Although there were fewer than eight hundred telephones in all of Santa Rosa in early 1905, the phone company was already pressing customers to signup for upgraded services at a higher price. Also: the latest model phones are prettier, and so tiny! Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

INCREASE FOR PHONE SERVICE
Small Raise in Price for New Four Party Lines – Contracts Now Being Made

Harry Kahn of San Francisco, contract agent of the Sunet [sic] Telephone and Telegraph Company, is in the City of the Roses for an indefinite stay. His business here is to explain to subscribers of the company the benefits to be derived from the change of the local system from ten party lines to four party lines. The company will increase the cost to subscribers for the four party lines to $1.50 per month for residences and $2 per month for business houses.

[..]

One particular feature which will recommend itself is that in case of complaints on a four party line they are easier rectified, and damages to the line are more easily repaired. Then with the smaller number of persons using the line there will be fewer responses of “Line busy” from the operator at central, and a consequent decrease of the ill humor and profanity which the subscribers are wont to use.

[..]

Manager Nephi L. Jones believes that the new phones will be here within possibly thirty days, and the work of installing them will be begun as soon as they arrive. They will be more ornamental than the ones now in use, and only about half as large…

– Santa Rosa Republican, January 9, 1905

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This has the feel of an overheard barbershop boast, with enthusiastic Mr. Apostolides proclaiming that he has a respected doctor as his “good Greek student,” along with the loan of a fantastic machine that records his voice.

The graphophone was the first major advancement over Edison’s primitive phonograph, invented and developed in the 1880s by Charles Sumner Tainter, an associate of Alexander Graham Bell. (The name “graphophone” was coined as a joke transposition of the word “phonograph,” according to Bell family lore.) The investors in their company, however, thought the future of sound recording lay in recording business correspondence, not music, and research concentrated on making a portable machine that recorded on wax cylinders. With improvements, the same technology would continue to be used by Dictaphone until the 1940s. The full history of Tainter’s graphophone — including the precautions taken to prevent his technology from being stolen by Edison’s spies — is told here.

Although the sound quality was lousy and the volume barely audible, wax cylinder recordings by musical performers such as John Philip Sousa’s Marine Band and “artistic whistler” John Yorke Atlee were favorites; an 1891 survey found one out of three phonographs and graphophones were being used for entertainment. In 1889, entrepeneur Louis T. Glass invented the jukebox using a modified graphophone that would only play after a nickel was inserted (and yes, the slug was apparently invented shortly thereafter). Only a single cylinder was available to be played, and patrons had to stand close to the machine, listening through one of four attached stethoscope-like hearing devices. The nickel-in-the-slot graphophone players continued to be popular through the turn of the century; a jukebox model was available as late as 1898, cost $20.00.^*

^*Jukeboxes: An American Social History by Kerry Segrave, 2002, pp. 5-8

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Given the small size of the “vast throng,” it probably would have been easier to write the returns on a chalkboard, or just yell them out the newspaper’s window. But ah, the allure of technology.

CROWDS WATCHED THE STEREOPTICON
VAST THRONG GATHERED OUTSIDE THE PRESS DEMOCRAT OFFICE LAST NIGHT
The Election Returns Thrown on the Canvas Kept Crowd Interested For Many Hours

For hours on Wednesday night the large square in front of the Press Democrat office was thronged with hundreds of people. The crowd also thronged the Courthouse plaza. It was a large, interested throng, and during the evening cheers were frequently raised as the stereoscope the names and the votes of the candidates who were forging ahead on the large screen.

For a number of years the Press Democrat has carried out this means of giving the election news to the public, and the effort has been greatly appreciated by everybody.

As usual, the paper arranged a system of messenger communication with the various polling places, and the messages were hurriedly transmitted to the office and the slides were rapidly made.

Frank Cherry used his fine stereopticon and gave excellent service. The crowd stayed until an early hour on Thursday morning, and the interest was maintained throughout.

In addition to the stereopticon service, several hundred queries were answered over the telephone. “How’s the election going?” was the favorite query asked and answered.

– Press Democrat, April 7, 1904

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