From The Times: April 12, 1921
Washington. I had the privilege today of sharing in a conversation which opens a new era in the history of the telephone. From an armchair in the Pan-American Union Building I exchanged greetings with an acquaintance in Havana and with a wireless operator in Catalina, a picturesque island in the Pacific off Los Angeles. As plainly as though we were all seated in the same room I heard Havana speaking to Catalina and Catalina answering. It was by far the longest conversation in point of distance ever held by telephone. The message to which I listened passed through 115 miles of cable, connecting Havana and Key West, in Florida, thence over the land wires connecting the chief towns of the Atlantic seaboard with New York, Chicago, Omaha, Salt Lake City, Sacramento, San Francisco, Fresno, and Los Angeles, and from Los Angeles by wireless to Catalina, 29 miles from the mainland, a total distance of 5,056 miles.
In the course of the afternoon President Harding had telephonic conversation over the submarine cable with President Menocal of Cuba. General Pershing talked with the Cuban Minister of War, and Mr Hughes with the Cuban Foreign Secretary. Then the transcontinental roll call was taken, and we heard voices responding with military precision from 26 towns in 19 States.
As Colonel John J Carty, the vice-president and chief engineer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, to whose genius and organizing ability the demonstration owes its success, observed to me, today’s conversations, with the same telephonic equipment, might just as easily have been conducted between London, via Paris, Constantinople, and Bombay, and Calcutta. He predicts that in the near future it will prove a most potent agency in the consolidation of the British Empire and the unification of the English-speaking peoples. Almost unimaginable political consequences for the British Empire, he thinks, will arise from this, for, as he says, the telegraph and submarine cable merely connect places, whereas the telephone connects peoples, and the time is fast coming when the Government in London will be able to hold daily telephonic conversations with the Governments of the Dominions and India.