Today, we can make a telephone call to anyone, anywhere in the world—but this was not always the case. In this series of columns on IQ.HSE, Anton Basov, HSE Faculty of Computer Science editor, discusses how telephones have become an integral part of our everyday life. The third episode focuses on the evolution of telephone connections, the first subscribers, and the history of the telephone directory.
The Bell Telephone Company adopted a feasible business model by granting licenses to companies interested in establishing telephone communications within specific areas. But another significant problem needed to be solved before the telephone could function as a practical communication tool.
During that era, telephone lines could only connect a pair of individual telephones located at specific sites, such as Williams' home and his workshop in Boston. It was a two-way connection: one could make calls from the workshop to the home and vice versa. However, establishing a connection to a different telephone was impossible, yet this exactly what was needed for the telephone to become a useful tool.
The world's first telephone exchange opened on January 28, 1878, in the American city of New Haven. It was created by George W. Coy, a local telegraph operator and founder of the District Telephone Company. In the autumn of 1877, Coy acquired a license from Bell. It was also at that time that he had the idea of establishing a telephone exchange, enabling all subscribers within the network to call one another.
Coy had originally intended to open his telephone exchange in December 1877; however, several technical challenges compelled him to delay the launch by two months. Coy had to design the switchboard technology himself, as the Bell Telephone Company sold only the telephones at that time.
Furthermore, the residents of New Haven were in no particular hurry to become telephone subscribers. Prior to launching his telephone exchange, Coy sent out a thousand advertising brochures. He had hoped for at least fifty subscribers, but received only one response—from Rev. John E. Todd, a local priest who became the first telephone subscriber in history.
However, Coy did not despair. He hired an agent, which resulted in more than two hundred requests for telephone installations by the end of 1877. The initial tests were conducted on January 21, 1878, and a week later, the world's first telephone exchange commenced operations, then serving 21 subscribers.
Within a month, the number of subscribers increased to fifty. Relying on memory was no longer practical, prompting Coy to produce the first-ever telephone directory on February 21, 1878. It did not have numbers, but listed the names of individuals and companies in New Haven who had telephones. Only two copies of the first telephone directory have survived to this day.
On March 9, 1878, an updated directory of 125 subscribers was released, followed on April 8 by another one listing 327 owners of telephones, of which 42 were installed in private residences.
Once it became possible to connect telephones to one other, the user base started growing exponentially. By March 1880, a total of 138 telephone exchanges were operational across the United States, serving tens of thousands of subscribers. However, the future of the Bell Telephone Company was far from clear sailing; it faced challenges from a multitude of competitors, the foremost being the formidable Western Union.
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