In 2015, it’s hard to imagine the concept of a telephone being a new and innovative break-through technology for the world as a whole, but Sunday, January 25 marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the world’s first transcontinental phone call. This phone call spanned 3,400 miles across the country from New York City, where Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, placed a call to his assistant, Thomas Watson, all the way in San Francisco. The call also included U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who was in the White House, and the president of AT&T, Theodore Vail who was in Georgia.

The phone call itself was, in reality, a rather elaborate publicity stunt to get telephone users to make long-distance phone calls. Of course, the call was real and the transcontinental phone connections were actually made (over 2,500 tons of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles), but historians speculate that the real first transcontinental phone call was made the year prior to test the lines once construction was complete. The four phone call participants read from scripts and made remarks under the direction of the phone company. One of Bell’s clearly per-constructed lines was: “All honor to the men who have made this achievement possible, they have brought all people of the United States within sounds of one another’s voices and united them into one great brotherhood.”

Despite the scripted production behind the world’s “first” transcontinental phone call, it is still an incredible achievement of the time and a milestone in mankind’s technological advancement. The actual telephones used by Bell and Watson will be on display in the California Historical Society starting on February 22, 2015.