Year: Day to Day Men: January 7
Sending a Message
The seventh of January in 1927 marks the placement of the first official transatlantic telephone call. The call, transmitted by radio waves, was held between Walter S. Gifford, the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), and Sir Evelyn P. Murray, the head of the British General Post Office.
The telephone call between Walter S. Gifford in New York City and Sir Evelyn P. Murray in London was a shared communication of prepared statements on the significance of the new technology with regards to facilitating business and fostering better understanding. The line was then opened for personal and business-related calls. By the day’s end, a news dispatch had been sent from Europe to America and over six million dollars worth of business had been transacted. The Gifford-Murray call was recorded for its historical significance and resides in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.
Before the telephone, long distance communication was conducted through letters, early models of fax machines, and telegraphs. Over a period of several years, the telephone was developed by inventors and businessmen; however, the definitive inventor of the telephone is still a matter of controversy. In 1840, American electrical experimenter and professor Charles Grafton Page discovered a way to use electricity passing through a wire to make sound. During the 1850s, Italian inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci developed a voice-communication apparatus that connected his Staten Island, New York, laboratory to his second-floor bedroom.
In 1871, Antonio Meucci submitted a patent caveat, the required legal document, for his telephonic device to the United States Patent Office; however, there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of voice sound in his granted patent request. In 1876, Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission by vocal sound through undulatory electric current. Elisha Gray, an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, also played an important part in the development of the telephone with his creation of the liquid transmitter, an important component of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent.
On the morning 14th of February in 1876, Elisha Gray’s lawyer submitted to the U.S. Patent Office a signed and notarized patent caveat that described a telephone using a liquid transmitter. In the same morning, a lawyer for Alexander Graham Bell submitted Bell’s application. The question of whose patent application had precedence became controversial. When proof of Bell’s invention of the liquid transmitter idea was required, Bell pointed to an earlier application which used mercury as a circuit breaker. This argument was accepted as proof even though mercury would not have worked in a telephone transmitter. Bell’s amendment to his claim enabled him to acquire U. S. patent 174, 465 on the 7th of March in 1876 for the invention of the telephone.