Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [841]
The Cortlandt Street Board of the New York Telephone Company, 1894, by which time women “operators” were the norm. Observed a writer in the Metropolitan Magazine: “It may seem, to one visiting the operating room of a telephone exchange, that the girls appear uncomfortably like prisoners. The galley-slave of old, bound to his oar by chains, was not held closer to his work than these, with their curious headgear of steel bands and black auricles, and the short stretch of wire which holds them, literally by the head, at their places in front of the switchboard.” (General Research. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations)
By the mid-1890s there were twelve exchanges, each of which averaged 150,000 calls a day. Residential subscribers accounted for only 10 percent of this traffic, however, as household phones were far too expensive for most people (service was available at banks and drugstores). Only after the Bell patents expired in 1894, and independent companies rushed in, would phone service become more accessible.
Businesses, however, leapt to install the new instruments, with banks, brokers, professionals, the Stock Exchange, dry-goods firms, publishers, jewelers, and druggists leading the way. Phones promoted internal organizational coherence as well as communication with the outside world. Bankers and brokers scattered them through their offices. Department stores put instruments at sales counters. Factories installed them to keep the main office in touch with shop foremen. Engineers ran vertical wires along rising skyscrapers to allow contractors below to confer with foremen aloft. Once a tall tower was built, moreover, telephones eliminated the need for messengers to be endlessly riding up and down elevators to deliver telegrams. This helped make upper-story offices as profitable as ones nearer the ground. After long distance service arrived—New York was connected to Boston in 1884, Philadelphia in 1885, and Chicago in 1892—it also became easier for corporations headquartered in Manhattan to direct their far-flung operations.
Telephones were also deployed to help guard the central business district itself. In 1880 Chief Inspector Thomas Byrnes, head of the police department’s detective bureau, established a protective cordon around the Wall Street community, declaring Fulton Street a “Dead Line” south of which criminals (of the blue-collar variety) would not be tolerated. Using the new telephone, he connected Mulberry Street Headquarters to every station house. More conventionally, Byrnes saturated the financial district with police and maintained an elaborate system of underworld informants. Grateful businessmen like Jay Gould dispensed market tips, helping Byrnes accumulate a fortune of $350,000 on an annual salary of two thousand.
While New Yorkers were adopting the telephone, Edison was making other breakthroughs in sound, including a machine that could register and print voice patterns. By December 1877 his apparatus repeated words spoken into it in a faint metallic tone. With Barnumesque attention to publicity, he took the machine—the sound writer or “phonograph”—to the Manhattan offices of Scientific American. As one astonished participant recalled, Edison “turned a crank, and the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night.” On January 2, 1878, the machine went on display at the Western Union building. People came, heard, and were convinced.
Edison brimmed over with moneymaking ideas for the phonograph. He licensed two Brooklyn men to incorporate it into clocks and watches that would call out the time, wake people up, and emit advertising messages. He groped toward stereo by working up a two-sided disk, both sides of which could be played simultaneously. He aimed to marketan educational