Tuesday marks 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell completed the first-ever phone call. Bell used a copper wire connection to speak the famous words — “Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you” — and establish a form of communication that persists today via fiber-optic systems, even as texts have surpassed calls in popularity.
That calling has survived myriad technological upheavals shows “how profoundly it changed society,” the CTO of AT&T, the corporate heir to Bell’s telephone company, told Flagship.
Bell’s call led to a number of other breakthroughs, including the first call between New York and San Francisco in 1915, and the first trans-Atlantic call in 1927.
Thirty-five years later, US Vice President Lyndon Johnson answered the first satellite call, and in 1969 President Richard Nixon phoned Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon using AT&T’s network.
AT&T is using the anniversary to announce a $250 billion investment in its US infrastructure and workforce through 2030, partly using savings from tax incentives in Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last year.
The investments include fiber and 5G infrastructure, such as cables and cell towers, as well as hiring thousands of technicians this year.
AT&T is building the equivalent of a strand of fiber — an ultra-thin cable that transmits data via pulses of light — stretching from New York to Los Angeles every month, CTO Jeremy Legg said.