Bell and Home

On a January afternoon in 1896 the stockholders of a new telephone company met in Fort Wayne to elect their officers. They had six hundred subscribers signed already. They did not yet have permission to put up a wire.

The Sentinel gave them a heading that afternoon.

THE NEW HELLOS. The Home Telephone Company Electing Officers. Over 600 Subscribers Secured and a Franchise Will be Applied for at Once.

The stockholders of the new Home Telephone company are holding a meeting this afternoon for the purpose of completing the organization and electing officers. The company is composed of a large number of the representative men of the city

There was already a telephone company in the city. The Central Union had been in the paper since the middle 1880s. From that January there were two, and the arrangement lasted long enough that a generation of businesses grew up inside it.

Two years in, it was not friendly. On 21 February 1898 the paper put the quarrel under the Spanish war news and made the war the lesser item.

WAR WITH SPAIN Would Be But a Side Issue Compared to One Now Threatened. Home Telephone Company May Clash With the Central Union, The Fur Will Fly.

Indications of a brush between the two telephone companies in this city are apparent. It is charged, it is alleged, by the Central Union company, that the undertakers, laundries and expressmen were induced to discard their service and take the Home service on the strength of no charge being made the latter company.

The Central Union's president, G. W. Beers, absolutely denied it.

What the quarrel did to the city is not in the news columns. It is in the small type at the bottom of the advertisements, where a business had to tell its customers how to reach it. From 1897 the answer was both. A pharmacist on Calhoun street set it out in one line.

Bell & Home Phones No. 477.

That is the whole arrangement in five words. Two exchanges, two sets of wire, two operators, and a grocer or a livery stable or an undertaker paying twice so that nobody who wanted them would find the line dead.

The formula went through the paper like a watermark. In 1898 it is in three issues out of four. From 1912 to 1915 it is in ninety-five to ninety-nine of every hundred, which is to say that a reader who picked up the Sentinel on any given morning in those four years would find it somewhere in the paper.

Then it thins out. In 1916 the formula is in a third of the issues. In 1917 it is in one in twenty.

The paper does not report a merger. A search of 1915, 1916 and 1917 for a purchase, a sale, a receiver, a consolidation or an absorption of either company finds none. In July 1916 a storm went through the city and the report of it named them both, separately, as any reporter would name two firms that were both in business.

A few telephones were put out of commission for the Home Telephone company. No trouble had been reported at the Bell Telephone office.

What changed was the printing. The advertisements stopped naming the exchange and started giving a number on its own, with no company against it. The named listings fall away over the same two years that the bare ones climb. By 1917 most advertisements gave a number with no company against it.

A business printed both numbers because neither company could reach the whole city on its own. Why that stopped being worth printing, the paper does not say, and neither the council nor the courts appear in the file to explain it.

A city of this size carried two complete telephone systems for twenty years. The council made room for both in a conduit in 1914 rather than choose. A booster paragraph in 1911 offered the pair as a civic asset, two companies, both with long distance service. A politician in 1912, talking about somewhere else, said there was no need for two telephone companies in Indianapolis or any other place.

And the cost of it sat on the counter of every shop in town, in the form of a second number that existed because the first one would not reach everybody.