Zahlen, bitte! Conference call with 5100 participants – over 100 years ago
Meeting with 5100 participants: What is now possible for everyone via the internet was a sensation and logistical masterpiece in 1916.
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The first large-scale telephone conference, reminiscent of today's team calls or clubhouse sessions, took place at a time when the telephone call itself was a pioneering act.
May 16, 1916 was a high point in the life of Theodore Newton Vail. The President of AT&T opened the largest transcontinental telephone conference with 5100 participants. The American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, now IEEE) had issued invitations to its annual conference, which this time was to be held in a decentralized manner throughout America.
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In the Engineering Societies' Building, the New York headquarters of the AIEE, more than 1100 people were listening to the headphones, with a further 4000 at the organization's regional groups in Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco.
Telephone network across 20 US states
Because the 6500-kilometer telephone network with its cables on 150,000 telephone poles also ran through their cities, 40 men each in Denver and Salt Lake City were allowed to listen in, but not to speak -- women were not allowed to attend the event. What they had to say was sent as a telegram via the telegraph network and read out, as was the congratulatory address from President Woodrow Wilson.
It still exists today and is located at 25–33 West 39th Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.
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An informative report on the technical feat of that time was published in the association's magazine IEEE Spectrum. It compares the large network switch with virtual conferences, such as those held today with Zoom, Teams or BigBlueButton. Representatives of the regional groups gave speeches that were transmitted to all listeners via the telephone network. Thomas Watson, who as Alexander Graham Bell's assistant had made the very first telephone call, sent greetings to the audience, as did Theodore Vail. There were local speeches that functioned like today's breakout sessions. The additional telegrams sent are compared to the chat function of Zoom.
Bringing providers together with acquisitions
The economic and technical aspect, the triumph of AT&T president Theodore Newton Vail, has been somewhat neglected. Vail had already worked for the Bell Telephone Company from 1878 to 1887 and was fired as president by the board of directors. 20 years later, at the age of 64, Vail became president of the company again, which was now called AT&T because Bell had bought its telegraph competitor Western Union in the meantime.
At that time, there were hundreds of independent telephone providers. With his best friend, the banker J.P. Morgan, Vail gradually – began to buy up these regional telephone companies, sometimes under the code name –, as well as the providers operating in the telegraph business.
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As he defied a ban and used both systems for both forms of communication, Western Union had to be sold again as early as 1913. Overall, however, Vail was successful in turning a disjointed network into a uniform telephone network. "The telephone must stop at no frontier, be it national, geographical or racial," he declared in 1911 in AT&T's activity report (PDF).
Conference call as a sign of united networks
One aspect of Vail's AT&T success story lay in its own research department, Western Electric. After the original Bell patents with which the Bell Telephone Company had been fattened had expired, this department bought patents such as the one on the audio tube from Lee DeForest and developed its own improvements on this basis, which all connected "sub-networks" were obliged to introduce.
The best-known example is the type A triode developed by Harold DeForest Arnold at the research department, which was used as a signal amplifier to make the first transcontinental telephone calls between the East Coast and the West Coast in 1914. At Vail's instigation, this connection was not officially introduced until the opening of the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco on January 25, 1915, with the advertisement "AT&T connects the world".
5000 switches for stable connections
At the event, the famous words of the very first telephone call were spoken by Alexander Graham Bell himself in New York: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want you." In San Francisco, Thomas Watson replied "It will take me five days to get there now!" At the AIEE conference in May 1916, more than 5,000 of the triodes developed by Harold D. Arnold were used as switches to minimize attenuation in the telephone network.
Participants: 5100
1100 in the New York headquarters, another 4000 in other locations
Participating cities: 6 (plus two passive participants)
New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver and Salt Lake City
Telephone network used:
20 states, 6500 kilometers with over 150,000 telephone poles and over 5,000 switches
Theodore Vail followed the conference from his country residence with three telephone lines. He congratulated those present by telephone for their achievements and urged them to deal with the threat of the USA entering the war. A few weeks later, on June 3, 1916, US President Wilson would pass a law that created the National Research Council. During the war, Arnold worked at the council on the problem of acoustically detecting German submarines.
The experts attending the conference were quite impressed by the quality of the amplified voice transmission. Unaware of the conference, the science fiction author Hugo Gernsback also enthused about the fact that people would soon be able to listen in on concert performances over the telephone via "tele-music". However, Harold Arnold, now the first director of the famous Bell Laboratories, was not satisfied with the quality. He had stereo recording systems developed, as well as the first electronic hearing aids. The first hi-fi transmission of a concert over the telephone that met his standards was achieved in April 1933 with a concert by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, just a few months before Arnold's death.
The AIEE telephone conference with 5,100 people in various US cities was the confirmation of Theodore Newton Vail's idea of establishing a comprehensive, uniform telephone network.
He resigned as president in 1919 and died shortly afterward at the age of 74. When Vail died on April 18, 1920, the entire US telephone network was shut down for one minute. Between 11:00 and 11:01 Eastern Standard Time, according to contemporary sources, some 12,000,000 telephones and 24,000,000 miles of telephone wire went silent.
(dahe)
