The telephone's Boston roots

This year marks much more than the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We are also celebrating the 150th anniversary of the independence of oral/aural telecommunication, by virtue of Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876. Since we owe Bell a bell-ringing for making possible our cellphones in our pockets, at the ready to send and receive calls, text messages, photos, videos and much more, I wonder how many are aware of the phone's Boston roots. Stumbling on this c.1900 Facebook image of Court Street, I instantly recognized the Palace Theatre building on the right as where it all began, up in the cozy attic shown above.

109 Court Street, Boston, 1879. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

At that time, 109 Court Street was a handsomely modest brick rowhouse that blended so many architectural styles it was hard to categorize: Gothic (lancet arches), Romanesque (round arches), Neoclassical (paneled pilasters and Corinthian capitals) Victorian Brick (keystones and corbelled cornice), and French Second Empire (Mansard slate roof, which gave Bell the space to do his work in secret). Oddly enough, Bell's dormer blends the Gothic lancet with the Romanesque round arch. Perhaps this stylistic indefinition foreshadowed the unpredictable novelty of the telegraphic-telephonic experimentation taking shape up there at the hands of both its owner and his most famous employee.

Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory, as reconstructed at
185 Franklin Street (Verizon Building), Boston. Photo by
Carol M. Highsmith, courtesy of Library of Congress.

Bell's laboratory (here reconstructed in the lobby of the New England Telephone & Telegraph Building, later the Verizon Building, at 185 Franklin Street, Post Office Square, in the 1940s after 109 Court Street was demolished in 1931) occupied the attic after telegraphic instrument manufacturer Charles Williams Jr. set up shop in 1862 in the attic and the loft below at 109 Court Street, where he built a weight-driven telegraph he patented, and built a duplex telegraphy system for the Franklin Telegraph Company's use on its transmission lines between Boston and New York. In 1868, Thomas Alva Edison worked in Williams' shop, developing a self-adjusting relay, a stock printer, a fire-alarm-signaling telegraph, a vote-recorder for legislative bodies (which he patented), and a double transmitter for duplex telegraphy, all born in Williams' Boston office.

Williams rebuilt 109 Court Street as pictured above and to the right in 1868 after a fire, giving it tall windows and a dormered Mansard roof – elements of High Victorian Gothic architecture – to illuminate, expand, and externally express the high ceilings, roomy laboratories and sunlight needed for such detailed, in-demand work as telegraph instrument production for the telegraphy that had swept the country since Samuel B. Morse and Alfred Vail developed Morse code and the electric telegraph by 1844. Williams went on to patent a pocket-sized telegraph set (a forerunner to today's pocket phones!) and a Phelps/Western Union pattern camelback telegraph key, helping to make Boston a national leader in telegraph instrument manufacturing. This was the perfect opening for Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Augustus Watson to expand telegraphy into the vocal and aural realm. 

Williams hired Watson as a binding-post turner on a hand lathe, and soon Watson was learning about the scientific principles of electricity behind the telegraph inventors' work he was involved in through study from a library Williams provided and tutoring from Moses Farmer, a leading electrician, who manufactured the Thermo-Electric Battery in the same building.   

Painting of Alexander Graham Bell (left) and Thomas Augustus Watson (right)
in Bell's laboratory, 1876, artist unknown. Image courtesy of MIT Museum.

Alexander Graham Bell, Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory, arrived in Williams' shop early in 1874 while working with Farmer on an apparatus and went straight over to Watson for assistance with a transmitter and a receiver of a harmonic telegraph he was developing, that he hoped would send 6-8 messages at diverse pitches at the same time over a single wire.

After failing in this attempt, Bell, an aficionado of sound, language, speech and elocution since growing up with a deaf mother, offered another proposal to Watson in 1875: "If I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air vries in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech."

Beginning on June 2, Bell and Watson experimented away together in that attic with sending multiple telegraph messages at the same time over one line among three stations, two in Bell's office, one in Watson's room. Each station's transmitter and receiver contained a spring steel reed placed over an electromagnet and clamped at one end so its vibration's pitch could be adjusted to get the right pitch on both the transmitting and receiving ends. This led to his disovery of a way to produce a varying electromagnetic circuit, the first step in his development of the telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone prototype, 1876.

To keep this experiment in secret until it could be patented, Bell leased two rooms half a mile from Williams' shop in the attic of 5 Exeter Place in Boston's Bay Village, where Watson set up a lab. Bell received his telephone patent on March 7, 1876, and the magic moment occurred on March 10 when Bell spoke into Watson's reed receiver between the Exeter Place rooms, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you."

Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone prototype, 1876, full version. Photo: Zubro.

While Alexander Graham Bell promoted and developed his life-changing invention by exhibiting it in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876 and sending the first phoned-in news dispatch to The Boston Daily Globe from Salem to Boston the following year...

...its birthplace went through a development of its own. By the 1890s, theater impresario William Austin had converted it into the New Palace Theatre, replacing its neoclassical first floor with a wide-arched theater entrance to lure audiences into its live stage variety and vaudeville acts...

...which eventually was replaced with a larger, wider, single-arched entrance with more prominent electric signage, to make room for a more comprehensive box office and to make the theater stand out and flash its lights on the street, especially in the evening, when most performances took place. 

Even in its reincarnation, the New Palace Theatre was dubbed "The Birthplace of the Telephone" in its publicity, perhaps to double the theater's drawing power by landmarking it as a place where history was made (even though the actual history was made at 5 Exeter Place; only the experimentation that led to the birth of the telephone was performed at 109 Court Street).

The New Palace Theatre, 109 Court Street, 1916.

By 1916, the New Palace Theatre was showing Charlie Chaplin film comedies, as well as early silent serial films and cliffhangers. 

In his book The Birth and Babyhood of the Telephone, based on an address he delivered before the Third Annual Convention of the Telephone Pioneers of America at Chicago, on October 17, 1913, Thomas A. Watson himself wrote, "The building where these first telephone experiments were made is still in existence. It is now used as a theater. The lower stories have been much altered, but that attic is still quite unchanged and a few weeks ago I stood on the very spot where I snapped those springs and helped test the first telephone thirty-seven years and seven months before."

Marker of the site of the birthplace
of the telephone. Photo by Stephen Z.

Alas, no more. The New Palace Theatre and The Garrett – the nickname Bell and Watson gave to the attic "where Bell Verified the Principle of Electrical Speech Transmission," in Watson's words – fell to the wrecking ball in 1931, as another example of Boston's reluctance to preserve its past as living, breathing historic landmarks for future generations, just like the Province House and Hancock Manor I discussed in previous posts. But had 109 Court Street survived, it would have likely fallen in the annihilation of Scollay Square for the construction of Government Center in the 1960s. For now a marker with a relief image of Alexander Graham Bell's first telephone marks the site where it all began – and what we can no longer see, as Bell's laboratory reconstruction was dismantled when the Verizon Building was sold around 2009. At least that phone in your pocket preserves the memory.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

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