indispensable, that the telephone would displace the telegraph in many business transactions, and that a man of business would have no more difficulty in talking with his agent a hundred miles away than in directing his servant through the speaking-tube. And he further stated that the telephone wires would yet be laid underground, as gas and water pipes are now laid. In Hartford, Mr. Gower explained the telephone and the many ways in which it could be utilized, and said:
And Smith will have a wire to the central office in Hartford, while his correspondent or branch house in Boston or New York will be similarly connected there. Smith will say to the hole in the wall: Switch me upon 500 State street, Boston. Whereupon the central officer will turn the little lever, and Smith may talk with his friend all day.
Back to that lecture in April, 1877, more than twenty-eight years ago, dates the conception of the movement that resulted in the establishment of the modern telephone exchange. For the earliest among all telephone exchanges were established in Connecticut, Bridgeport claiming the honor of the first mutual telephone exchange system, and Hartford the second; Ansonia, the first private exchange system in which a regular switching system and operator were employed; to New Haven rightfully belongs the honor of having the first commercial telephone exchange ever opened, while to Meriden is credited the second of the commercial exchanges. And the manner in which the telephone was introduced for public use in each place is indicative of the way in which it was first established in many other cities.
During the past twenty years Mr. Thomas B. Doolittle has been one of the most widely-known, capable and companionable telephone men in the country, and has planned a greater mileage of telephone pole lines than any other man. In 1887 Mr. E. J. Hall said: "The first really practical success in talking over long distances was the copper metallic circuit constructed between New York and Boston by Mr. T. B. Doolittle, for the American Bell Telephone Company, in 1883. The distance was about 300 miles, and I call it the first practical success because it was the first circuit that worked at all times regardless of outside electrical disturbances."
In 1874 Mr. Doolittle was a well-known manufacturer of metal goods in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During that year he assisted in the establishment of a social telegraph system, in which some twenty or thirty users of the Morse code were connected by telegraph circuits that terminated in a special switchboard in the Bridgeport office of the Atlantic and Pacific Telegraph Company, the necessary switching being performed by the local telegraph operator.
In June, 1877, the closing of the A. & P. telegraph office, through absorption by the Western Union, temporarily suspended this local service, and necessitated other arrangements. Having become a firm believer in the future of the telephone, Mr. Doolittle secured four pairs of Bell's wooden hand telephones, and placed one pair on each of four
