Category Archives: Telephone history

SS Eastland Disaster, 1915

S.S. Eastland. Wikipedia photo.

S.S. Eastland in 1911. Wikipedia photo.

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the greatest loss of life in the history of the Great Lakes, the shipwreck of the SS Easland in Chicago on July 24, 1915.

The ship was commissioned in 1902, and served as a passenger and tour boat based in Chicago, with a dock on the Chicago River.  The ship had significant problems with listing from the start. The ship was topheavy, and the ship would list from passengers congregated on the top deck. In a 1903 incident, overcrowding caused water to flow up one of the ganglplanks.

On July 24, 1915, the ship and four other ships were chartered by Western Electric to take employees to a company picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. Ironically, safety measures on the ship made the ship more dangerous. In the wake of the Titanic disaster, ships such as the Eastland were required to carry a full set of lifeboats. The added weight on the deck probably made the top-heavy ship more dangerous.

Passengers, many of whom were low-wage immigrant Czech workers, began boarding for the picnic at 6:30 AM. By 7:10, the ship had reached its capacity of over 2500 passengers. The ship began to list to port (away from the wharf), and the crew attempted to stabilize by taking water into the ballast tanks. In the next 15 minutes, a number of passengers rushed to the port side and the ship lurched and rolled onto its side.

SS Eastland capsizied. Wikipedia photo.

SS Eastland capsizied. Wikipedia photo.

The river was only 20 feet deep, and the side of the ship rested on the river bottom. Because of the cool weather, many passengers had already moved below deck, and found themselves trapped. Some of them were crushed by heavy furniture as the ship suddenly tilted. Even though the ship was only 20 feet from shore, a total of 844 passengers and four crew members died in the disaster.

Most of the Western Electric employees had worked at the company’s Hawthorne works. While the plant was open the following Monday, the workers spent most of the day gathered in small groups mourning. The plant was closed on Tuesday and Wednesday for workers to attend funerals. Later that week, the entire Bell System declared a day of mourning, with only essential workers coming in to work, and with memorial services across the country.

A few weeks later, Alexander Graham Bell himself spent the day touring the factory and taking the time to stop at each work station and desk to speak to employees about the disaster.

The ship was raised in August and eventually sold to the Navy.  After conversion, she served as the U.S.S.  Wilmette, and served largely as a training vessel at Great Lakes Naval Base.  The ship was used until being scrapped in 1947.

References

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First Broadcasts: Paris, 1891, Newark, 1911.

Most will be surprised to learn when the first broadcasts took place. In other words, people in their homes could, for the first time, listen to music, news, or entertainment originating from a central studio. The answer, it turns out, is Paris in 1891, when the Theatrophone first started broadcasting.

The Theatrophone didn’t use radio–it broadcast programs to subscribers’ homes by telephone line into a dedicated telephone instrument. Surprisingly, despite the later competition from radio, the Paris Theatrophone held on until 1932. Similar systems were soon in operation in Budapest and London.

In about 1911, a group of New Yorkers were traveling in Budapest and were surprised to find the service available in their hotel. Upon doing some investigation, they decided to offer a similar service. It was decided to install the new system in Newark, New Jersey, and later expand to New York. They formed the New Jersey Telephone Herald Company and began operations either in late 1911 or early 1912.

NJTelHeraldRxThe drawings of the home receiver instrument and main studio shown here are from the June 1925 issue of Radio News.  The article notes how similar the studios of the Telephone Herald were to those of a radio broadcast station of 1925. Broadcasting took place from 9:00 AM to 11:00 PM daily, and included, music, news, market reports, and even bedtime stories.

The company leased telephone lines from the New York Telephone Company in order to bring the service to individual city blocks. From that point, the Herald had its own lines to run the programs to individual subscriber homes. There were some mechanical amplifiers used in the distribution process, consisting of telephone receivers and transmitters connected by a rod. The main downfall of the system was the limitations in amplifying the telephone signal, which could never get above headphone volume. As the Radio News article pointed out, the system would have worked quite well had vacuum tube amplifiers been available. But they were a few years off, and radio had a firm hold on broadcasting by the time they were available.

The New Jersey Telephone Herald office and studios.

The New Jersey Telephone Herald office and studios.

Interestingly, the New York Telephone Company was initially unwilling to lease the lines, and the Telephone Herald had to go to the New Jersey Board of Public Utility Commissioners to force the telephone company to lease the lines. The Commision agreed with the Telephone Herald.  The Commission held that the Telephone Herald was not a “public utility,” but instead just another telephone customer, and they telephone utility was obligated to make the lines available on the same terms as for any other customer.

The price of the service was $1.50 per month, or “five cents per day,” as the marketing people put it. At its peak, the New Jersey system had about 5000 subscribers. However, as the novelty wore off, many subscribers defected, and the service seems to have ended by the end of 1912.

A similar service, the Oregon Telephone Herald, was operated in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. The 1913 advertisement shown below is for the San Francisco Telephone Herald Company, which apparently never began operations, but planned a similar service.

References

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Liberty Bell Sounded, 1915

LibertyBell1915A hundred years ago, the Liberty Bell was sounded for the first time since 1835, and the sound transmitted by telephone to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. The photo here appeared in Popular Mechanics, May 1915.  (More details are available in that month’s issue of Electrical Experimenter.) The article also notes that a phonographic recording was made.  It was apparently recorded again in 1917, but it appears that neither recording has survived.

It was recorded again in 1944 as part of a D-Day broadcast, and there is also a computer-generated recreation of the bell’s original sound.  Both of those recordings are available at the National Park Service.

The same issue of the magazine carries an interesting article summarizing how the warring powers of Europe are using wireless as part of the war.

 

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Emergency Telephone Hookup

PhoneIntercom

It’s a relatively trivial matter to hook up two telephones so that you can talk from one to another. Virtually any old telephone can be used, and it’s simply a matter of placing a battery (the voltage is not critical) in series. So if you need to hook up two telephones to talk, it’s about as easy as it gets.

It’s more difficult, however, to figure out a way to make the other telephone ring. The telephone itself operates off DC. The ringer sounds when an AC voltage is applied. And there’s no particularly simple way of generating that AC voltage. The easiest way to solve the problem is to run a second circuit with a bell, buzzer, or light. If you want to talk to the other station, you push a button, a bell (separate from the phone) sounds at the other end, and the other person picks up the phone.

The ingenious arrangement shown above shows a way to wire it all up so that a single circuit can handle both the bell and the telephone line. When one station wants to call, he pushes the button to signal the other station. Then, both sides put the switch on position 2, and they can talk. This circuit, and all the details for constructing it, are found in the April 1966 issue of Radio Constructor, a British electronics magazine.

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US-Japan Radiotelephone Circuit, 1935

JapanOperatorSix years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, radiotelephone service was inaugurated between the United States and Japan. Shown here is Chiduko Kashiwagi, the Japanese telephone operator at the Tokyo end of the circuit. The radio link was between the transmitting stations at Dixon, California, and the receiving station at Komuro, Japan. The signals going the other way went from Nazaki, Japan, to Pt. Reyes, California. The control points were located at San Francisco and Tokyo, from which points the signals were linked to the respective national telephone networks.

JapanRXTo ensure secrecy, the signals were scrambled. The Komuro receiving station is depicted here. The U.S. transmitting station at Pt. Reyes had a signal of about 20,000 watts.

References

 

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Merry Christmas!

Santa1914Santa hasn’t changed a great deal over the last hundred years.  Here, he’s shown in a 1914 Ohio newspaper, answering the phone.

The accompanying advertisement reminds readers how much more convenient both Cristmas and life in general would be if they had a telephone installed in their homes.

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German Field Telephone, 1914

GermanFieldTelephone

A hundred years ago today, the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, November 30, 1914, carried this photo of a German field telephone in use.  The caption notes that the Germans’ extensive telephone network has made much trouble for the Allies.


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Army Signal Corps Field Buzzer, 1916

U.S. Army Signal Corps Field Buzzer. Technical Equipment of the Signal Corps: 1916.

U.S. Army Signal Corps Field Buzzer. Technical Equipment of the Signal Corps: 1916.

A hundred years ago today (September 21, 1914), the Calumet (Mich.) News carried an article entitled, “Communication Big Factor in Modern War Machinery,” which explained the technological developments in communications in use in modern warfare. The article runs down the developments in telegraph, telephone, and wireless in use in the war.

One that caught my attention was a rather ingenious telephone-telegraph that was used in situations where the lines were in poor shape. As the article points out, lines near the battlefield “are often laid at high speed, are of high resistance and are frequently leaky.” In those cases, it described a “special instrument known as the buzzer.”

It describes the instrument as a metal-lined leather case with a dry battery, induction coil and interrupter, key, telephone transmitter, and telephone receiver. It could be used as a field telephone, or by use of the buzzer, the key could send out an intermittent current which would traverse the line where the distant receiver would give out a sharp note. Thus, the telephone could be used to send Morse code via audio.

It notes that these “Morse signals are audible over an incredibly bad line.” It cites one case where a signal was successfully sent over bare wires lying on wet ground.

The schematic of the instrument is shown here:

The field buzzer itself is shown above as it would be carried, and it is shown dismantled here:

This diagram of a typical hookup of the buzzer shows its use with a line of dubious quality:

 

References

Camp Telephone for the Army, Telegraph and Telephone Age, July 1, 1917, page 302.


 

Completion of the Transcontinental Telephone, 1914

TranscontinentalTelephoneA hundred years ago, it became possible for the first time to make a telephone call from coast to coast. The September 1914 issue of Popular Mechanics reports that the line from Denver to San Francisco had been completed on June 17, 1914. On that date, crews working westward from Salt Lake City and eastward from San Francisco met at the Nevada-Utah state line. The lines were spliced together at a pole erected on the state line and “the last splice was accompanied by a ceremony much like that of driving the last spike on a transcontinental railway.”

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