In 1885, “telephone girls” operated a pyramid-style switchboard at Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Co. on East Main Street. (Photo courtesy The Cook Collection, The Valentine)
The new sensation required wires strung from the second story of W. J. Anderson’s stove shop at 830 E. Main St. near Capitol Square across to the Young Men’s Christian Association hall. On May 22, 1877, a device called a “telephone” received public demonstration.
That night at the YMCA hall, Charles H. Winston, a Richmond College professor of advanced grammar, psychology and elementary science, lectured — and not for the first time that spring — on the technology’s scientific principles and its possibilities.
Winston’s presentation for a large and receptive audience included music transmitted from a nearby building. The tunes came across with “great accuracy and clearness,” The Daily Dispatch noted, adding, “There was not quite as much success with the vocal sounds, owing to the unavoidable imperfections of the instruments employed.”
Professor Winston might have spoken of how the term for the device derived from the Greek “telephon,” meaning “far speaking,” which entered the lexicon in 1796 to describe a nonelectrical German system of megaphones. An assortment of 19th-century inventors claimed the word. Then, the experiments of British-born speech therapist and teacher of the deaf Alexander Graham Bell and young machinist Thomas A. Watson yielded the first telephonic device on the evening of March 10, 1876.
The C&P building on East Grace Street, as seen in 1930 (Photo courtesy Dementi Studio)
The race commenced to get the country talking.
“The C&P Story: Service in Action,” a book by Joseph H. Cromwell, explains how Bell and his financial backers sought funding for this “brand new, untried business in which workers solved problems ... with common sense or trial-and-error procedures. To make it more difficult, people were skeptical of the ‘new-fangled contraption.’ ”
Several Boston men with the National Telephone Co. brought the telephone to Richmond, viewed as a gateway to the South. The newcomers included James M. Ormes, James D. Tracey and David I. Carson.
At first, boys operated the switchboard. Historian John Brooks calls male operators “an instant and memorable disaster.”
Ormes chartered the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Co. in New York. Carson and Tracey organized the first Richmond exchange that went into service on April 1, 1879, at 1219 E. Main St. The initial 38 subscribers included Dr. Hunter McGuire; Asa Snyder, whose foundry created the cast iron stairs of Old City Hall and many of the coal chute hatch doors on Richmond houses; the 1 W. Franklin St. residence of banker John Patteson Branch; lawyer Joseph Bryan; and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Co.
The first telephone wires ran along 17th, Dock, First and Broad streets, often strung across rooftops or attached to trees because telephone poles hadn’t yet proliferated. The city’s initial switchboard, 16 feet long and 18 inches wide, had four discs similar to clock faces mounted to its front.
“A series of numerals, together with a long hand similar to the hand of a clock, appeared on each disc,” Cromwell writes. He details these early switchboards resembling the bell-call board of “Downton Abbey.” The repeating or vibrating telephone ring didn’t then exist. A bank of 25 single-strike call bells ran along the ceiling. Each bell carried a number. When the bell dinged, the operator stood from the small bench to turn the hand of the device to the number calling and thus connect the operator to the caller.
Each telephone instrument served as both transmitter and receiver. The responding operator placed the phone in front of his mouth to say, “Hello,” then moved the instrument to hear. This continued until 1878, when a separate transmitter devised by Massachusetts technician Francis J. Blake went into use and was installed here by Wythe White, who ultimately retired from the phone company in 1930.
At first, boys operated the switchboard. John Brooks, in “Telephone: The First Hundred Years,” calls male operators “an instant and memorable disaster.” The historian describes the young men who operated these early exchanges as “unruly and unreliable” at a time when the balky equipment and inexperienced customers demanded “patience and calm.”
The boys went out — and often up into management.
C.E. McCluer, first district superintendent of the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Co., started his job on Oct. 1, 1880. He oversaw the redesign of the magneto switchboard, hiring a cabinetmaker to create from black walnut a pyramidal, one-legged switchboard. Fittings of plugs and battery strips came from salvaged magneto sections. This innovation allowed the exchange to grow from 200 stations to almost 500 — the capacity of the pyramid board.
Women became the operators. Cromwell quotes an observer from the 1920s: “When males had business to transact in the operating rooms, they entered cautiously and under the watchful eyes of the chief operator. It was indeed a woman’s world.”
Southern Bell in 1902 acquired property to erect its first planned telephone building at 711 E. Grace St.; the lot and three-story building with a basement cost $31,670.
On Oct. 8, 1912, Southern Bell became the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Co. of Virginia. By then, the firm serviced 39,396 phones in a territory between Richmond, Norfolk and Lynchburg.
Evolving models at the Virginia Telephone Museum (Photo by Harry Kollatz Jr.)
Richmond’s western growth and expansion of telephone use prompted construction of the exchange building at 2615 Stuart Ave in today’s Fan District. C&P sought a design that “harmonized with its surroundings,” unlike the present Verizon building, some might say.
The growth of operations in Virginia spurred construction of a third building on East Grace Street from 1928-29, designed by New York architects Voorhees, Gmelin & Walker, who specialized in Art Deco skyscrapers. “Later additions are not as interesting as the original building,” historian Robert Winthrop writes with characteristic accuracy in “Architecture in Downtown Richmond.”
The 1984 breaking up of C&P into “Baby Bells” converted it into Bell Atlantic-Virginia, and after Bell Atlantic’s 2000 union with GTE, the entire system took on the unusual name of “Verizon.”
Flashback is grateful for the assistance of Jan Belote, of the Old Dominion Chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America, and the staff of the Virginia Telephone Museum. The museum, jammed with notable telephonic artifacts, is housed deep within the old C&P, now Verizon, headquarters at 713 E. Grace St.
