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First Telephone Exchange opened in New Haven 1878

The telephone exchange refers to equipment that connects telephone lines to permit communication through phone calls. It is most common in large enterprises and the communal interchanged telephone linkage. In modern times, the telephone exchange is a switchboard made up of mainly electronic components. In its pioneer stages, the telephone exchange was mainly operated by people who physically connected and disconnected the calls as they came through or ended. In earlier years, the telephone exchange was also referred to as the central office, a word coined by the Bell Company. It was a more general term referring to the nature of the role played by the telephone exchanges in acting as a central point of intersection between subscribers. However, a single central office could house more than one hundred telephone exchanges. These centers could also be termed as cable hubs from where a receiver gains its dial tone.

In the US, they had to figure out a way to differentiate and distinguish one telephone exchange center from the other. The Bell Structure came up with a single way of identifying the central offices that were located in or served a single common region. This was done by assigning them three digit codes that were inserted as a precede to the subscribers’ telephone numbers. These identifying numbers were called area codes and were assigned mostly by state. This was because most of the central offices were set up to handle the telephone traffic of specific states on a rough ratio of one to one (Calling 28). As the use of telephones became more widespread and transcended countries and continents in the twentieth century, the international community adopted this coding system to identify where a transoceanic phone call was originating. These three digit identification tags are commonly discussed to as country dialing codes in the present day.

Since time immemorial, communication has been a key tenet of human existence. Without communication, whole civilizations have been known to crumble. Therefore, human beings have always figured out ways to stay in touch with one another. All along one of the main challenges to communication amongst populations was the geographical separation between the source of the message and the intended recipients. The longer the distance, the more difficult it was to send the messages in a quick and timely manner in their entirety. The post office was painstakingly slow and limited due to the restricted reach of the road and rail networks. Information that was needed urgently would only be transmitted after it had become stale and lost its value thereby derailing entire systems (Graham 41). As a result, there remained a need to come up with more innovative ways that were not only fast but also efficient and reliable.

One of the shortcomings of the telephone was one could only speak to those people who owned the second telephone which was physically connected in a direct manner via cables. This meant that a man who had a two linked telephones serving his home and business could not communicate with his neighbor even if the neighbor also owned a telephone. This greatly limited the usefulness of the telephone because it could only facilitate communication between two places or people. In this era, only government ministries, corporations, post offices and very wealthy individuals owned telephones. Since the telephones were hardwired to each other, it meant that only one conversation would take place (Calling 29). This problem was first solved by a Hungarian engineer by the name Tivadar Puskas who was an employee of Thomas Edison. He came up with an idea to allow for people who owned phones that were not hardwired to each other to be able to communicate. This system was able to initially support more than two ongoing calls simultaneously.

The first telephone exchange-provided coverage to only a small locality and was operated manually. The telephone exchange was a centrally controlled system where all the lines passed through a common point before being connected to a telephone. When one subscriber wanted to call a different station, they didn’t need to be directly connected. Instead, the telephone operator at the central point simply connected the two lines allowing them to communicate. Therefore, a businessperson would be able to stay in touch with both his private and business interests without having to physically connect his telephone to several others (Standage 32). As long as the telephone lines of all subscribers went through the focal point, one subscriber could stay connected to an infinite number of people who owned telephones.

A civil war veteran by the name of George Coy advanced the idea developed by Puskas. Coy was the first telephone exchange ever in partnership with Herrick Frost and Walter Lewis. Coy created a switchboard that allowed a central office to connect multiple people at the same time. This system required that all calls and communications went through the central office who then had to wait for the operator to enable them to connect. Soon after this was launched, Coy also printed the world’s first ever telephone directory(Graham 32). The telephone directory contained the names, addresses and contact details of the first subscribers to the telephone exchange system. It had taken quite a few more decades before direct dialing became introduced to minimize the importance of the switching centers.

According to Coy, he had gotten the idea from a talk he had attended hosted by Alexandar Bell in which he demonstrated his concept of a telephone connection amongst three different phones. It was at the same forum that Bell brought up the idea of using a telephone exchange for business or trade deal. A little while after that lecture, Coy applied for a contractual permission from the Bell Telephone Company. The permit issued was valid for them to operate in New Haven and Middlesex counties. Under this contract, the Bell Company was to own 35% of Coy’s enterprise in exchange for him using their intellectual property that he was going to exploit in setting up the company. Along with the other two partners, Frost and Lewis, they started the District Telephone Company of New Haven. The Coy’s switchboard utilized bearing screws, holders from teapot covers and bustle cable. This model could only support a maximum of two calls at a go and required a minimum of six connections for each call to go through successfully. Initially, the District Telephone Company of New Haven started operating with only twenty-one subscribers (Standage 33). A majority of these were corporations, public institutions, and ministries. The founding partners were also listed as subscribers alongside very few other private citizens. However, within the first month, the idea had caught on such that by the time they were publishing the first ever phone directory, they listed twenty-nine new members bringing the total tally to fifty subscribers. The monthly rate for service was a dollar and fifty cents.

The working of a telephone exchange was slightly complicated. When one lifted their phone to make a phone call, it notified the operator seated at the switchboard in the central office by a light that came on in the operator’s panel. The operator connected a plug into the appropriate jack to connect the subscriber before asking for the contact number of whoever the subscriber was trying to reach. On the same panel, jacks were connecting the telephone exchange to all the subscribers within that region. The operator would then plug into the appropriate jack and ring the recipient by operating a key. The number of operators that could be connected was limited by the number of jacks on the operator’s panel. If the call was meant to be forwarded to another exchange, the operator used a junction to enable the connection (Graham 28). This use of junctions was especially common for calls over longer distances that had to go through more than one or two central offices before getting to their destination.

The first exchange operators in New Haven relied on snooping keys and buzzing keys. Later improvements allowed them to incorporate an automatic calling feature in the model. This improvement enabled the immediate answering the moment the operative implanted the responding cable into the appropriate jack. The ringing started the moment the operator inserted the ringing cord into the calling party’s jack. After making the connection, the operator was free to insert other callers’ cords as long as there were empty jacks available. This was because once he connected one call successfully, he was cut out of the circuit as the caller on the other end listened to a ring back signal as he waited for the person, on the other hand, to come to the phone. Instead of the operator repeatedly notifying the client that they were connected, the dial tone did that job for him freeing him up to take more calls.

An issue of contention in the timeline of its development are the attempts to erase the contribution of Puskas towards the development of the telephone exchange. Several online sources incorrectly credit Coy, Herrick, and Frost as the inventors of the switchboard. It is important to note that theirs was an improvement and execution of Puskas’ idea while building on Bell’s models of a three-way connection from his lecture. Coy should be correctly recognized for building the first switchboard on American soil in New Haven. Furthermore, Herrick and Frost were only a part of the development because they provided the capital to start the Telephone Company of New Haven (Shelton 352). By the time the New Haven exchange was launched, Puskas had already launched Europe’s first telephone exchange in Paris almost immediately after Bell had patented his telephone.

During that period, several other activities left a remarkable and related mark on the communication world. On April 15 of the same year that the District Telephone Company of New Haven was commissioned in New Haven Connecticut, the world’s first toll service was established in the same town. The toll line ran from Blackrock to Bridgeport. In the same month, the Connecticut District Telephone Company set up the first ever telephone booth known to man. In 1880, the Connecticut Telephone Company was formed to provide similar services as the District Telephone Company of New Haven (Shelton 352). In 1882, the District Telephone Company of New Haven became the Southern New England Telephone Company.

In 1889, they pioneered the first coin-box telephone. The coin-box telephones were set up in the booths installed in public places. They allowed those people who did not own private telephones and thereby not connected to the grid to make telephone calls at a fee. The payment was made by the use of coins inserted into slots in the telephones. The establishment of the first telephone exchange in new haven brought many benefits to the inhabitants of Connecticut. This was apart from the connectivity it obviously provided. From the word go, the company needed operators for its switchboards. It also employed men who put up the tolls and lines and maintained the infrastructure (Mueller 554). It was also during this period that the company hired Marjorie Gray, the first women telephone exchange operator which was a major accomplishment for the female gender.

In the several years that followed, the company was forced to restructure its operations to raise money to pay for its expansion plans and increase its contractual obligations with the Bell Company. It was in this time that the company acquired the startup exchanges in Hartford, Meriden, and Bridgeport. It also embarked on the extension of its toll lines and created more awareness of their existence to attract t more subscribers and reach a wider target market. The stiff competition backed the original investors into a corner such that both Coy and Frost had to give up their controlling interest to secure further capital (Kieve 68). The financier, Jay Gould, tried to use the company to get control of the Western Union. The Western Union gave up the telephone business to the Bell Company on condition that they remained in the telegram business. The appeal of the telephone company declined, and they had to seek out financing from another investor, Marshall Jewel who had been the Postmaster General. In 1880, the company was renamed the Connecticut telephone company with some of the acquired finance to buy out Gould.

In the following couple of years, the company set up twenty-four exchanges connected by phone lines that served over 3500 subscribers. The company’s subsidiary had even commenced the construction of a toll line across states from the network in its newfound lease of life this enthusiasm ran into several challenges in two forms. The introduction of electricity transmitted by relevant authorities caused interference of the telephone lines such that other calls were not clearly. This led them to incur extra expenses in insulating the cables with metallic circuits. It also required that every single switchboard is replaced to adapt to the new system. This drastically increased the cost of service production. The second issue was the collapse of the New York to Boston line which was sold out to an American telephone and telegraph company. Unfortunately, the SNET sold its other commitments in Massachusetts concentrated its efforts On Connecticut. This made an already brutal competitive environment even worse leading to the unfavorable return on investment for the company (Kieve 72). The blizzard of 1888 destroyed the infrastructure that had been set up in the past years which also slowed down the progress of the budgeted expansions.

In this context, some individuals deserve honorable mentions before we delve into the world of the telephone exchange. They are the gentlemen who created the need for a telephone exchange in Connecticut and all over the world in the first place. A physicist from Britain by the name of Robert Hooke conducted extensive experiments with the string telephone and is credited with one of the first acoustic string phones that were ever made in the seventeenth century. For a short period, they were produced for commercial purposes to compete with the electrical telephone. For a century after that, the transmission of sound via physical mediums was mostly relied upon. However, in the nineteenth century, there was an outburst of improvements on the initial design and other inventions (Agar 28). This eventually led to the pioneering acoustic string phone to be phased out. Some of the inventors of that century who were credited with the metamorphosis of the telephone include; Antonio Meucci, Charles Bourseul, John Phillip Reis, Elisha Gray, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

However, the one device that ingeniously combined the ideas of the telephone and the telegraph and has had the most profound effect on the modern world is the mobile phone. The invention of the mobile phone had taken time before it was actualized. The first mobile phone call was made in 1973, marking the start of an era of modernization and proliferation. Interestingly, this was not the first device to utilize wireless networks for communication. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a patent had been issued for two-way radios that were used by emergency services and police officers to communicate on shortwave radio frequencies (Mueller 555). This design had severe limits as far as distance was concerned. All that became a thing of the past with the onset of handsets that could communicate anywhere even across continents. The invention of the mobile phone was monumental because it brought about convenience. It shifted the locus of communication from the physical places to the people who used them.

All things considered, the invention of the first operational telephone exchange will always remain one of the highlights of the nineteenth century. In the chronology of the events leading up to the invention of the mobile phone, the telephone exchange will always be fondly remembered for the role it played in easing communication amongst multitudes at a time when the only options available could not provide for the same. The importance of the telephone exchange cannot possibly be overstated especially for the role of the central offices in the world wars. The switchboards and their operators provided a direct link between emergency services, warning centers, and the law enforcement agencies in times of bomb attacks that enabled many lives to be saved and injuries averted where possible. The telephone exchange also served to improve the value of the invention of the telephone. Without the exchange centers, the use of the telephone would have been limited by the ability of one to buy pairs of telephones to be used to link a maximum of two subscribers.

Works Cited

Calling, America. "A Social History of the Telephone to 1940." Berkeley: U of California P (1992).

http://www.history.com/topics/inventions/telegraph

Standage, Tom. The Victorian Internet: The remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's online pioneers. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998.

Kieve, Jeffrey L. The electric telegraph: A social and economic history. David and Charles, 1973.

Mueller, Milton. "The switchboard problem: Scale, signaling, and organization in manual telephone switching, 1877-1897." Technology and Culture 30.3 (1989): 534-560.

Agar, Jon. Constant touch: A global history of the mobile phone. Icon Books Ltd, 2013.

Graham, Bell Alexander. "Improvement in telegraphy." U.S. Patent No. 174,465. 7 Mar. 1876.

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/nokia/nokia-3310/19848/history-mobile-phones-1973-2008-handsets-made-it-all-happen

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/19/AR2008021902596.html

Shelton, Norris N. "Telephone central office based method of and system for processing customer orders." U.S. Patent No. 5,345,501. 6 Sep. 1994.