{"id":11725,"date":"2017-09-25T07:49:31","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T11:49:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=11725"},"modified":"2017-09-25T07:49:31","modified_gmt":"2017-09-25T11:49:31","slug":"to-be-or-not-to-be-that-was-no-longer-the-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2017\/09\/to-be-or-not-to-be-that-was-no-longer-the-question\/","title":{"rendered":"“To be, or not to be?\u201d That was no longer the question."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Bell Telephone Company Founder’s Week Parade Float, Broad and Spruce Streets, October 7, 1908. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alexander Graham Bell found only fifteen customers in all of Philadelphia the year after he demonstrated his telephonic invention at the Centennial. The question he transmitted: “To be, or not to be?\u201d was still very much unanswered in 1877.<\/p>\n

By 1890, the telephone\u2019s prospects were looking somewhat less dire. More than 3,000 Philadelphians had gotten wired up. It looked as if the telephone might be on its way to becoming useful. Indispensable and omnipresent would have to wait.<\/p>\n

When the city threw itself a massive, self-congratulatory celebration in 1908, the telephone industry jumped at the chance to brag about their 102,000 early adopters. In three lavish floats, Bell Telephone pitched their services to the hundreds of thousands of holdouts who lined Broad Street from Diamond to Snyder.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Founders Week celebration,\u201d sniffed the New York Times, \u201cis the most pretentious undertaking this city has ever attempted.\u201d The daily parades illustrated \u201cprogress of the city from its founding\u2026down to the present day.\u201d Re-enactors created 68 scenes from Penn\u2019s Treaty with the Indians to \u201cThe City Beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

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From Telephone Statistics of the World, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1912. (Archive.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wednesday October 7th was entirely dedicated industry. Organizers had hoped to limit the number of floats to 100 but they ended up with twice that many. \u201cEvery phase of industrial activity, labor, agriculture, science, and all the applied arts, weaving, spinning, soap making, transportation, fortune, cigar making, the manufacture of crude and partly finished materials into the finished product, were shown with wonderful reality in the procession which moved down Broad Street between two walls of closely packed humanity.\u201d The Tacony saw manufacturers Henry Disston & Sons had five floats; the city’s lager brewers had four; Baldwin Locomotive Work had two. Bell Telephone had three.<\/p>\n

Twenty red and gold-trimmed horses pulled the first and largest, a 46-foot display divided into eight room-like sections. The first presented \u201ca woman in her boudoir using the telephone.\u201d Next came a manufacturer\u2019s office illustrating \u201cthe benefits of telephone service;\u201d then a lawyer and a broker\u2019s office, \u201ceach showing the convenience of telephone facilities.\u201d On the opposite side of the float we’re four more scenes, \u201ceach fitted up in a similar manner to illustrate the uses of the phone.\u201d Above, on the roof of a house portion of the float, were \u201ctwo boys, talking over the string and tin can methods of voice transmission,\u201d a reminder of the primal, universal appeal of voice communication. \u201cOn the ends of the float there will be three young women switchboard telephone operators, showing the system of today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bringing up the rear of the telephone float trio was a horse-drawn bar graph with giant model telephones representing \u201cthe rapid rise of adoption.\u201d Bell Telephone proudly celebrated the numbers with increasingly large model telephones from 1883 when there were 3,674 subscribers to 1908, when there were 102,193.<\/p>\n

By 1917, Philadelphia would have 175,000.<\/p>\n

Comparing Philadelphia with, say, Paris: Philadelphia had lagged behind through the 1890s. But by 1905, the American city had more than double the telephones per capita of its European counterpart. By 1911, Philadelphia had close to three times the phones of Paris.<\/p>\n

The American investment in infrastructure had paid off. <\/a>From 1901 to 1912, the total telephone wire mileage on earth increased from five to 29 million miles. Half had been unspooled in the United States. In 1908, there were four million American telephones in use. By 1912, there would be eight million. Total American telephone conversations topped 14 billion, more than double what the rest of the world could claim.<\/p>\n

The American love affair with the telephone\u2014and with winning\u2014was only getting revved up.<\/p>\n

[Sources: \u201cFounders Week Industrial Day,\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, July 24, 1908; \u00a0\u201cPhiladelphia Opens Its\u2019 Founders Week<\/a>,\u201d The New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0October 5, 1908; \u00a0\u201cMiles of Float Show Industries\u2019 Progress March \u2013 Nearly two hundred displays on wheels delight thousands,\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1908; Telephone Statistics of the World<\/a> (American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1912);\u00a0David Glassberg, \u201cPublic Ritual and Cultural Hierarchy: Philadelphia\u2019s Civic Celebrations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.\u201d\u00a0The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography<\/em>, Vol. 107, No. 3 (Jul., 1983); \u201cTelephones<\/a>,\u201d by Lucy Davis in The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia<\/em>.]<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Bell Telephone Company Founder’s Week Parade Float, Broad and Spruce Streets, October 7, 1908. – detail. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alexander Graham Bell found only fifteen customers in all of Philadelphia the year after he demonstrated his telephonic invention at the Centennial. The question he transmitted: “To be, or not to be?\u201d was still very much unanswered in 1877. By 1890, the telephone\u2019s prospects were looking somewhat less dire. More than 3,000 Philadelphians had gotten […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}