Long Distance Telephone

I guess the first thing to note is that in the early days of the industry, there were many hundreds of small, local telephone companies. Many, many of these quickly became part of the Bell System or competitors like General Telephone, but others stayed independent into the 1970s or later. So I’ll be speaking about general trends, and undoubtedly there were exceptions around the country.

Once the novelty of a single circuit connecting a plutocrat’s factory office with his home wore off, it became clear that the value was in the network effect: connecting a critical mass of a town’s businesses and consumers. So the business model was setting up an exchange, which allowed any phone to be connected to any other, and persuading homes and businesses to become subscribers. The burden of recordkeeping meant that nearly all these initially allowed unlimited numbers and extent of connections to others (no paying per call), though the supervision of human operators meant that someone keeping a line in use around the clock would be noticed and somehow discouraged. In some big cities, apparently pricing per thousand calls was available; I’m not sure what sort of automated recordkeeping would have allowed this approach. Monthly bills were mailed to subscribers. A delinquent subscriber would have his switchboard jack flagged, so that connections would be declined, or in the automatic era, shunted to a recording. In many cities, competing phone companies sprang up for a short period, without connections to the other, so businesses needed to have a phone from each company. This competition often originated with a new company that saw a business opportunity in using the new Strowger switching equipment to allow subscribers to dial their own calls, so it was common to see period advertisements showing that Gower's Pharmacy could be called at either Main 5661 or Automatic 8213. Pay phones existed almost from the beginning, though that initially meant paying a human to use a phone booth he was overseeing, much as found in European Internet cafes of the late 1990s.

Very quickly, telcos added links to adjacent towns, and true long-distance service was in place by the 1880s. The Long Lines Division was one of the innovations and strategic investments that helped the Bell System to become dominant in the industry. So far as I can tell, the value of direct links was realized early on, meaning that a call from Boston to New York didn’t “hop” via Providence and New Haven, though the nascent science of electronics was quickly employed in the 20th century in developing repeater amplifiers so that you didn’t have to shout so loudly. Long-distance calls were very expensive. A cross-country call in 1928 cost $9 (equivalent to $120 today). By 1975, a three-minute call was “only” $1.35 (equivalent to $6 today). That’s why you hear the line “but he’s calling long-distance” in old movies to emphasize the importance and urgency of the situation. Unlike in Europe, in the US the post office never was involved in telephony, so you wouldn’t go there to make a long-distance call. In the early decades, though, AT&T set up long-distance salons in big cities, and would collect you by taxi and bring you in if you had the money to make a long-distance telephone call.

The multiplicity of small companies across the country probably meant that a few telephones still weren’t on the national network even into the 1970s, but obviously nearly all companies saw the value in linking to the long distance trunk lines. Companies also made their own marketing decisions about local toll calls: typically adjacent towns and nearby suburbs were “local” calls with no additional fees, while those involving a different company or to an exurb would be a “toll call.” The Los Angeles area, divided up between Bell and General Telephone service territories, probably had the nation’s largest volume of local toll calling. The front pages of your telephone directory would tell you what exchanges you could call for free and which involved additional charges.

As for your Kansas farmer, chances are that he simply couldn’t get a phone until shortly before World War II, and possibly until the 1950s. It was uneconomic for the telco to run miles of wire for one subscriber—or even for eight sharing a party line. Cities could make universal service a condition of their franchise agreements with telcos, but those mechanisms often weren’t in place in rural areas. It was the New Deal Rural Electrification Administration that made loans and set up co-ops to extend both electric and phone lines to farmers. In the West, some remote ranches never got wires to town, and had to wait for the invention of radio links or cellular coverage in the 1990s to get connected.