You’ll have to cut me some slack on that title—it’s a bit puzzling, but it’s the actual story behind the varied exhibits at the Comporium Phone Museum in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Comporium is the ‘new age’ name of the still-independent company that operates local phone and now internet and mobile services.
Rock Hill began in 1851 as a way station on the railroad from Charlotte, North Carolina to Atlanta. Having a station at that point allowed local farmers to ship cotton and other crops, and encouraged the growth of warehouses and eventually factories, mostly focused on cotton products, but branching out to other industries, including carriage-building. At the time, the most modern form of communication was the telegraph and Morse code, which the museum calls—accurately— “1800s Text Messaging.”
By the late 1800s, after the Civil War, the town continued to grow, spreading out from its original center, The biggest industries were cotton cloth, cotton thread and buggies.
The buggy business was operated by one of the ‘big names’ in town, John G. Anderson and his father-in-law; it was a busy enough business to turn out a complete buggy every 25 minutes at its peak; eventually, as Anderson Motor Company it became a leading southern car manufacturer. But I digress…
John Anderson, apparently a forward-looking entrepreneur, grew tired of having to cross town repeatedly between his factory and the railroad depot where supplies arrived and buggies were shipped. In 1880, having heard of the new ‘telephone’ technology, he had a single wire strung between factory and depot, and connected it to two magneto telephone—the kind you’ve seen in old movies, with a crank to power the signal over the wire.
It didn’t take long for other local businesses to recognize the advantage, and Anderson, with two partners, set up the Rock Hill Telephone Company and planned for the future by installing a switchboard that could handle up to 25 subscribers. Clearly, as forward-looking as they might have been in 1895, they underestimated the future. They did turn a tidy profit, though, and in 1912 sold the company to the Barnes family whose descendants still own it.
Shortly before the company changes hands, it changed phones in a major modernization: Phones no longer had to be cranked to power a local battery; instead, batteries installed on each line at a central office powered the lines. The new system had capacity for 300 lines, which, of course, meant bigger switchboards, and more operators to connect the calls.
By the time World War II came around, Rock Hill had 2,000 telephones. The war somewhat interrupted growth because materials needed for new phones and new lines were needed for the war, and the opportunity for many new kinds of jobs for women made it harder to keep large staffs of operators. By 1945, there were 2,500 lines, and well over a thousand would-be customers on waiting lists for service. And, as new industries grew in the area, those lists just got longer.
All that led to two big changes: many rural customers were served by ‘party lines,’ where several numbers shared a single line, reducing time and cost for construction, and the introduction of dial service, with switches like the one above enabling customers to call each other directly without an operator needing to make the connection. Rock Hill made the change to dial in 1949; the switch above was still in service in 1987. Today, that type of switch has been replaced by electronics.
Aside from its own history, the Comporium museum has plenty of telephone-related artifacts, and a number of interactive exhibits, including an old-style phone booth with an actual working dial payphone from which (no coin required) you can call the museum’s front desk.
Outside the museum, there’s a sculpture group created as a public art commission by Carrie Gault; its title is Communication: Endless Possibilities Past, Present and Future. As described here, ” The design is composed of several figures standing around gazing at a glowing sphere. Made with fiber optics, the sphere represents all of the potential held in the future of technology. The sphere is being held by a teacher who is surrounded by her students, each representing different technological eras.”
