TELEPHONE. ROBERTS' OPERA HOUSE, APRIL 27, 1877

Bell, Alexander Graham. TELEPHONE. ROBERTS' OPERA HOUSE, APRIL 27, 1877... [Hartford: Alexander Graham Bell, April, 1877] Broadside flyer or ticket, 3 x 4 1/2 inches, on dark green (teal) paper. Two corners chipped, and one crease, but a remarkable survival for such an ephemeral piece printed on such poor quality paper. This small flyer, which may also have served as a ticket of admission, invited potential customers to come to Bell's first public demonstration of a long distance telephone system (or "exchange"). This historic demonstration was held in Hartford and New Haven with transmissions made over a "borrowed" telegraph line and an "operator" in Middletown making the system (or "exchange") connections. Up until this time phones had been leased in pairs, and the customer had to string their own line (usually between office and home) to the second phone; if they wished to be able to call a third party, yet another line had to be strung directly between the original caller and the third party, but the second and third parties could not connect with each other. The "exchange" system eliminated this severe limitation, establishing the model that led to the modern phone system, allowing multiple parties to speak to each other over the same lines through a manual switchboard. A brief history of Bell's telephone puts this landmark event in context. Bell first transmitted sound (but not speech) over a phone line in 1875; in March of 1876 he filed his first patent ($12,000 for the last copy at auction, 1996, with one leaf torn) and also first succeeded in transmitting speech over a phone line (from one room to another in a single house); he placed the first long distance call (one way, on a single line between two phones, with no exchange system) later that year, and completed a two-way long distance call (again, with no exchange) a short time after that. In 1877 he published his `Researches in Telephony' in `The Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' ($3,200 for the last copy at auction, 1998, with tape repair). A crude exchange system was set up between five banks in Boston by another individual in 1877, but did not involve long distance lines nor outside callers. The first public long distance line was set up between Boston and New