Telephones in pairs
When Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone appeared in 1876, it was sold or leased in pairs. A customer who wanted to talk between two places, typically an office and a factory or a house and a shop, rented two instruments and strung a private wire between them. There was no way to reach anyone else. To talk to a third party, you would have needed a third instrument and another wire.
That worked for a few hundred early users, but not for a service that would have to connect thousands of people to each other. The solution, the switchboard, was developed within about two years, and surprisingly, there is no single undisputed “first.”
Early shared lines and the Holmes system
The first steps toward a central exchange came from existing businesses that already ran wires between a central office and many customers. Burglar alarm companies were an obvious example. In Boston in 1877, the alarm business of Edwin Holmes is often described as having connected telephones to its central station, so that customers in different places could talk through it. Several other telegraph and alarm companies, and Bell’s own agents, tried similar arrangements around the same time.
Telegraph and alarm companies were used to running wires from a central office, much as they had run lines along railroads. These early arrangements are reported in several accounts with different details, and what counts as a “switchboard” matters. A shared line to a central office that lets one customer speak to the office is not quite the same as a board that can connect any customer to any other. For that reason, claims about the very first exchange vary between sources.
New Haven, January 1878
The exchange most commonly cited as the first commercial telephone exchange opened in New Haven, Connecticut. The District Telephone Company of New Haven began service on January 28, 1878, with a switchboard designed by George W. Coy. Reports usually say that it served around twenty subscribers at the start, and that the board was built with simple hardware, a point often described in a colorful way. The details of the construction vary in different retellings, so it is safest to say it was a small, improvised board.
The board allowed the operator to connect any subscriber to any other, using wires and simple connecting devices. This capability, rather than the number of customers, is why New Haven receives the credit. The company also issued a printed list of subscribers, often described as one of the first telephone directories, and it was only a single sheet, produced by a local printer from the kind of type used in print shops of the day.
Operators in these early exchanges were typically teenage boys, borrowed from the telegraph world where messenger boys were common. Their pranks and impatience with customers led companies to try women instead, a move first noted in Boston later in 1878, and it became the standard.
What the earliest boards looked like
The first boards were not the polished panels of later photographs. They were basic switching frames. A subscriber’s line ended at a terminal on the board, and the operator joined two terminals with a short length of wire or a metal peg, a plan later improved by the plug and cord system that became the standard approach. A subscriber signaled by sending a current that made a signal appear on the board, or just by shouting into the telephone if there was no better means.
The exchange had to deal with several practical problems that did not exist with private pairs:
- Signaling. How does a subscriber get the operator’s attention? Early solutions included a hand-cranked generator that sent a ringing current to the exchange.
- Identification. The called party had to be rung. Telephones were commonly equipped with a bell, and the operator could send a ringing current down the line.
- Disconnection. The operator had to know when a call was over, which led to signals from the subscriber.
- Reliability. Lines were exposed to weather, damp and induction from neighboring wires.
Spread to other cities
After New Haven, exchanges spread quickly. Within about a year, there were exchanges in many American cities and in Europe, with London and Paris among those opening in 1879. Power came from batteries at the exchange, an approach that later grew into large banks of lead-acid battery cells. Each new exchange had its local organizer and its own board design, and some local variations lasted for years until larger companies standardized equipment.
An important development was the multiple switchboard, in which each operator could reach all the lines in the exchange. That design came a little later and supported much larger systems.
Why this early period matters
The first exchanges changed what a telephone was. The device Bell patented in 1876 connected two places. The network that followed connected any subscriber to any other, and so the value of belonging to the network grew with the number of others on it. Questions that still matter today, such as numbering, directories, service quality and the training of operators, first appeared in rooms like Coy’s in New Haven.
The 1877-78 period also illustrates how many “firsts” in technology depend on definitions. If the question is who first connected telephones through a central point, the answer may be a Boston alarm company. If it is who opened a commercial exchange with a subscriber list and a switchboard that could connect any two customers, New Haven in 1878 is the most widely quoted answer.