The delivery of San Francisco’s phone system
The phone is such an integral part of modern life that it’s easy to forget that for years after Alexander Graham Bell patented it in 1876, it was considered a toy. That was certainly the case in San Francisco, and there was a reason for the skepticism among the population: The development of the telephone service here was accompanied by an above-average number of incorrect numbers and disconnections. The story of the early San Francisco telephone system is a little-known and fascinating chapter in the annals of communications for a city famous as an innovator in the field.
The city’s first electrical communication system used the precursor to the telephone, the telegraph, and was developed in response to the famous San Francisco fog. During the gold rush it was valuable information for traders to know which ships were arriving at the Golden Gate, so in 1850 two entrepreneurs set up an observation station on a hill in the city center that the Spaniards called Loma Alta. From here they forwarded information via semaphore to the traders’ exchanges in the financial district. To get the information even earlier, a year later they set up a second observation station at Point Lobos, known as the outer station, which visually relayed the information to the inner station on the Loma Alta through a system of semaphores and signals. This system worked fine on a clear day, but in foggy conditions the semaphores were invisible. So in 1853 the two men built an eight-mile telegraph line from the outer station to the inner station, which later became known as Telegraph Hill.
As the young city grew and businesses moved further away from the small area around Montgomery Street, business professionals and freelancers increasingly needed a high-speed communications system. They turned to an innovative telegraph system operated by a company called the American District Telegraph Company. As described in “A Historical Review of the San Francisco Exchange,” a book published in 1927 by the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, that company, founded in 1874, maintained “a telegraphic call box system similar to the messenger call boxes that still exist today use. The boxes were installed in the offices of the city’s main trading companies and professionals. By simply pressing the correct button on a rotary dial, a subscriber could send his request to the control center, where the signal would be recorded on tape. One of a large group of messenger boys employed by the telegraph company was immediately dispatched to call the taxi, policeman, doctor, or whatever party they wanted to the address where services were needed. “The” tape ” on which the signal was recorded resembled the stock market ticker tape invented in 1867.
The city’s first telephone appeared in 1876, and Bell patented his invention that same year. It was an experimental line built between Meiggs’ Wharf off North Beach and the Merchant’s Exchange building in the Financial District. The next year the first handy phone line was set up for Frederick Marriott, an English banker and editor who was not only the first to use the phone on the West Coast, but also a visionary promoter of air travel. (In 1869, Marriott’s prototype of the Avitor unmanned aerial vehicle successfully orbited a field near Tanforan – the first American flight of a motorized and steerable aircraft.) The line connected Marriott’s Lombard and Jones home and its newspaper office on Merchant Street.
The city’s first telephone company was called the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company, which also included the American District Telegraph Company. In 1877 the company installed its first switchboard in its office at 222 Sansome Street. There were only 18 telephones in the system. The switchboard was a crude device made up of two boards, each holding a series of brass clips into which a switchboard operator inserted brass plugs tied with cotton-sheathed wire to establish a connection between the participants’ lines. Telephoning was not an easy thing. There was no way for customers to call the attendant. To make a call, they first had to send a telegraph to the district telegraph office, which was in the same room as the switchboard. As with the call box system discussed above, the telegraphic message was recorded on tape and forwarded to the operator, who would then connect the customer to the desired line.
The Gold and Stock Telegraph Company soon changed its name to the American Speaking Telephone Company and acquired a competitor, the National Bell Telephone Company. This rival company set up a series of bells, one over each line, that rang when a call came in. But the ringing sounded so similar that the operators had difficulty identifying which line was calling. They solved this problem by hanging a cork on the tenon of each bell with an 18-inch string. Whenever a call came in, the line could be identified by the bob of the cork.
After several years of intense competition, many of which vied for patents, the American Speaking Telephone Company and the National Bell Company consolidated into the Pacific Bell Telephone Company in 1880. But the new company still had a peculiar customer service problem to solve. As the Historical Review notes, “Until shortly after the two companies merged, the switchboards were operated by teenage boys. The friendly relations between the telephone company and its patrons were repeatedly jeopardized by the tendency of these young fellows to use improper language. Your usual “hello hello what do you want?” and “Are you done? Well, why don’t you hang up? ”Didn’t seem like the right way to talk to customers to company officials. Attempts to instill in the boys the need to be polite proved unsuccessful and they were eventually transferred to other jobs, with women being replaced in their place. “
Despite the teens’ dubious track record, Pacific Bell kept her busy night shift for several years believing that women didn’t want to work at night. But one night, responding to numerous customer complaints about poor service, the company’s vice president made an unannounced inspection visit and found the boys curled up next to their switchboards, snoring to themselves. “The boys were released and women were put to night work,” says the “Review” and adds: “Since then, telephone operations have been considered to be just as peculiarly feminine as the home.”
San Francisco’s nascent phone industry was out of diapers, but it had to overcome many obstacles before it could become a practical means of mass communication. The next portals will tell the story of these trials and tribulations, from the romantic years in which two-man “long-line patrols” led a gypsy-like existence in order to track down interruptions in long-distance lines, to inexpensive one-way kitchen phones for housewives, one of whom one hoped they would then order full-service phones, right down to the first payphones that could defraud unscrupulous customers by rubbing the coin box with a comb.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestseller “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco”. His latest book is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City”. All material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read previous portals in the past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals.
The final quiz question: What unusual items covered the floor in Gold Rush San Francisco?
Answers: Shirts. Laundry was so expensive that many 49ers just tossed their dirty shirts on the floor.
This week’s question: Who was known as “the rudest waiter in the world”?
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