What Happened to America's oldest Telephone Network? (History of the Telephone) - IT'S HISTORY

Big thanks to Keeps for supporting the channel! Here’s the site if you want to check them out! > keeps.com/ItsHistory

I remember when you paid a monthly maintenance fee for the privilege of using ATT's phone. You weren't allowed to own a phone and in 1981, it became possible to use your own phone. We decided, since their phone was indestructible, to buy it from the company. It cost as much as the monthly fee and we could spread out the payments over a year. Then it became possible to buy phones from places like Radio Shack and instead of $36, they now cost $12. Oh how many hundreds of dollars we spent on phone rental over the years! No wonder ATT stock did so well.

The tower in the thumbnail is the Telephone Tower in Stockholm, Sweden. It was built in 1887 to hold the city's phone lines and was 45 meters (147 feet) high. It was torn down in 1952 after a fire.

For anyone interested in the slightly clickbaity thumbnail, and I know I’d seen it before; it’s the old Stockholm telephone tower. Used until 1913, it contained 5,500 lines. In 1952, up to that point serving as a billboard basically, it was damaged by fire and demolished. Hope this helps!

You intermix the manual exchange with the automatic (dial) exchange. In a manual exchange, lifting the handset from the hook lights an indicator next to the subscriber's jack and the operator inserts an "answering cord" into the jack and says "number, please". The operator then takes the corresponding "ringing cord" and inserts it into the destination subscriber's jack to complete the call. Or maybe a trunk line if the destination is in a different exchange. In an automatic exchange, lifting the handset causes the originating telephone to be connected to equipment which will accept the dialed digits, the automatic analog of the answering cord, at which time the caller hears a dial tone, the equivalent of "number, please". As the digits are accepted, a connection is built to the destination phone, similar to connecting the "ringing cord".

Fascinating! I worked at MCI during the dawn of VoIP and learned a lot about the history of telecommunications from my time there, but I learned so much more with this documentary. Very well done, sir!

The Bell system built the oldest and biggest computer utilizing the distributed computing power of its thousands of telephone switching offices. Connections from anywhere to a anywhere in seconds, sometimes using various paths and switces. All transparent to the caller. RIP MA Bell. NYCMNYBW01T

An old prominent business owner once told me this. A good business expands its market, a successful business controls it, but a true business benefits the market beyond its stake.

To echo other commenters, AT&T Long Lines communications network was an essential part of this history...

The early history of the telephone company was abridged quite a bit in the video. Early operators (my mother was one) would ask "Number please" and then make the connection for the subscriber. Dial telephones came later, and with them, the dial tone. Dial telephones did not require operators to complete a local call. BTW, the Morse code chart you showed was a later code, now standardized worldwide for radio use. The old telegraph system used the old railroad code.

I was born in 1965 and I remember party lines where everyone in your neighborhood could pick up the phone and hear your conversation and there was always a little old lady talking to another little old lady when you wanted to make a call. I'm glad those days are gone ;-)

This is very well done Tom - a touching and respectful tribute to a brave young man who died just as he became an adult. Peter

you should really do a headphone warning for that intro jingle

I wonder how many people watching this video ever actually used a rotary phone in their lives. I don't think pulse service has even been available in my area for around 20 years. Let alone the fact that everyone I know ditched pulse in favor of touchtone phones back in the early 90s.

Well done team! The look is MUCH better. Without the antique movie effects, the photos take on a life of their own. Thank you for making that change. Looks sooo much better!

It's not "center office", the common term for the local switching center was "central office".

At the end you mentioned Verizon, but an interesting thing is Southwestern Bell. SW Bell (as it later changed to) started in a partnership to form Cingular wireless. Sw Bell changed to SBC and bought some of the former Baby Bell regions. SBC the bought AT&T Corp. The new company is called AT&T Inc. They claim the AT&T history but the corporational structure is SBC.

This ep was fascinating! It waybacked me a lot. I had completely forgotten about all those MCI commercials & never knew what MCI stood for! I also didn't know that whole bell/verizon link. Entire time couldn't stop thinking about all those twisted pairs stretching out from every home, spidering out across the map...

I'd like to add my "well done" to the many that were given. I retired as a central office switchman and saw many innovation's through the years. Well done.

For those who think they remember the "old" phone system, I taught a class on the history of the telephone in the 80's. You missed a number of things; originally phone calls were only through an operator. The first automated switch was invented by a funeral home owner who didn't get calls because the wife of his competition was the local operator who directed calls to her husband. The law suit that finally brought the break up of the system was originally filled in 1949 and was settled because AT&T saw dollar signs in the unregulated market, they basically wrote the final solution. AT&T as a company finally went out of business and the AT&T of today came from a renaming of another company trying to capitalize on the name, that's when the logo changed. The day the break up was announced in 1983 we knew prices were going to increase which the did, by leaps and bounds. The 22 operating companies broke up into reginal companies and ALL the advantages that existed as a regulated monopoly when out the window. The public never understood the concept but no one was happy when their phone bills started going up.