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.
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| 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.
Local History of the Telephone
In 1878, a telephone switchboard was set up in a room of the Central District and Printing Company, which had been operating a telegraphic exchange service for large Pittsburgh businesses for a few years. By the end of 1879, about 300 Pittsburgh businesses were using telephones. One subscriber would call another by going through the operator and asking for the other subscriber by name.
Twenty years later there were more than 10,000 telephones in the Pittsburgh area and about 3,000 of them were in homes. Well before this time, the number of subscribers was too great to ask for another by name and telephone numbers began to be issued. Subscribers had to continually be reminded to use a telephone number when placing a call rather than asking to be connected to someone by name. And basic instructions on how to make and receive telephone calls were included in the telephone books that telephone subscribers were urged to purchase.
Initially, boys were hired to be operators, but they tended to get into mischief so by about 1882 they started to be replaced by "mild-mannered female operators."
(This information was found in "The Telephone Comes to Pittsburgh," by Salvin Schmidt, in the May 31, 1952, issue of the Western Pennsylvania History magazine which I found at https://journals.psu.edu/wph. Search for Schmidt in 1952 to find this article, which isn't too long - 8 pages - and gives quite an entertaining introduction to the use of telephones in the late 19th century.)
Early Telephone Books
When I visited Pittsburgh in September 2017, I viewed some of the old Pittsburgh Telephone Directories on microfilm at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. They did not have directories for all these early years. The December 1880 directory didn't have George Lysle in it, but the July 1892 telephone directory did. His entry is second from the bottom in this image:
With a phone number of 1049, I wonder if his was the 1,049th telephone number issued in Pittsburgh?
And I also found the page with James Hunter's entry.
James was one of the more uncommon entries: he had a telephone at his Lime business (on River Avenue in Allegheny City) and at his home on Perrysville Avenue. His telephone numbers were 3197 and 3163. James was Marguerite's (future) father-in-law; his son Percy Earle Hunter married Marguerite in 1897.
Early Telephones
Possibilities for what George Lysle's office telephone might have looked like include the Top Box phone (circa 1879):
or maybe this Wood Cradle Desk phone (circa 1885):
or perhaps an early version of this Stromberg Carlson desk phone (this one is circa 1902):
These images are from CBS News - The Evolution of Telephones.
When you think of the evolution of telephones from the 1880s (the first U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone was awarded to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876) when only a few businesses had them, through 2023 and the ubiquity of cell phones, you have got to be amazed at the change in technology over the last 150 years!
I descend from George Lysle, Jr. as follows:
This week's theme is Technology.
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