SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) When Alexander Graham Bell made the first coast-to-coast telephone call from New York to San Francisco a century ago, technicians for the Atlantic Telephone and Telegraph Co. made sure an extra 1,100 miles of line connected the call to the company’s president on the Georgia coast.

Georgia’s role in the historic phone call on Jan. 25, 1915, came about by sheer accident. AT&T President Theodore Newton Vail had planned to be at Bell’s side in New York. However, Vail found himself stuck at his winter getaway on Jekyll Island after suffering a leg injury that prevented him from traveling. The phone company had just a few days to ensure Vail had his own special connection.

“It’s just kind of by happenstance that a few days before this landmark achievement for AT&T is happening, he can’t return,” John Hunter, director of historic resources for the Jekyll Island Authority, said in a phone interview Friday. “Jekyll Island had a notoriously bad phone connection to the mainland. They were determined to make sure that Vail was going to be a part of that ceremonial call.”

Bell’s call across 3,400 miles to his assistant, Thomas Watson, at the World’s Fair in San Francisco was celebrated as a major technological breakthrough. In addition to Vail listening in from Georgia, President Woodrow Wilson also took part in the call to offer congratulations from Washington.

“We are talking over 3,400 miles as easily and clearly as we talked over 2 miles 38 years ago,” Bell told his assistant during the call, referring to their landmark telephone conversation from Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 1876.

At the time of the first transcontinental phone call 100 years ago, Vail was a member of the Jekyll Island Club that served as a winter getaway for some of America’s wealthiest industrialists. The island off the port city of Brunswick was purchased by the state of Georgia in 1947 and now operates as a state park.

Hunter said Jekyll Island will mark the 100th anniversary of the coast-to-coast call Sunday with a public celebration that includes a recreation of the phone call and a champagne toast.

“One of those great things about history is that you end up getting connected to things many times by luck and happenstance,” Hunter said.