Telephone Celebrated 50th Birthday March 10, 1926

50th Birthday of Telephone System. . . On March 10, 50 Years Ago, The First Message Was Transmitted Over the ‘Phone

The 50th birthday of the telephone was celebrated March 10 by 320,000 Belle Telephone workers and thousands of others throughout the United States and Canada.

In honor of the occasion, men and women in the telephone industry everywhere wore and attractive button, showing a telephone and the numerals 50. These workers during the 24-hour period of celebration enabled telephone subscribers to complete 67,700,000 messages—an almost unbelievable expansion from the one sentence on March 10, 1876, to the millions of conversations on March 10, 1926.

There are 20,500 Bell telephone workers in the Southeastern states who joined in the nation-wide celebration. The South can claim with pride that the telephone owes a part of its development to the reception given it in the South in its infancy.

Among the first telephone exchanges established were tose opened in some of the leading cities of the South during the year 1879. Among the cities in this pioneer list are Augusta, Savannah and Atlanta, Ga.; Charleston, S.C.; Wilmington, N.C.; Mobile, Ala.; Louisville, Ky.; and Richmond, Lynchburg and Norfolk, Va.

The first building ever erected to be used exclusively as a telephone exchange was constructed in Louisville, Ky, some 15 years before the close of the nineteenth century.

Four days after his 29th birthday and three days before the first sentence was transmitted, Alexander Graham Bell, an impetus young Scotchman, received his patent for the telephone If had lived until today, he would have seen his first telephone system of two crude instruments, connected by a few feet of wire, and protected by a single patent develop into a system of 16 million Bell owned stations, connected by 51million miles of wire, and protected by a total of 9,000 patents. There are 27,213,100 telephones in use in the world today, of which number, 61 per cent are located in the United States and most of them are part of the Bell system.

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From the front page of The Smithfield Herald, Friday morning, March 12, 1926

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073982/1926-03-12/ed-1/seq-1/