USA > Connecticut > History of Connecticut, Volume III > Part 10
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On April 20, 1931, Peter J. Berry came to New Haven as vice president and general manager of the Connecticut Indemnity Com- pany, a casualty affiliate of Security. He devoted the next five years to the development of the casualty department. Then, at Mr. Roth's request, he became active in the fire insurance phase of operations as well. He was elected executive assistant, and still later, executive vice president of all companies in the Security group; and in Novem- ber 1938, he was elected president. Under his direction the Security Insurance Company continued to grow and prosper, to the extent of building a new and even larger office next to its home office site.
Five years ago. in 1956, Mr. Berry retired at his own request, from the presidency of the company. In September, 1957, E. Clayton Gengras, an aggressive young business man from Hartford, acquired a substantial financial interest in Security Insurance Company, and was elected to the presidency. One of his first acts was to invite Mr. Berry to return as chairman of the board of directors, a position which he holds today.
As of today, the Security-Connecticut Insurance Group comprises the Security-Connecticut Life Insurance Company, Security Insurance Company of New Haven, The Connecticut Indemnity Company, and The Fire and Casualty Insurance Company of Connecticut. The latter was acquired in November 1958. Two hundred and fifty people are employed at the home office, and branch offices are maintained in Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Louisville, New Orleans, Omaha, San Francisco, and Rockford, Illinois. The payrolls at these locations and in numerous field offices add another one hundred and fifty to the Group's personnel.
Having weathered the adversities of war and depression, fires,
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THIS DRAWING IS AN ACCURATE RE-RECREATION OF THE WORLD'S FIRST COMMERCIAL TELEPHONE EXCHANGE WHICH OPENED IN NEW HAVEN ON JANUARY 28, 1878.
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earthquakes and tornados, over one hundred and seventeen years, it is confidently expected that "New Haven's only surviving insurance company" is here to stay, and to thrive under its present capable leadership and their successors.
THE SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE COMPANY THE TELEPHONE IN CONNECTICUT
Ingenuity and enterprise of three Connecticut men led to the opening of the world's first commercial telephone exchange in New Haven on January 28, 1878.
Although Alexander Graham Bell had discovered the basic prin- ciple of the telephone in 1875, its use had been limited. Phones were generally leased in pairs, to connect a home and office, for example, but without interconnection to other users. In some cases, a group hooked several phones together in a private party-line system.
The idea of a central exchange to serve the general public came to George W. Coy of New Haven after hearing Bell lecture there on April 27, 1877. Coy was manager of a local telegraph office whose lines Bell had leased for his demonstration. Words of Bell's assistant stationed at Middletown were transmitted to audiences assembled at Skiff's Opera House in New Haven and Roberts' Opera House in Hartford.
Coy persuaded two fellow-townsmen, Herrick P. Frost and Wal- ter Lewis, to join him with a cash investment of $600. A young at- torney named Morris F. Tyler helped them incorporate as the "New Haven District Telephone Company." Coy built a crude switchboard and hired two boys as operators. They began service to twenty-one subscribers on January 28, 1878.
The first directory, dated February 21, 1878, listed fifty names, without addresses or telephone numbers. (Numbers were not used until 1889.) It also stated that the telephone office, then shut down between 2 and 6 a. m., would stay open all night after March I. Most of these fifty telephones were in downtown business places. Except for Coy, Frost, Lewis and their lawyer, Tyler, only eight others had residence telephones.
The telephones were connected by single wires run on trees and housetops, using the ground for the return circuit. When electric lights and electric street cars came into use, noisy electrical interference made conversation almost impossible.
Other Connecticut cities were not far behind New Haven in ac-
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quiring telephone systems. On January 31, 1878, another telegraph man named Ellis B. Baker opened in Meriden the second commercial telephone exchange in the world, using a switchboard patterned after the New Haven board. On July 8. Bridgeport became the third city in the state to have a commercial telephone exchange.
Hartford's telephone system began when a druggist named Isac Smith used a pair of telephones to connect his Capitol Avenue drug store with a nearby doctor's house, some time in 1877. Within a few months, several other doctors and a livery stable proprietor had joined the system in a sort of multi-party line. Its emergency value was drama- tically shown on the night of January 15, 1878, when a train wreck on the Connecticut Western Railroad at Tariffville killed ten pas- sengers and injured forty. Word of the disaster was telegraphed to the Hartford Western Union office, where the operator used his new telephone to rouse the night clerk at Smith's drug store. He in turn telephoned all the doctors he could reach and ordered a wagon from the livery stable to carry drugs and bandages to the Hartford depot. Seventeen doctors who responded were transported to give aid at the disaster scene. Their swift mobilization deeply impressed the public with the telephone's value.
When Smith's expanding telephone service began to interfere with the operation of his drug store, in April, 1878, he relinquished his agency to Frost and the New Haven group, who had also added Springfield and Holyoke to their field of operations.
The original New Haven District Telephone Company which had been capitalized at $5,000 was succeeded on May 28, 1878, by the Con- necticut District Telephone Company. On October 12, 1878, the name was changed to the District Telephone and Automatic Signal Company. Capital had by now been increased to $40,000, and the company oper- ated 949 telephones in its four cities.
Infringements upon Bell's patents brought rival companies into the business. In 1879 the Western Union Company withdrew from the telephone business. Its Connecticut exchanges were combined with Coy's exchanges in 1880 to form the Connecticut Telephone Company, which gave up the Massachusetts exchanges. President of this com- pany was Marshall Jewell of Hartford, a former governor of Con- necticut and postmaster general under President Grant.
In 1880. the Inter State Telephone Company was organized to build long distance lines connecting several cities in the East. This company and The Connecticut Telephone Company combined to form The Southern New England Telephone Company in 1882. Upon the
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death of Jewell in 1883, Morris F. Tyler became the president of this company. Then forty years old and well started on a brilliant law career, he was to lead the company through a period of reconstruction and growth from about 5,000 telephones to nearly 60,000 at his death in 1907.
An early crisis for the young company was the great blizzard of March, 1888, which so battered the lines as to require almost complete rebuilding. About this time, it was also decided to use two copper wires, instead of a single grounded iron wire, for intercity circuits-an extensive undertaking, but a major improvement which eliminated interference from nearby electric power lines. Local service was also converted to two-wire operation soon afterwards.
Using the telephone became easier with the introduction of the "common battery" system, starting in Waterbury in 1900. This elim- inated the separate battery at the subscriber's telephone and turning a crank to signal the operator. Although smaller towns used the old hand-cranked magneto telephones for some years thereafter, the im- proved system was rapidly introduced in the state's larger cities.
The early years of the twentieth century brought other technical advances. With the purchase of its first motor vehicle in 1904-a chain-driven Locomobile touring car-the telephone company began its shift from horse-and-buggy operations to one of the largest auto- motive fleets in the state.
Development of the "loading coil" in 1907 greatly extended trans- mission limits, and helped extend long distance lines to the Pacific Coast by 1915. That same year saw the first successful demonstration of radio telephony, when telephone experts sent speech by wireless 250 miles from Montauk Point, New York, to Wilmington, Delaware. Later that year, messages crossed the ocean to Paris, but World War I temporarily halted experiments. (Regular overseas radiotelephone service was established in 1927.)
Though hampered through World War I by shortages of equip- ment, materials and manpower, the telephone company was laboring to meet the demands of the busy industrial state. A new ten-story brick headquarters building was completed in 1917 on Court Street, New Haven.
Along with providing many special services for national defense, the company was supplying its full quota of men to the armed forces, the total reaching 260 by the end of the war : three gave their lives.
Wartime circumstances led the United States Congress to author- ize government control and operation of all telephone and telegraph
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systems. From July 31, 1918, to July 31, 1919 the Southern New Eng- land, along with all other wire communication companies, operated as an adjunct of the Post Office Department.
Among the company's problems at the end of World War I were an almost total depletion of plant margins; a dearth of materials for reconstruction : a shortage of instruments and an attendant backlog of unfillable orders; and finally, a scarcity of personnel, particularly of operators.
The challenging task of transition was vigorously undertaken under the direction of James T. Moran, who had become president of the company in February, 1917. A major step toward new efficiency was the introduction of dial telephone service, beginning in Hartford on June 10, 1922.
Improved handling of toll calls had begun in 1913 by changing methods so that only two operators, instead of four or five, were needed to handle a call. Between 1921 and 1926, average time required to complete such calls was cut from 4.3 minutes to 1.3 minutes. Fur- ther improvement came when operators began to dial out-of-town calls, in 1929.
On January 28, 1928. a bronze tablet was placed at the New Haven site of the world's first commercial telephone exchange to mark its 50th anniversary. In the ten busy years since World War I, the com- pany's telephones had doubled in number, now totaling 300,000.
To meet the needs of growth, major new telephone buildings were being constructed at Trumbull and Jewell streets in Hartford, and at Courtland and John streets in Bridgeport, when the stock market crash of October, 1929, foreshadowed the depression years ahead. In these trying years, the company was headed by Harry C. Knight, succeeding President James T. Moran, who retired in 1930.
The company barely managed to gain about 1,000 phones in 1931, and lost some 30,000 in 1932-about a tenth of its total. Although 9,000 more were lost in 1933, an upturn began in 1934. By the end of 1937, the total depression loss of 40,000 telephones had been re- covered.
The company's ability to cope with the forces of nature was also severely tested during the late 1930's. In March, 1936, an unprecedent- ed Connecticut River flood drowned out essential power equipment in the basement of one downtown Hartford telephone building. The business office in the newer building across the street was evacuated as water rose to a height later marked by a bronze tablet at just over six feet above the ground floor level. Speedy restoration of service
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was aided by nationwide resources of the Bell System. As a safeguard against another such crippling blow, power equipment was replaced on upper floors, main cables waterproofed by gas pressure, and bulk- heads designed to fit lower windows. These precautions proved their worth when a second major flood hit the city along with the great hurricane of September 21, 1938.
Although telephone buildings withstood the hurricane with little or no damage, wind and water played the same havoc with telephone lines as with other works of man.
The storm left poles toppled and lines snapped by falling trees, cables broken by the washing out of bridges, and exchanges crippled by power failures. The Southern New England Company counted 106,000 telephones silenced, 31% of all those it served.
Even as the hurricane was still roaring northward, telephone em- ployees were doing their utmost to keep the lines alive. In Mystic, they worked in a building surrounded by tidal waters. In New London, operators worked at the switchboards as a raging fire reached within one block of the building, while a company truck stood ready to batter through a rear fence if that route of escape became necessary. Flood waters again surrounded the Hartford building, but the bulkheads placed after the 1936 flood withstood the tremendous pressure of water. As failing commercial electric lines caused lights to flicker off, telephone offices were lighted by lanterns, candles, and emergency lighting systems.
The first step toward restoring interrupted service was to clear streets of wires and run lines for emergency service. Hundreds of men worked steadily at this through the night. The second step was to handle the enormous increase of traffic on damaged lines. The third step was to send out patrols through the dangerously littered roads to ascertain the extent of the destruction.
From the very beginning, the extensive and flexible resources of the Bell System came into play. On the evening of the first day, the nationwide Western Electric organization began to speed essential supplies to the stricken areas. Other Bell Telephone companies sent more than 2,000 telephone men in 600 fully equipped trucks into New England from as far away as Arkansas and Nebraska.
The task of restoration proceeded rapidly. Twenty carloads of extra poles were rushed from the south by fast freight. A special carload of wire from Indiana was attached to the Broadway Limited in Chicago, and delivered in New Haven on the following day. Under police escort, truck convoys moved day and night. Meanwhile, in the
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field, men from half the states in the union worked side by side with Connecticut telephone men, swiftly and efficiently. Service was com- pletely restored by October 13, 1938.
This memorable demonstration of high morale and efficiency was later honored by the National Vail Medal Committee with a bronze plaque, which was mounted in the Hartford telephone building.
Even as the hurricane passed, war clouds were gathering over Europe. The armed conflict which began in Europe in September, 1939, made American industry increasingly busy with production of material of war. And highly industrialized Connecticut demanded more telephone service than ever before. The state gained a record total of 22,934 telephones in 1940, and 38,720 more in 1941.
This nation's entry into the war on December 8, 1941, found the telephone company headed by a new president, Allerton F. Brooks, who had taken office when Harry C. Knight reached retirement age in November. Mr. Brooks had held positions of increasing respon- sibility in the telephone business since his graduation from Yale in I9II and had served as vice president and general manager since 1930.
Though the nation's telephone industry remained under private ownership and management during World War II, the War Produc- tion Board early in 1942 limited additional exchange service to places where lines and switchboards were already available, and later halted the manufacture of telephones for civilian use.
Military service took 744 employees, including 131 women; 13 gave their lives.
By stretching every facility, the telephone company was able to supply promptly all service essential to the war and most business needs. But requests for new service were far in excess of its capacity to meet them. When the war ended in 1945, the number of unfilled orders, nearly all for home telephones, had reached 34,693. Although it had been doing a bigger volume of business than ever before, the company's earnings were less than at any time during the previous thirty years. Taxes, wages and other expenses had steadily increased along with its rising volume of business. The company had not profited by the war-nor had it wanted to do so.
The first full-scale construction program since 1941 got under way in 1946, and the company's first stock issue since 1930 began a postwar series of such offerings to raise capital for expansion.
With the removal of federal price controls came the start of a constantly increasing price rise in commodity markets. It became increasingly evident that the company's balance of income versus
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outgo was getting out of hand and that action would have to be taken if the standard of service was to be maintained. The telephone rates which had been in effect for twenty years were increased by new schedules late in 1947.
An improvement in local telephone service, given new impetus in 1947, was called "extended local service." Customers welcomed this plan which enabled them to call without toll charge all telephones in adjoining exchanges with which they had a high community of interest. Also accelerated was a program which had been interrupted by the war, to provide divided ringing" so that a party-line user would hear only half the rings on his line, instead of all, as formerly.
Use of radio to replace wire lines in telephone service took a notable step forward in 1947. Designed primarily to test a new method of telephone communication, but with an eye to the ultimate needs of television networks, a chain of radio relay stations between New York and Boston was established by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. Spaced about forty miles apart, three of these stations were located in Connecticut-near Bristol, Glastonbury, and Stafford Springs. Toll dialing by operators was also being extended so that by 1948 they were able to handle three-quarters of all long distance calls over dial circuits. The year 1948 also saw the birth of the transistor at the Bell Laboratories, a device capable of performing nearly all the functions of a vacuum tube, and the most outstanding invention for many years in the field of communication.
With its acquisition of the Huntington Telephone Company in 1948, the Southern New England company was serving almost all the area of Connecticut. One independent company, the Woodbury Telephone Company, served that town and neighboring Bethlehem and Southbury. Most of Greenwich was served by the New York Telephone Company, and the village of Pawcatuck, on the Rhode Island border, by the Westerly Automatic Telephone Company.
The years immediately following World War II brought tremen- dous growth in the telephone industry, catching up with shortages caused by the war and keeping pace with the new needs and wants of Connecticut families and businessmen. The company's service became all-dial with the opening of a new dial office to serve 600 telephones in Cornwall on November 14. 1953.
New records of accomplishment lasted only long enough to be surpassed by newer records. But the year 1955, ten years after the war's end, makes a convenient point for reference. On January I, the company's presidency was assumed by Lucius S. Rowe, succeeding
Conn.III-9
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Allerton F. Brooks, who was nearing the retirement age. Requests for private lines were still in excess of the company's capacity to supply them. This unfilled demand for high quality service made a contrast with the war years when the number of people waiting for telephone service of any kind had reached a peak of 35,000 in August, 1945. Concentration on party lines, to provide the most service for the most people, had rapidly cleaned up these unfilled orders, but had in turn created a new demand for the better grades of service. The total number of telephones in use in the state had increased from 494,408 on VJ Day, August 14, 1945, to 998,000 at the end of 1955. The one million mark was to be reached early in 1956. The company's employees had increased from about 5,000 at the start of the war to more than 10,000 at the end of 1955. Both growth and inflation had helped increase the company's plant investment from $III,000,000 at the end of 1945 to more than $300,000,000 ten years later. The company's ownership had also been widened from about 8,500 stock- holders in 1945 to 46,000 in 1955.
Customers were welcoming new telephone services and increasing their use of others. Demands were mounting for more than one tele- phone in the home, colored telephones and automatic answering sets. Outdoor telephone booths were making service more readily available on rural highways and city streets. And in Hartford, the downtown telephone building had been enlarged from six stories to twelve to make room for complex equipment being installed to enable telephone users to dial their own calls to places throughout the state and across the nation.
This improved long distance service, called "Direct Distance Dial- ing," was inaugurated in Hartford and thirteen nearby exchanges in June, 1956. Hartford thus became one of the first large cities in the country to use this development, first publicly tested at Englewood, New Jersey, in 1951. Connecticut telephone numbers had been changed to a seven-digit system consisting of the first two letters of a central office name, followed by five numerals. This provided a different num- ber for every telephone in the state, so that users of the direct dialing system could dial anywhere in the state without encountering duplicate numbers.
Direct Distance Dialing was introduced in Stamford, Norwalk and surrounding areas later in 1956; New Haven and Waterbury in 1957: Meriden, Middletown and their neighbors in 1958. With the addition of the Bridgeport area early in 1959, more than four out of five Connecticut telephone users were able to "spin a dial and span
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a nation." Within their reach were millions of telephones in most of the states of the nation and parts of Canada.
The telephone business which started from scratch in New Haven in 1878 had grown to be one of the state's largest industries by 1960. At the end of that year, The Southern New England Telephone Com- pany was providing modern dial service to more than 1,271,000 tele- phones in homes and business places throughout the state. More than two-thirds of the homes served had private lines. Extra phones for convenience were also becoming commonplace; for every four homes with a single phone, there was another with one or more extensions. In some families, the children had their own line, listed in the directory under their own name. And phones in a variety of colors were being placed in kitchens, bedrooms and other corners of the bright new homes that had sprung up in profusion across the state.
Speedy telephone communications set the very pace of existence for business and industrial life of the state. Big business firms had dial telephone systems which in size matched that of a whole town. Department stores served customers on a statewide scale by combining free telephone order service with daily truck deliveries. Radio-tele- phones in cars and trucks kept highway travelers in touch with wire lines. Dozens of firms in the state used teletypewriter service to trans- mit written messages by wire, and others were beginning to link wide- ly-separated offices for integrated data processing through telephone lines.
New ways to use the service were constantly being found. School- boys, confined at home by illness, heard classroom work and recited their lessons by telephone. Sidewalk phones in bright red boxes gave a city's residents a ready means of calling fire engines, ambulance or police when needed. By dialing a telephone number, one could learn the time of day-or hear a word of prayer.
Telephone lines not only served the state, but helped guard it against aggression. Nike bases defending the state's industrial centers used complex electronic computers devised by telephone engineers and built in the same factories that produced telephone switching systems.
To keep the lines alive and the calls moving, nearly 5,000 men and 6,000 women were employed by The Southern New England Tele- phone Company, with an annual payroll of almost sixty million dollars. The facilities they operated were valued at close to $500 million, and owned by 75,000 stockholders, most of them Connecticut residents or institutions.
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