498 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



indispensable, that the telephone would displace the telegraph in many 

 business transactions, and that a man of business would have no more 

 difficulty in talking with his agent a hundred miles away than in di- 

 recting his servant through the speaking-tube. And he further stated 

 that the telephone wires would yet be laid underground, as gas and 

 water pipes are now laid. In Hartford, Mr. Gower explained the tele- 

 phone and the many ways in which it could be utilized, and said : 



And Smith will have a wire to the central office in Hartford, while his cor- 

 respondent or branch house in Boston or New York will be similarly connected 

 there. Smith will say to the hole in the wall : Switch me upon 500 State street, 

 Boston. Whereupon the central officer will turn the little lever, and Smith may 

 talk with his friend all day. 



Back to that lecture in April, 1877, more than twenty-eight years 

 ago, dates the conception of the movement that resulted in the estab- 

 lishment of the modern telephone exchange. For the earliest among 

 all telephone exchanges were established in Connecticut, Bridgeport 

 claiming the honor of the first mutual telephone exchange system, and 

 Hartford the second; Ansonia, the first private exchange system in 

 which a regular switching system and operator were employed ; to New 

 Haven rightfully belongs the honor of having the first commercial tele- 

 phone exchange ever opened, while to Meriden is credited the second 

 of the commercial exchanges. And the manner in which the telephone 

 was introduced for public use in each place is indicative of the way in 

 which it was first established in many other cities. 



During the past twenty years Mr. Thomas B. Doolittle has been 

 one of the most widely-known, capable and companionable telephone 

 men in the country, and has planned a greater mileage of telephone 

 pole lines than any other man. In 1887 Mr. E. J. Hall said: "The 

 first really practical success in talking over long distances was the 

 copper metallic circuit constructed between New York and Boston by 

 Mr. T. B. Doolittle, for the American Bell Telephone Company, in 

 1883. The distance was about 300 miles, and I call it the first prac- 

 tical success because it was the first circuit that worked at all times 

 regardless of outside electrical disturbances." 



In 1874 Mr. Doolittle was a well-known manufacturer of metal 

 goods in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During that year he assisted in 

 the establishment of a social telegraph system, in which some twenty 

 or thirty users of the Morse code were connected by telegraph circuits 

 that terminated in a special switchboard in the Bridgeport office of the 

 Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, the necessary switching being 

 performed by the local telegraph operator. 



In June, 1877, the closing of the A. & P. telegraph office, through 

 absorption by the Western Union, temporarily suspended this local 

 service, and necessitated other arrangements. Having become a firm 

 believer in the future of the telephone, Mr. Doolittle secured four pairs 

 of Bell's wooden hand telephones, and placed one pair on each of four 



