Top 50: New Haven was birth place of the modern telephone

Cable laying in the Quinnipiac River, from the Southern New England Telephone Company Records, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library, Storrs. Cable laying in the Quinnipiac River, from the Southern New England Telephone Company Records, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library, Storrs. Photo: Archives & Special Collections UConn Library Photo: Archives & Special Collections UConn Library Image 1 of / 36 Caption Close Top 50: New Haven was birth place of the modern telephone 1 / 36 Back to Gallery

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of 50 stories this year that will highlight Greater New Haven.

Telephone communications wouldn’t be what they are today if it weren’t for a man named George Willard Coy.

Coy, who lived in Milford and worked in New Haven, is known as the inventor of the first commercial telephone exchange.

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It might be hard to imagine, but before Coy’s invention, phone calls were made person-to-person between two units — usually one at home and one at the office. But a switchboard allowed anyone with a telephone to connect with anyone else with a telephone within the same exchange. Coy’s switchboard was the first such invention in the world.

How it all began

The year was 1877. Alexander Graham Bell came to New Haven that April to demonstrate the telephone, which he had invented the prior year. He was speaking to a small crowd at Skiff’s Opera House, and a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a manager of the local Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Co. was in the audience.

That man was George Coy. Inspired by Bell’s talk and demonstration of a phone call between Middletown and New Haven that ended up in an unintentional three-way call with a man in Hartford, Coy started researching the commercial application of telephones. He suffered a small setback when he learned a local Western Union manager had secured the rights to a New Haven Bell franchise and was already building lines.

“This was a disappointment, but while forced to relinquish his plans, the project still absorbed his thoughts, and he never lost his enthusiasm for it,” according to an interview with Coy run in the Telephone Bulletin in 1911.

When Coy found out the Western Union manager backed out of the franchise deal, Coy quickly jumped in and applied for his own Bell franchise. Thanks to the backing of partners Walter Lewis and Herrick Frost, the franchise was granted on Nov. 3, 1877.

As part of the franchise, Coy would make 15 percent on all leased telephones and 10 percent on all call bells leased or sold, according to a letter from a Bell Co. attorney saved in the telephone company’s files housed in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut Library.

Competition way before Apple and Samsung

Coy had difficulty in securing outside help and “even those interested in the invention rather discouraged his exchange as being ‘too complicated,’ ” according to the Telephone Bulletin article.

“He at once found that he could not depend upon other than his own efforts and initiative to make progress,” the article said.

There was also a dispute between Coy and Thomas Doolittle, of Bridgeport, over who should be allowed to do business in the Naugatuck River Valley, which Coy described as “the cream of this county.”

Once Doolittle agreed to give the Valley to Coy, Coy sent a letter back, saying, “I shall take especial pains to help Doolittle if he wants any advice from me about running wires, etc.”

While working out the details for his new venture, Coy was getting pressured by the telegraph bureau that employed him, saying he should stay away from the telephone business or he would lose his job there.

“I am ready to push this telephone business and must decide very quickly what I will do,” Coy wrote on Dec. 25, 1877, in a letter to a Bell Co. attorney.

A week later, Coy resigned from Atlantic and Pacific.

The District Telephone Co. was founded on Jan. 15, 1878, and on Jan. 28, it was ready to open for business in a small, rented office in the Boardman Building at the corner of Chapel and State streets in New Haven. Coy served as secretary and superintendent of the company.

Before circuit boards: The first switchboard

The first switchboard was built according to Coy’s design — 3 feet wide and 2 feet high with 24 wires connected to three clock dials. It was assembled with a mix of teapot lid handles, millinery wire from hats, ladies’ bustle wire and carriage bolts. Galvanized iron wires were run on trees and house tops on a grounded circuit.

“In the beginning, they used the cheapest materials because they just couldn’t afford anything else,” said Laura Smith, archivist at the Dodd Center, where a majority of the telephone company’s historical documents reside. “They just didn’t have enough money to build the company.”

Frost had advanced $600, and the three men started the company with a capital of only $5,000.

“All the furnishings of the office, including the switchboard, were worth less than $40,” an article on the Milford Hall of Fame website says.

When the exchange went live, there were 21 subscribers at $1.50 per month. By Feb. 1, 1878, when the first telephone directory in the world was published, in New Haven, there were 50 subscribers. Among them were 11 homes, three physicians, two dentists, four meat and fish markets, the police, the Post Office and the Register Publishing Co.

The New Haven Flour Co., New Haven Folding Chair Co. and the American Tea Co. were among the first stores to sign up for the exchange, according to the one-sheet directory now housed at the Dodd Center. Coy, Frost and Lewis were among the 11 whose private homes connected to the exchange, in addition to the Rev. John E. Todd, the first person listed on the one-page directory.

A long way to global calling

“Still it was limited as only two conversations could be handled simultaneously and six connections had to be made for every call,” according to the Milford Hall of Fame website.

The bottom of the directory noted that calls could only be made between 6 a.m. and 2 a.m., but after March 1 that year, the office was expected to be open all night.

“The first telephones used were of the wooden case type, and used alternately as a receiver and transmitter,” according to the Telephone Bulletin article where Coy was interviewed. “The necessity for the subscriber to shift the receiver from ear to lips, and vice versa, made the conducting of the conversation an absorbing occupation.”

At first, boy operators handled all calls at the switchboard. However, people complained about their rudeness, so eventually women were hired to handle all calls, according to a 1998 article in the New York Times. It was unusual for a business to employ women at that time, but by 1908, the company — now known as Southern New England Telephone — had opened the first operators’ school in the country for women.

Telephones increase in popularity

Customers continued to sign up for telephones. In 1886, there were 1,165 telephones in New Haven, and about 5,600 in total in Connecticut, according to an unsigned 1947 company letter in the SNET collection at the Dodd Center. By 1947, there were 600,000 telephones in the state — 80,884 of them in New Haven, the letter said.

“The principle was that the value of the service to subscribers increased as the number of subscribers increased,” the letter said, adding that when the butcher, the baker and personal friends all had telephones, the average resident felt the need to have one, too.

The 1947 company letter also speculated that due to the demand in service, “mobile telephone service, enabling people to telephone from automobiles, will be in operation soon.”

Another 30 years went by before that happened.

Several decades after Coy’s invention, there were records questioning who had actually created the first commercial switchboard.

“He was not given credit at the very beginning,” Smith at the Dodd Center said. “He himself had to prove that he did it.”

Coy wrote letters providing drawings and descriptions of his idea, asserting that he did, in fact, invent it before anyone else.

“Prior to 1877 there had been, according to Mr. Coy, no successful attempt to bring subscribers’ lines into touch with each other through a central agency, for commercial purposes, making it possible for any business house, officer or residence to call and be called from every other station connected to the system,” according to the Telephone Bulletin article.

Many others who claimed to be first had simply operated private telephone lines, which were later connected to central offices and turned into exchange systems, Coy told the reporter for the article.

Coy eventually was credited with the honor of being first. But other companies across the country were quickly catching on and catching up, building their own telephone systems. In 1880, the National Telephone Exchange Association was formed and held its first meeting in Niagara Falls, New York, to ensure that all technologies developed across the country would be compatible with each other.

Coy moves on

Coy sold his shares and left the telephone company after just a few years and instead started working in “telephone affairs” in New York City, his Milford Hall of Fame biography says. Phone company records also say he worked in Baltimore in the 1880s.

Coy used the money from his shares to buy a large house on Broad Street in Milford, where he lived until the last years of his life. He died Jan. 23, 1915, at the Soldiers’ Home in Chelsea, Mass. His death certificate lists his occupation as a “retired electrician.” Coy is buried in Milford Cemetery, in a family grave where his wife and three children were later buried, as well.

The business of talking booms

The District Telephone Co. of New Haven became the Connecticut Telephone Co. in May 1880, when it received rights to serve all of Connecticut and Western Massachusetts. It later became the District Telephone and Automatic Signal Co.

In 1882, it merged with the Interstate Telephone Co. of New York to form Southern New England Telephone, which became a subsidiary of SBC Communications of San Antonio in 1998. SBC acquired AT&T and took that company’s name. It later sold its Connecticut lines to Frontier Communications.

In 1998, when SBC Communications took over and moved communications headquarters to San Antonio, a large collection of the SNET history, including all the details about the first switchboard and telephone directory, were donated to the Dodd Research Center, which has the largest business collection in the state. Along with the donation was a substantial grant to help organize and preserve the records.

“SNET was very proud of its history,” said Smith, at the Dodd Center.

When the records were first donated in 1998, another librarian at the Dodd Center told the New York Times the same thing, adding that “they kept things other companies wouldn’t keep.”

“There was a concern that all this information not be lost, because of the personal pride they have in what they accomplished,” William J. Uricchio told the Times. “It is important for people to realize that Connecticut has long been a leader in communications.”

The first telephone booth was invented in Bridgeport by Thomas Doolittle in 1878 — the same man Coy had promised to help after a turf war about the Valley. The first coin-operated public telephone was installed in Hartford in 1889, according to a 2016 article in Time Magazine.

Doolittle also developed telephone lines using hard, drawn copper wire for better transmissions, similar to copper wire used in modern telephone lines, according to the New York Times.

The Boardman Building

While the early telephone company records are preserved from 140 years ago, the same can’t be said for the building where those first phone calls were exchanged.

The Boardman Building was made a National History Landmark on Jan. 29, 1964, then known as the Metropolitan Building, according to the National Park Service . The designation was withdrawn in 1973, when the New Haven Redevelopment Agency got approval and funding to tear it down and turn the space into a parking garage.

George Willard Coy and the building where the first commercial switchboard was used may be long gone, but they are not completely forgotten.

Last fall, A Broken Umbrella Theatre company in New Haven performed its 11th original work called “The Exchange,” inspired by Coy and his invention. That project, performed during the City-Wide Open Studios in October, started with a mobile storytelling station, where people in retirement communities throughout the region shared personal stories about the telephone. The stories became the inspiration for the final production, according to the theater company’s website.

The Milford Historical Society also included Coy in an exhibit featuring Milford notables in summer 2015, where he was said to be an “inventor who changed the world.”

Today, there are telephones not just in every home, business and public building, but in almost everyone’s pocket across the country.

In fact, the number of cellphones used in the United States exceeded the country’s population back in 2011, with 327.6 million phones in use compared to a population of 315 million, including Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the Washington Post .

By 2016, more than half of U.S. homes only had cellphone service and had given up their landlines, according to a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Today, there are an estimated 7.2 billion mobile devices used in the world — and about 328 billion of them are used in the United States.