These and a multitude of other difficulties, constituting problems of the most intricate nature, impeded the progress of the telephone art, but American engineers, by persistent study, incessant experimentation, and the expenditure of immense sums of money, have overcome these difficulties.  They have created a new art, inventing, developing, and perfecting, making improvements great and small in telephone, transmitter, line, cable, switchboard, and every other piece of apparatus and plant required for the transmission of speech.

As the result of nearly forty years of this unceasing, organized effort, on the 25th of January, 1915, there was dedicated to the service of the American public a transcontinental telephone line, 3,600 miles long, joining the Atlantic and the Pacific, and carrying the human voice instantly and distinctly between San Francisco and New York and Philadelphia and Boston.  On that day over this line Doctor Bell again talked to Mr. Watson, who was now 3,400 miles away.  It was a day of romantic triumph for these two men and for their associates and their thousands of successors who have built up the great American telephone art.

The 11th of February following was another day of triumph for the telephone art as a product of American institutions, for, in the presence of dignitaries of the city and State here at Philadelphia and at San Francisco, the sound of the Liberty Bell, which had not been heard since it tolled for the death of Chief-Justice Marshall, was transmitted by telephone over the transcontinental line to San Francisco, where it was plainly heard by all those there assembled.  Immediately after this the stirring tones of the “Star-spangled Banner” played on the bugle at San Francisco were sent like lightning back across the continent to salute the old bell in Philadelphia.

It had often been pointed out that the words of the tenth verse of the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus, added when the bell was recast in 1753, were peculiarly applicable to the part played by the old bell in 1776.  But the words were still more prophetic.  The old bell had been silent for nearly eighty years, and it was thought forever, but by the use of the telephone a gentle tap, which could be heard through the air only a few feet away, was enough to transmit the tones of the historic relic all the way across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Thus, by the aid of the telephone art, the Liberty Bell was enabled literally to fulfil its destiny and “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

The two telephone instruments of 1876 had become many millions by 1916, and the first telephone line, a hundred feet long, had grown to one of more than three thousand miles in length.  This line is but part of the American telephone system of twenty-one million miles of wire, connecting more than nine million telephone stations located everywhere throughout the United States, and giving telephone service to one hundred million people.  Universal telephone service throughout the length and breadth of our land, that grand objective of Theodore N. Vail, has been attained.