The electrical century: a snapshot of telephony at the turn of the century

The telephone as we know it was slightly less than a quarter of a century old in 1900. There were just over 1.3 million telephones in service that year in the United States, handling an average of about 7.7 million conversations per day. Almost all telephone connections worldwide were handled by live operators using cord-and-plug switchboards. The idea of supplying subscribers' telephones with electricity from the central office had just been introduced, eliminating the battery that had previously sat under every telephone set. Calls of more than 10 miles or so were still considered long distance, and Pupin had recently described the "loading coil", an inductance device that extended long distance calling many more miles. Still, an east-coast caller could only reach out as far as Omaha, NE, by 1900. Telephone companies were rapidly building trunk lines between cities at the turn of the century, creating the new long-distance service. It became the practice, at AT&T at least, to charge for these calls by the minute, thus they were called "toll" calls. Operators used written tickets to indicate the destination of the call and its duration. The United States, where telephony got its commercial start, did not always have the highest level of telephone service in the early years. At the turn of the century, the percentage of the population with telephone service was considerably higher in Canada than either the United States (with only 17.6 telephones per thousand population) or England.