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People take instantaneous communication for granted today. But when telephones were new, people thought they were magical.
Richard Valentine, a telegraph operator in Janesville, made Wisconsin’s first phone call in 1877. By the end of the year, the Milwaukee City Council had leased three of the new-fangled machines to connect the mayor’s office to the police and fire departments.
The value of the new technology was obvious, and a wave of telephone enthusiasm swept the state.
One of the people who caught that wave was Angus Hibbard, founder of the Wisconsin Telephone Co. In 1881 he demonstrated a phone to two lumberjacks just in from the woods. One of them held it up to his ear, “and said in a gruff unnatural voice, ‘Hello!’ and then dropped the instrument as if it had been red hot, exclaiming, ‘ Well, I’ll be damned. Come on out of this, Pete! It said, “Hello yourself!” Can you beat that!’”
In Milwaukee, Hibbard hired telegraph messenger boys to work the first switchboards. Their streetwise manners prompted so many complaints from callers that they had to be replaced. “Almost at once,” Hibbard wrote, “telephone girls were seated at switchboards in all parts of the country, giving such service as had not been thought possible before.”
One was Pauline Juneau, who started in Milwaukee about 1883. She recalled later, “There was one customer who told me over the wire to ‘keep my shirt on.’ Naturally, I had intended to do that anyway, but I was highly insulted and reported the incident.”
Find out more about Wisconsin history online at the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Web site: www.wisconsinhistory.org.
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