Few inventions more directly signaled the advent of the modern era better than the telephone, and today is the anniversary of two important dates in telecommunications. First, in 1881, two early titans, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, created the Oriental Telephone Company, which sold telephones in Asian countries, from Turkey to China. Second, while Bell initially invented the telephone in 1876, it was on January 25, 1915, that he inaugurated transcontinental phone service, speaking from New York to his onetime assistant Thomas Watson, in San Francisco.
According to an article published in the New York Times the day after the transcontinental call, the 1915 call was much clearer than the first telephone call, despite the distance. To commemorate their first conversation, the two men spoke on a model of the original telephone, after establishing contact on a more modern (for 1915!) device. The wires connecting the two men also looped in telelphones in Georgia and Washington, creating what we'll refer to as a conference call. Several people joined into the call, including the mayors of New York and San Francisco, and President Woodrow Wilson, who congratulated both Watson and Bell on their achievements.
We're a day late on this, which surely would have disappointed the focus of today's Today in STEM: Benjamin Franklin. After all, Ben was the one who said, "You may delay, but time will not." Ben Franklin was born on this (yester)day, January 17, in 1706. 
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