The First Telephone Exchange
Near New Haven, Connecticut
Two years after Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone, a New Haven doctor had one installed in his office. The year was eighteen seventy-eight. He noticed something immediately: if he had a telephone, it would be more useful if other people also had telephones. Not just his neighbors, but his patients, his colleagues, the pharmacist, the hospital. He contacted George Coy, a local telegraph superintendent, and the two men worked out the idea together.
On January twenty-eighth, eighteen seventy-eight, the District Telephone Company of New Haven began operating the world's first commercial telephone exchange. The switchboard connected twenty-one subscribers. Within months the list expanded. A directory was published, a single piece of cardboard listing fifty names. It was the first telephone directory in the United States.
The exchange required human operators to connect every call. When a subscriber picked up the receiver, an operator at the central board answered and manually connected the line to whichever number was requested. Early operators were men and boys, but within a year women began taking the job, and telephone operating became one of the first occupations open to women in large numbers in the United States.
The New Haven model set the template for the telephone network that followed.
