Lesson 2: Differences Between the Telephone and the Telegraph

150 Years of American Telecommunications: The Online Course

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The switchboard exchange that opened in New Haven on January 28, 1878 with twenty-one subscribers turned the telephone into a network. Voice needed more of a line than a telegraph pulse did, so the loading coil and the vacuum-tube repeater had to be built before speech crossed the continent: on January 25, 1915, Bell in New York spoke to Watson in San Francisco, 3,400 miles away.

Theodore Vail, who had led AT&T in the 1880s and came back as its president in 1907, coined "universal service" to mean universal interconnection into one system. A letter an AT&T vice president sent to the Attorney General on December 19, 1913, traded competition for regulation, and the independents fell from 6,000 to roughly 2,000. The copper lines that the 1913 bargain paid for are being switched off in 2026, and the questions it answered are being argued again.

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Where this lesson sits. Lesson 1 ended with a patent and the litigation that enforced it. It did not explain what the telephone did that the telegraph could not, or how the network crossed a continent. This lesson takes up both. Its subject is how voice became a system of its own rather than a feature bolted onto the telegraph, and how that system became a single, nationwide, regulated monopoly. The decisive moments are again institutional rather than mechanical: a switchboard, a phrase, and a letter to the Attorney General. Watch for the course's first principle: communications are governed as much by bargain as by engineering.

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Lesson 2: Differences Between the Telephone and the Telegraph

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