On June 17, 1914, AT&T erected the last of some 130,000 poles at Wendover and spliced the wires, joining more than 3,400 miles of telephone line to create the first telephone line across the United States from the East Coast to the West Coast. The completion drew little fanfare at first, with the last splice made, flags placed on the cross-poles, and photographs taken. The company that became AT&T began in 1875, after Alexander Graham Bell worked with Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders as partners and financiers while trying to invent a talking telegraph-telephone, then secured patents in 1876 and 1877, and in 1877 the three men formed the Bell Telephone Company. In 1908, AT&T made a transcontinental telephone line its top priority even though the necessary operating technology did not yet exist, because communication across a country as large as the United States was not possible without amplification. After AT&T announced in 1909 that the line would be ready for the 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair, the emergence of electronic amplifiers made the project feasible. The amplifier was the first high-vacuum tube triode, adapted from Lee de Forest’s audion. AT&T began construction in 1912, working east from Sacramento, tested high-vacuum tubes on the long-distance network by 1913, and that fall began construction west from Denver while upgrading lines to the east. Crews linking the country by phone wires faced especially difficult conditions between Salt Lake City and Wendover, where temperatures sometimes reached 130 degrees and glare made daytime work almost impossible. The first test of the completed line took place in July 1914, when AT&T president Theodore Vail spoke from one coast to the other with his voice boosted in Pittsburgh, Omaha, and Salt Lake City. Because the line was finished six months before the Panama-Pacific Exposition opened, AT&T waited until January 25, 1915, to open it commercially with a major celebration. Alexander Graham Bell, in New York, began the event by speaking to Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco and repeating the words he had first transmitted by telephone in 1877: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” Watson replied, “Sorry Mr. Bell, it will take me a week now.” U.S. President Woodrow Wilson congratulated those involved from the White House in Washington, D.C., while Theodore Vail spoke from Jekyll Island, Georgia. The line stretched between New York City and San Francisco across 13 states, with four copper wires carried by 130,000 wooden poles, and about 1,500 AT&T employees stood ready along its length to address any problem during the ceremonial call. New York Mayor John Mitchel and San Francisco Mayor James Roth also exchanged greetings. Twenty-eight years later, in 1942, Wendover again figured in telephone history when the first transcontinental all-weather buried cable was joined at the border.