Seattle’s First Brush with the Future
When an agent from Portland brought a pair of telephones to town, residents gathered at Yesler’s Hall to hear voices and music traveling eight miles through thin air.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mr. F. H. Lamb, general manager of the Western Union Telegraph Co., paid a visit from Portland with a couple of telephones. He attached one to each end of the line between here and Milton yesterday afternoon, and for a time, several of our citizens had the pleasure of conversing with persons at that place, eight miles away. Mr. Snow, the operator at this place, who had charge of the Milton end of the line, informs us that he could hear with the greatest ease everything said at this end, recognizing the voices in every case where the conversation was carried to any length. The conversation was enlivened by the rendering of the song 'Way Down on the Swanee River,' by Col. Larrabee, which was reproduced with startling distinctness at the other end of the line, heard not only by the operator, but by everyone else in the room at Milton. Tunes were also played on the concertina and jewsharp with the same result. Mr. Lamb has removed the instruments and returned with them to Portland, but will be over again in a couple of weeks, when more of our citizens may avail themselves of the opportunity to test the practical workings of this wonderful instrument. Among those who tested the instrument yesterday were Messrs. H. L. Yesler, Col. Larrabee, H. W. Rowland, and a number of others.
“The conversation was enlivened by the rendering of the song 'Way Down on the Swanee River,' by Col. Larrabee, which was reproduced with startling distinctness at the other end of the line.”
In the late 1870s, the telephone was an uncanny novelty that required a massive physical infrastructure of lines. Today, the infrastructure is invisible, but the public wonder at instant remote communication remains a touchstone of our shared technological experience.
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