On this past weekend’s episode of Minding Your Business on News 12+, AT&T Archives Manager Melissa Knoll sat down with Bob Considine to mark the 150th anniversary of the first telephone call made by Alexander Graham Bell that sparked over a century of innovation and led to the founding of AT&T.
Knoll spoke about AT&T’s driving ambition to stretch their early network coast to coast and the inventions needed to accomplish the feat.
“We realized that the current technology that existed at the time was not going to be able to do it so we needed to invent it ourselves and so we do,” Knoll said. “We come up with the loading coil and the high vacuum tube amplifier, which together help make sure that the signal stays strong enough and clear enough for us to be able to go coast to coast.
“And we opened that transcontinental line in 1915, which is really remarkable when you consider that in 1876 we could only go 30 feet. In 1915 we were able to go over a span of 3,000 miles and then in today’s standard of our fiber network, from what I’ve heard, we have enough to cover the globe 50 times over.”
NJBIA’s “Minding Your Business” is a weekly TV show and the winner of seven Telly Awards over the past three years, including a gold 2024 Telly in the Interview & Talk Show category. It airs on News 12+ at 9:30 a.m. every Saturday and Sunday, as well as 7:30 p.m. on Saturday.
