page_title: Long-distance calling
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Long-distance calling / History
caption_attribution_description: English: My 2010 photo of the site of the first long distance telephone call, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
context_page_description: In telecommunications, a long-distance call or trunk call is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are typically charged a higher billing rate than local calls. The term is not necessarily synonymous with placing calls to another telephone area code.
  Long-distance calls are classified into two categories: national or domestic calls which connect two points within the same country, and international calls which connect two points in different countries. Within the United States there is a further division into long-distance calls within a single state and interstate calls, which are subject to different regulations. Not all interstate calls are long-distance calls. Since 1984 there has also been a distinction between intra-local access and transport area calls and those between different LATAs, whose boundaries are not necessarily state boundaries.
  Before direct distance dialing, all long-distance calls were established by special switchboard operators even in exchanges where calls within the local exchange were dialed directly.
context_section_description: 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 but was not showcased until early 1915, as a promotion for the upcoming Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in the spring of the same year.
  On January 25, 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 by manually patching in the route of the call.
  "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."
  — New York Times, Jan 26, 1915.
  On November 10, 1951, the first direct dial long-distance telephone call in North America was placed from Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey to Mayor Frank Osborne of Alameda, California via AT&T's Bell System. The ten digit call (seven digits plus a three-digit area code) was connected automatically within 18 seconds.
  The first subscriber trunk dialing in the United Kingdom was deployed December 5, 1958 with Elizabeth II placing a call from Bristol to Edinburgh.
caption: Site of one end of the first US long-distance telephone call in 1876 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another early call between cities had been made in Canada by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.[2]
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