That same year he established the Bell Telephone Laboratories as a separate entity which would take over the work being conducted by Western Electric's engineering department's research division.

According to one historian, Gifford had a video telephone conversation in 1927 with Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, through AT&T's pioneering technology in television transmission over wire.

In 1927, Gifford relaunched his firm's overseas operations and by 1948, 72 foreign countries were linked by wire and radio with AT&T lines.

[5] In 1922 Gifford became one of the founding trustees of the Grand Central Art Galleries, an artists' cooperative established that year by John Singer Sargent, Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others.

[6] Also on the board were the Galleries' architect, William Adams Delano; Robert W. DeForest, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Frank Logan, vice-president of the Art Institute of Chicago;[7] Irving T. Bush, president of the Bush Terminal Company; and Clark.