My second great-grandfather, George Lysle, was a coal merchant in Pittsburgh. A family story says that in the 1880s, George Lysle's office had one of the earliest telephones in Pittsburgh.
This is either George Lysle, Jr. (1845-1900) or his father George Lysle (1800-1877) |
George's daughter, Marguerite, was born in 1876 and was not quite nine years old when her mother, Marion, died in 1885. At some point in the 1880s, her father George, who was the owner of George Lysle & Sons Coal Merchants and was briefly on the Pittsburgh School Committee, had a telephone installed in his office.
Marguerite remembered visiting her father's office and seeing this new contraption and being fascinated by it and by watching her father speak into the device to another person in another location. This was a significant enough memory for her that she shared it with her granddaughter (my mother) sixty-some years later. And thirty or thirty-five years after that, my mother shared this story with me.