A Desert Span is an early silent film about running telephone lines through the American West. The film starts with a recreation of wagon trains, then moves to the actual train used as a home base when stringing telephone wire. The lighthearted film focuses on an adorable burro who as been made obsolete by 1920s high-tech machinery.
Throughout the U.S., the "first pass" to connecting the nation with telephony involved running the telephone wires on poles next to train tracks. These can still be seen from the windows of passenger trains, including many with their original colored glass insulators. However, wires on poles turned out to be vulnerable to storms and weather, and the next phase of wired technology involved burying the wires underground. Coaxial cables, which could carry far more conversations, were laid next, and then the cellular network and lightwave communications (fiber optics) developed more or less concurrently. Today there are a variety of ways that phone conversations are transmitted, but those original wires shown in A Desert Span are no longer in use.
Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ
