Head Style: head36 – 36 Point, 1 deck, Minion-RegularBDN95, Plain; 39; 5 col

Body Spec: Body Text; colw: 10p0; depth:9.39 (in.)

Telephones invaded the back woods a century ago

Mainers were finding a growing number of uses for telephones a century ago. Take funerals, for instance. What may have been the first (and quite possibly the last) funeral conducted over the telephone occurred in Auburn during the winter of 1907. The Rev. Arbor J. Marsh murmured words of consolation over the telephone wire to Mr. and Mrs. Pliny W. Sturtevant on the death of their 2-year-old son from diphtheria. The house was under quarantine, said the Bangor Daily News on March 27, so the Rev. Marsh was unable to attend.

Most telephones were still confined to cities and large towns, but they also were being strung to isolated logging camps, islands and farms. Great Northern Paper Co. had routed phones to such remote places as Pocwocamus and Sourdnahunk, in the heart of the Maine wilderness, reported the Bangor Daily Commercial on March 12, 1907. These phones often were located in wooden boxes spiked to big trees attached to miles of wire. Imagine what a shock it must have been to encounter one of these while trying to retrace the trail of Thoreau.

During the log drive, an employee could run along the river for miles, reporting jams and other problems to his boss on the phone. But, alas, these phones were one more hindrance to experiencing the “glamor and fascination” of a trip through the northern wilderness, the newspaper writer lamented.

Farmers also were rapidly recognizing the value of telephones to summon physicians or to “spread the gossip.” “[T]here are many villages in this state with not over 200 or 300 inhabitants which have telephones installed in as great a proportion as some of the cities,” said the Commercial on July 21, 1906.

Sometimes, however, it was necessary to overcome the suspicions of rural folks. One farmer angrily ordered linemen to move his new line from over his chicken house after his hens laid fewer eggs.

Islanders were another group interested in telephones. The inhabitants of Sutton’s, Little and Big Cranberry isles had just had a “submarine cable” put down on the ocean bottom for 21/2 miles, the Commercial reported on June 14, 1907. Before it could be installed, the heavy cable reel fell through a wharf at Mount Desert Ferry and had to be salvaged. “There will be pay stations on each of the three islands that the service may be available to all the inhabitants,” said the newspaper.

Meanwhile, expansion of telephone systems in cities was truly impressive. Subscribers to New England Telephone and Telegraph Co. in Bangor and Brewer had tripled in four years from 1,200 to 3,600, the Commercial reported on Sept. 7, 1907.

There was then room for 30 operators at the “operating board.” Fourteen handled local calls and the rest did long distance. The exchange was handling 26,000 local calls a day and 1,400 to 1,500 toll calls. At peak times, more than 2,000 calls an hour were processed on average. The company planned to add 15 operators and a new board just to handle toll calls, leaving the big board for local work, said the newspaper.

The operators also were improving their speed and efficiency. The average time of a call from the moment the subscriber removed the receiver until the operator answered was exactly three seconds for day calls and 2.8 seconds for night calls, an improvement of half a second since the last inspection was made, the newspaper reported.

Of course, it took longer to actually make a call. The phone user had to turn a crank to get an operator’s attention and, after she plugged a cord into the switchboard, would ask her for a number. Then the operator had to test the desired line to see whether it was busy, before plugging in a second cord to create a circuit and ring the number manually, sometimes repeatedly. After the caller hung up, he was supposed to signal the operator to pull out both cords to disconnect the circuit. Long-distance calls took much longer, requiring contacts with multiple phone exchanges.

Operators averaged about 230 calls an hour. The Bangor exchange had the distinction of having the fastest operator in New England Telephone and Telegraph’s service area, a young woman who could handle 400 calls an hour, said the Commercial.

The telephone company was doing everything in its power to convince people to install phones. Large advertisements ran in the newspapers offering free trials. Newspaper infomercials taught telephone etiquette. One piece was titled “The Art of Telephoning.” It offered this rudimentary advice: ” Look up numbers before calling ‘Central’; be prompt about answering your own telephone bell when it rings [an operator was waiting as well as the caller]; take pains in speaking.” That meant don’t shout.

But the original telephone needed no more selling than the cell phone would years later. It had been only 27 years since the Bangor Telephone Co. was founded. A Commercial reporter figured in 1907 there was one telephone for every eight residents of Bangor and Brewer. Today there are probably eight telephones or more for every resident of some communities, if one counts the extensions and the devices such as cell phones and computers used for instant communication in homes and businesses.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net Thanks to the folks at the Telephone Museum in Ellsworth for providing a demonstration of how a switchboard worked a century ago.