HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

The first commercially viable telephone network was created by a Boston inventor and entrepreneur. Not Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with inventing the telephone, but Edwin Thomas Holmes. Starting in the 1850s, his father Edwin Holmes created the first burglar alarm company here in Boston, then Edwin Thomas Holmes adapted the alarm company’s network of telegraph wires in the 1870s to work with the telephone switchboard he invented. Working with Alexander Graham Bell, the Holmes company turned his invention into a business and helped him build the Bell Telephone Company.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/214/

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All the Bells and Whistles

• A Wonderful Fifty Years by Edwin Thomas Holmes
• Profile of Augustus R Pope in a Harvard alumni publication
• Pope’s 1852 burglar alarm patent
• Pope writes to Scientific American to discuss the fire alarm telegraph and burglar alarm
• Karen Donnelly’s 1992 thesis on the Holmes Burglar alarm
• Herbert Casson’s 1910 History of the Telephone

Edwin Thomas Holmes insulates wire with paint in his father’s backyard Pope’s alarm bell The Holmes shop on Tremont Row Edwin Holmes’ demonstration alarm Charles Williams’ shop on Court Street The Holmes building on Washington Street with a forest of wires on the roof The first telephone switchboard, created by Edwin Thomas Holmes