Speaking of Bookmarks

by

Lauren Roberts

         

The beginning of the telephone begins, of course, with Alexander Graham Bell. Born in 1847, Bell was by age 14 already inventing things. One early one, developed for a local farmer, was a device to remove husks from wheat by combining a nail brush and paddle into a rotary brushing wheel. Shortly afterwards, he was sent to London to “acquire polish.” There he visited the workshop of Sir Charles Wheatstone who was working on a speaking machine. Back home he and his brother tried one of their own—with a twist. It was a facsimile skull with homemade jaws, teeth, larynx, lips, cheeks, tongue and palate. With a bellows it was actually able to utter the word “Ma-ma.”

Over in Germany, a physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz, had also been experimenting with sound. His thesis, On the Sensations of Tone, proved that vowel sounds could be produced not only by the human mouth but also by a combination of electrical tuning forks and resonators. Bell could neither read German nor understand the confusing diagrams, but as he later noted, that confusion produced a “very valuable blunder.” He believed it showed that vowels could be transmitted from place to place using a wire. His misunderstanding laid the groundwork for his future experiments.

Bell had been teaching “Visible Speech” at a school in Boston when he turned his attention to Samuel F.B. Morse’s telegraph, widely considered a miracle when it was introduced in 1844. But the telegraph had its limitations, and competition to improve on the communication device was fierce. Bell recognized the parallel between multiple messages and multiple notes in a musical chord so he called his dream the “harmonic telegraph.”

At an electrical machine shop where Bell brought his blueprints for the harmonic telegraph—which would replace tuning forks with flexible organ reeds attached to electromagnets—Bell met Thomas A. Watson. Watson was the tinkerer, the electrical artisan who attempted to put Bell’s written dream into a real machine. After numerous attempts that ended in defeat, they found success. Watson remembered Bell’s words clearly: “If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity, precisely as the air varies in density during the production of a sound, I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically.”

So they continued their work. On the afternoon of June 2, 1875, Watson recalled that one of the transmitting springs he was working on stopped vibrating. He plucked it repeatedly to start it. Suddenly there was a shout from Bell in the next room who rushed in and demanded to know what Watson was doing. Bell had heard a twang, and that sound with complex overtones and timbre similar to the human voice, convinced Bell that was indeed possible to send speech over a wire. He immediately abandoned his work on the harmonic telegraph and the next day Watson built the first Bell telephone. Despite the crudeness of the machine, Bell’s voice coming from the fifth floor down to Watson’s on the third was heard. Distant, fuzzy and feeble it was, but there was no mistaking that it was Bell’s voice.

Bell immediately began working on the specifications he needed to submit the device to the U.S. Patent Office, which he did on February 14, 1876. In the Specifications area, he noted:

He was issued Patent No. 174,465 on March 7. Bell was twenty-nine years old. Three days later the first telephone call ever made came through. It was the most famous cry for help in history.

The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 took place in Philadelphia, and the latest discoveries and inventions were displayed. “My God, it talks!” exclaimed Dom Pedro, the emperor of Brazil, at the machine as Bell recited Hamlet’s soliloquy from a  building 100 yards distant. Soon after the exhibition, Bell and Watson took their Speaking and Singing Telephone on the road, giving demonstrations and lectures. Then came the decision that made the business: Bell, along with his patent partners Thomas Sander and Gardiner Greene Hubbard, founded Bell Telephone Company. (Watson was given ten percent.) Bell married Hubbard’s daughter, and they sailed to England where he introduced Queen Victoria to the telephone. Other momentous events for the telephone that year included the first use of the telephone in newspaper reporting and the first telephone made available for business use. It was destined to be a success, but the most important part of that success was Hubbard’s decision that the company would lease, not sell, the phones to subscribers.

In 1879, Western Union, who had once turned down the opportunity to buy the patent for $100,000 and, after realizing its mistake, tried to start its own telephone company, finally admitted defeat and pulled out. Bell Telephone became the American Bell System. The company then hired a man named Theodore Newton Vail away from the Railway Mail Service. He became the general manager and immediately set up a relationship with Western Electric Manufacturing (ironically, a subsidiary of Western Union) to produce its equipment; that company soon became part of the Bell System. Vail also established the basic framework that created the AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph) monopoly and created its nearly century-long creed: “One Policy, One System, Universal Service.”  

On the night of April 27, 1877, George Willard Coy was in Skiff’s Opera House in New Haven, Connecticut to hear a lecture-demonstration by Bell. But he was more than a mere audience member; he had supplied the telegraph wires for the occasion that allowed, for the first time, the lecture to be a dual one conducted by Bell in New Haven and Watson in Hartford. He was so impressed he obtained from Bell the franchise to operate telephones in his city. That first telephone exchange or central office was located at 219 Chapel Street in New Haven, but it wasn’t long before many other towns and cities had their own.

Exchanges consisted of mulitple switchboards (made of switches) at which an operator would connect callers with one another. At first wires were literally dragged across a bare floor to connect one subscriber to another. These first operators were young boys, most of whom had been previously employed at the telegraph office. “Two to four boys had to work together to complete a call, as they dashed from board to board to make connections. They also swept the floor, heaped coal on the fire, and collected bills from subscribers,” wrote Brenda Maddox in a  1976 study called “Women and the Switchboard.” It wasn’t long though before women displaced them because they were less costly, more polite and more patient.   

The job may have been better than the other “respectable” positions available to women, but it wasn’t easy. Miss Emma M. Nutt was the first telephone operator in America, beginning at the Telephone Dispatch Company in Boston on September 1, 1878. She was also the first to be addressed as “Central,” a name that stuck to any operator for many years afterward. The job paid ten dollars a month, the operators could not marry and were supposed to be obedient and virtuous. Their wardrobe were also prim and proper: a blouse with a white linen collar and a long dark skirt. They wore a metal headset that flattened their upswept hair and a six-pound Gilliland Harness that sat on their shoulders and strapped around their waists. Each operator was required to focus solely on the switchboard before her, never looking left or right, could not cross her legs or suck a lozenge. She couldn’t even blow her nose or wipe her brow without permission from her female supervisor. “The operator must now be made as nearly possible a paragon of perfection, a kind of human machine,” wrote Katherine Schmitt, the first operator supervisor.

Early operators worked nine hours a day, six days a week with no overtime. Lunch was the only time she had free, and even then, since it was considered inappropriate to dine in the exclusive male domain of the oyster bar, she brought her lunch. But, reported one, “it was not considered dignified to carry our lunch, so I tucked mine tin box in a black satin bag.”

That was city life. In the country, however, it was less rigid for many of these operations were independents built by entrepreneurs. Neighbors knew one another so the operator was both messenger and muse. She knew everyone’s business, and often helped with party-line disputes, knew train schedules, assisted panicky children, shared recipes and even acted as a warning system in one case where a flood was hastening toward the town.

In the beginning, subscribers were numbers, not names. It began in 1879 when a family doctor in Lowell, MA, realized that the town’s four operators were as susceptible to the measles epidemic as everyone else. If people used numbers instead of names, substitute operators who didn’t know names could easily take over. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, the business had increased to such an extent that a new system was needed. It was developed by, of all things, a Kansas City undertaker obsessed with the idea that Central was plugging his potential customers into a competitive parlor. He came up with a system that worked for up to 99 phones; it was “based on a sort of windshield wiper in the central office that automatically moved around the touch the contacts of he number being called when the caller pressed the correct number of times on two buttons attached to his telephone.” Unfortunately, it wasn’t well thought out. If a subscriber wanted the number 99, each button had to be pushed nine times. Nevertheless, it was the first successful automatic switchboard, the precursor of the dial-telephone switchboard. It also pre-sold customers on the idea of doing their own dialing.

In 1881, the first long-distance call was made from Boston to Providence. Then on January 25, 1915, the first coast-to-coast call was made—between an elderly Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson. A mere dozen years later, in 1927, the same year Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, so did the first overseas telephone call.

As the number of telephones increased so did telephone wires. By the late 1880s, cities and towns were becoming a forest of electrical wires running between poles, sometimes so many that the sky was difficult to detect. The first phones in the home were wall models, but by the 1890s, desk models began to be seen. But they still depended on an operator to make connections. Though  not the first, the major change to self-connecting began with the “cradle” desk telephone, the clunky black instrument that sat solidly on the telephone table or because it was more utilitarian than decorative, might end up hidden behind cabinet doors to avoid clashing with the decor.    

Not surprisingly, Bell Labs decided to explore design options so the telephone would be a point of pride in the home. In 1930, they held a redesign competition with a $1,000 prize, but the entries were unsatisfactory. However, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss later developed a “300” desk set series that came out in 1937. The ten-finger holes were clearly marked with letters in red and numbers in black, and the holes were finger-friendly. In 1949, the “500” series was issued. This design is the first one my parents owned. It initially came only in black but by 1954 a range of colors was available. The telephone dial had a coiled cord, adjustable volume, and a classic body of encased in plastic. The dial was expanded from three to four and one-quarter inches, and the letters and numbers—now white molded in black—were placed outside the clear Lucite finger wheel. 

In 1959, one of the most popular models ever devised, the Princess phone, was marketed. It was designed especially to appeal to girls and women with its slim dimensions and pastel colors. It even glowed in the dark.

Then in 1963, Touch-Tone was introduced. One had to get phone to get those so people did. Then they got the Speakerphone, the Data-Phone, the Centrex, the Trimline, the Circle, the Touch-a-Matic, and the Ericofon.

Once AT&T or ole “Ma Bell” was broken up in the mid-1980s, the leased phone system that had supported the company for all those decades went into a free-for-all. Phones could be bought, and the development of new styles and technologies went wild. Today it is nearly impossible to keep up unless one buys a new phone every year. (Some people do.) But the original purpose—to give people the opportunity to talk to others not near them—stays the same. Cell phones have taken that to such an extent that in some places they are banned from ringing in case they disturb theatre or musical performances. The U.S. Postal Service pleads with its customers not to answer or talk on their phones if they are at the counter. And they are not the only ones.

I am always amazed at how personal many people get on their cell phones in public. I have heard social security numbers and bank account numbers being recited. I have listened—unwillingly—to details of a real estate deal closing. I have heard about parties, business meetings, people’s failings (according to the caller who is subjecting me to it), and back-and-forth questions about what to get at the market. But not once have I ever had the opportunity to listen to a conversation worth overhearing.

Phone numbers, until sometime in the later part of the twentieth century, were not composed of all numbers as they are now. Well, they were, but they were not stated as such. Instead of telling someone to call 786-6233, you would say that your number was “State 66233,” meaning ST6-6233. The most famous example of this was the movie, Butterfield 8 with Elizabeth Taylor. “The most desirable woman in town,” read the movie poster, “and the easiest to find … just call … BUtterfield 8.”

New York Magazine even published a hilarious mock book review of the Manhattan Telephone Directory, 1970-71 in its issue of March 22, 1971. In it, Sol Chaneles and Jerome Synder wrote:

Book collectors would do well to stock up on the 1970-71 Manhattan Telephone Directory. Doubtless it will figure among the finest editions of this work, surpassing all previous editions in layout, typography and literary style . . .

On the domestic front, the authors have avoided coming to grips with the issue of polarization and have achieved a moderate, middle-of-the-road position by defining about 1,400 Whites, 400 Blacks and over a thousand Browns. While racial confrontation still looms large in this book, the authors have made it clear that the balance of power is held by Middle America’s silent majority, for there are a total of 5,700 Smiths and Joneses.