As the popularity of the telegram grew, Alexander Graham Bell was working on an even more direct form of communication: the telephone. He was granted a U.S. patent for the device in 1876. Once adopted, the telephone’s popularity grew rapidly: in 1900, there were 600,000 telephones in the United States; by 1910, there were 5.8 million. In 1927—the same year as the first television transmission—the telephone officially went international. That year, the first commercial transatlantic telephone conversation, happened, between Evelyn Murray, secretary to the British General Post Office and W. S. Gifford, president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), still a leading telecommunications company.