Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [840]
News of this invention factory reached Western Union, then under Vanderbilt control. The firm summoned the twenty-four-year-old to company headquarters and proposed to help him perfect his device and let him test his models on Western Union lines. When Edison succeeded, however, the Vanderbilts refused his asking price for the rights. Aware that his Philadelphia backers had been weakened by the Panic of 1873, they figured the inventor would come to terms. They were right: with his debts mounting, Edison gravitated, as he always would, to where the money was that would fund his experiments and sustain his household, and in the crunch, the money proved to be in New York, not Philadelphia.
Edison moved from Newark twelve miles south to the farming village of Menlo Park, remote yet easily accessible to Manhattan (it stood three hundred yards from the railroad station). Here he established the first significant industrial research laboratory in the United States. Edison now spewed out inventions—cooking up plans, and sometimes models, for electric pens, dental drills, and fax machines. Occasionally he would break for a weekend jaunt to New York, dining with his wife at Delmonico’s and spending the night at the Astor House, or carousing with cronies at music halls and theaters, losing himself in the Bowery’s nighttime throng.
In early 1877, in Boston, Alexander Graham Bell transmitted vocal sounds—conversation itself—over the long lines. Bell exhibited the instrument in New York, giving lecture-demonstrations at Chickering Hall. Western Union assigned Edison to producing an improved apparatus, which they hoped would be distinctive enough to ward off patent infringement suits. Edison came up with a receiver that could amplify sounds more loudly. He arranged a long distance concert and had piano selections wired in from Philadelphia to a huge audience, including Professor Bell, jammed into Steinway Hall. By December the device was in production by the new American Speaking Telegraph Company, hustled into existence by Western Union investors, and Edison, at thirty-three, was one of the richest men in the country. But Western Union lost the ensuing legal and technological war and, threatened on its flank by Jay Gould, agreed to stay out of telephony if the Bell forces would stay out of telegraphy. Local telephone service therefore came to the metropolis under the corporate aegis of the Boston-based American Bell Corporation.
In May 1878 American Bell licensed a Metropolitan Telephone and Telegraph Company to commence service in an area thirty-three miles in all directions from City Hall. In March 1879 subscribers—who paid sixty dollars a year, soon upped to $150—were linked together by New York’s first telephone “exchange,” at 82 Nassau Street, and listed in the first directory, a small card listing 252 names. To reach a subscriber users turned a crank, lifted the earpiece, and asked the “operator” to connect them. At first, following the telegraph industry model, young men were used as operators, but their rowdy switching-room behavior—they drank beer, fought, and swore at customers—proved ill adapted to an industry that still had to seduce clients away from telegraphy. Native-born white women came presocialized with the proper decorum, and the new “Hello Girls” proved successful at soothing irate customers (equipment and connections being frustratingly unreliable). Many clients came to consider “Information” operators like Miss Katherine M. Schmitt, who joined the company in 1882, as being what she described as a “combination