale starting in the early-to-mid 1970s) let long-distance calls match the high voice quality of local calls.
With the breakup of the Bell system in 1984, the U.S. Government imposed rules to allow the Baby Bells and other long-distance providers to compete via “Equal Access.” Equal access allows telephone subscribers to choose an authorized telephone company or companies to handle their local toll and long-distance toll (including international) calls from their traditional, wireline telephones. Where equal access is available, subscribers may dial the prefix “1010” and a 3-digit code specific to the long-distance Carrier in order to have that carrier handle the InterLATA call. These Equal Access codes are currently known: 1010288 – AT&T, 1010333 – Sprint, 1010550 – CenturyLink. By dialing a special number (in the U.S.), 1-700-555-4141, a subscriber can hear a recorded message that announces the InterLATA carrier. By dialing the Equal Access code and then this ‘700’ number, the recorded message is played for the selected carrier…
