On this date… 7 January 1927

the first commercial transatlantic telephone call

It was a rainy January day in London. Sir Evelyn P Murray, head of the British General Post Office, and Walter S Gifford, President of AT&T, had just concluded the first commercial transatlantic call in history. After the conclusion of their ceremonial call, the line was opened up for other business partners, in both the US and Britain. This allowed them to conclude business transactions in mere minutes, instead of the days, or sometimes weeks, it had taken previously via mail and telegraph. By the end of the day an estimated $6 million dollars (about $40 million today) in transactions had been concluded. All for the whopping price of $75 for the first three minutes, or roughly a cool $1000 today. And you thought your phone bill was high.

Although Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call in 1876, it wasn’t until 1915 that the first transcontinental call occurred between New York and San Francisco. It would be another twelve years, on 7 January 1927, that the first transatlantic call happened between Murray and Gifford.

It was not made possible by cables laid across the ocean floor, which had handled telegraph communications since 1854 but were unreliable and failed frequently due to high traffic volume. Instead, the phone call was made by bouncing radio waves off the atmosphere. Inventor Enrico Marconi had shown that possibility in 1901 when he bounced a solitary radio signal off the atmosphere and the salty ocean water. His simple message was the letter “S” via Morse Code.

Fourteen years later in 1915, two engineers from AT&T sent a voice message from their lab in Virginia that was picked up by a receiver in Paris. But the capability of how to enable an actual voice to voice conversation would elude the engineers until that fateful January day. 

The call between Gifford and Murray began on the 26th floor of the AT&T building in New York City, traveled via wire to a radio transmitter in Long Island that then bounced the signal off the atmosphere to another receiver in Rugby, which then transmitted the call via wire to the Post Office building in London. The return signal took a different route, from London to Cupar, Scotland to Maine, to New York. Circuitous had a whole new meaning for those two.

Listen to the call and see how business was conducted nearly 100 years ago.
https://www.history.com/speeches/first-transatlantic-telephone-call