Metropolitan Home Telephone Co. - The Cambridge Historical Commission Blog

“Telephonic Coal” – What the heck? The above was part of an 1877 advertisement from the Austin C. Wellington Co. in Boston specifically for Cambridge customers to acquaint them with the benefits of ordering coal by telephone. Imagine! In this era of cell phones and 5G, we thought it would be interesting to take a look back 146 years to the dawn of the telephone age.

Alexander Graham Bell changed human communication forever when he placed his “long distance” call from Boston to Thomas A. Watson (at 28 Osborn Street in Cambridge) on October 9, 1876, just three days after receiving the patent for his invention.

Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), colorized by Sanna_Dullaway

Alexander was born in Scotland. His mother was nearly deaf, and his father taught elocution to the deaf: Bell’s interest in improving communications came naturally. The family emigrated to Canada, and in 1872 Bell moved to Boston to teach and became at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes.

In 1877, seven months after Bell received his 1876 patent, Gardiner Greene Hubbard (the former president of the old Water Company) offered to install telephones at the Water Works and in City Hall, proposing that, “the city shall be to no expense for the same unless they shall prove satisfactory to the Board.” Hubbard felt in interest in having–

*Cambridge Chronicle* May 19, 1877.
“The Board” refers to the Water Board.

Hubbard was more than just the former president of the water company: he was Bell’s father-in-law. In 1877 Bell had married one of his hearing-impaired students, Mabel Hubbard, one of Hubbard’s daughters, who had lost her hearing at age five following a bout with scarlet fever. Gardiner Hubbard was also an investor in a plan to create a telegraph company to compete with Western Union, which backed Bell’s experiments.

Everyone hopped on the telephone bandwagon. The system had a substantial impact on public safety, connecting police and fire stations with their branches. By 1877 many businesses were proudly advertising their telephone connections—but without telephone numbers. In the beginning, callers who subscribed to a private serv ice would pick up the phone and ask an operator at a manual switchboard to connect them by name to the person or business they wanted. (The first switchboard was made in New Haven in 1878 for a grand total of twenty-one subscribers.) Early operators memorized the names of every subscriber. It didn’t take long for this system to become unwieldy, but it needed a medical crisis to develop a more efficient system. In 1879 a physician in Lowell, Massachusetts, worried that, if the town’s four telephone operators all succumbed to the current measles epidemic, no one would be left to operate the switchboards. He suggested a numbering system for each subscriber, and telephone numbers were born.

Like all technologies, the invention of the telephone created lots of new businesses and jobs. First among them were private telephone companies: New England Telephone Co., Suburban Telephone Co., Metropolitan Home Telephone, Cambridge Telephone Exchange, Massachusetts Telephone & Telegraph, and The Telephone Despatch, “Organized for the Introduction of the TELEPHONE”:

A month later, the company announced that it already had orders for eighty-eight telephones:

Then there was the astonishing new “Telephone Harp” demonstrated by the inventor Frederick Allen Gower at a concert at Union Hall on January 23, 1878:

Gower set up the “newly invented telephone in the bakery of Mr. Frank A. Kennedy on Green street, and from the general office in Pearl street, Boston. … He then called for a cornet solo at Mr. Kennedy’s bakery, and it was given clearly and loudly, the notes being perfectly rendered, both through the instrument on the platform, or through instruments depending from the ceiling by wires…”

After that was a demonstration of the Telephone Harp: an instrument comprising steel tongues set into a steel frame, beneath which was a hammer similar to a piano key. When the keys were played, the vibrating steel tongues came in contact with a metallic point opening a circuit. The notes where then transmitted over the wires to the telephone instruments in the hall. The Quadruplex telephone in the advertisement was actually an electric telegraph system invented by Thomas Edison in 1874 that allowed four separate signals to be transmitted simultaneously. The crowd was dazzled.

Needless to say, there were commentaries on what this new-fangled invention meant to daily life:

Some more philosophical comments waxed on about the changes to daily life brought on by telephones. Below are excerpts from the Cambridge Chronicle (March 16, 1878), which called the telephone the “crowning invention of the age.” Change a few of the details and the complaint could have been written today about the speed of contemporary life:

“…parties were in adjoining rooms…. The beauty of thing will be that everybody will feel the necessity of having a telephone. The business places which do not have a telephone will naturally be at a disadvantage, and will soon succumb to the pressure……For ordinary messages the memory of the operator at the central office will suffice, but for longer ones a phonographist would be required.”
Cambridge Chronicle March 16, 1878

Does anyone know what a “phonographist” might have been?

In 1879 the Chronicle reported there were 30,000 telephones in the United States (Sept. 20, 1879). In 1883 the paper carried an article about telephone usage world-wide:

Trouble in River City: In 1887 trials in Cambridge of the “electric motor” cars produced substantial interference on the telephone lines. Customers complained: among them was James W. Lovering, Superintendent of Mount Auburn Cemetery and an early adopter of the telephone. By 1889 he was so fed up that he wrote to New England Tel & Tel: “the telephone service is so bad from this buzzing noise on the wires that we are unable to do any business with it, and unless it can be put right at once I do not care to continue the instrument in the office.” And, to one of the monument makers: “Since the electric cars began running the interference has been so great that we have been unable to use the telephone with any degree of accuracy, and until the telephone company … remedy the matter it is absolutely unsafe to attempt to send any message by telephone in regard to anything which is of importance.”

Lovering wasn’t alone. In October of 1889 a meeting of telephone subscribers was convened to address complaints:

A month later, the Cambridge Telephone Exchange “agreed to put in what is called the McClure system at an expense of $7000. This system is said to be such as to remedy the existing trouble.” (Cambridge Chronicle November 9, 1889)

But the troubles didn’t end there….

Installing telephone equipment on public streets produced hundreds of kerfuffles that were reported in the newspapers. In the decade 1890-1899, there were about 1,400 articles, editorials, or announcements about telephones—poles, wires, rates, etc. An example of one of the more benign complaints: