The year was 1880 when a few vocal citizens of Colorado Springs decided it was about time to join the web of telephone wires that were fanning out across the state.  The Springs Gazette Chronicle also put in a good word for a “telephonic system,” touting the wonderful assistance it would provide businesses in the city. 

After much discussion and months of work, the first telephone exchange opened in Colorado Springs.  The date was Aug. 6, 1880. 

Friday marks 130 years since the exchange connected the first calls between Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs.  Though Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone with modest intentions to aid business transactions, over the years the transformation and proliferation of the technology progressed far beyond its inventor’s wildest dreams. 

Bell made the first telephone call to his assistant Thomas Watson in 1876.  Within a year the technology had become a business.   

Telephone service spread west quickly, with service reaching Denver in 1879.  A year later, the telephone exchange in Colorado Springs was built above Craigue’s grocery store at 24 North Tejon St.

By the end of 1880, there were 79 subscribers in the city. 

Businessmen, lawyers, newspapers and farmers outside the city were the first to own telephones, said Jody Georgeson, the director of the Telecommunications History Group in Denver.  Some of the first phones were also used in Colorado’s mines, she said. 

The first phones were big wooden boxes mounted on the wall, said Harold “Pinky” Graham, a member of the Qwest Telephone Pioneers Plains and Peak Council, a local group of telephone company employees.  In the early days, the caller would crank a handle to generate an electric current that would travel along telephone wires to ring a bell at the telephone exchange, he said.  At early switchboards, when the bell rang female operators would yell the number of the call to boys who would dash back and forth to make the connections to the caller’s destination.

Colorado Springs put in the first battery-operated switchboard west of the Mississippi River in 1898.  It took until the 1950s for phones in the city to be converted from manual to dial sets. 

In recent decades, telephone technology has been used in the development of computers, cell phones and the Internet, Georgeson said.  Though now, the proliferation of these modern technologies are the main cause in the decline of traditional land line telephones, an ironic twist in the history of Bell’s famous invention.

—

Contact the writer at 636-0187.

Telephone MuseumThe Plains and Peak Council’s collection of historic phones and switchboards is stored at the Qwest Telephone Pioneers Museum, 308 East Pikes Peak Ave.  The museum is open Fridays 7 a.m. to 12 p.m.

Pictured are several details from the telephone collection at the Qwest Telephone Pioneers Museum at 308 E. Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs. Anthony Souffle, The Gazette Photo by ANTHONY SOUFFLE, THE GAZETTE

ANTHONY SOUFFLE