First Telephone Company Owned Building Located at 130 South Market Street, San Jose

Reprinted from "INSULATORS - Crown Jewels of the Wire", July 1984, page 19

The following picture and article are reprinted from the March-April 1983 issue of "The Information Desk" with permission of Telephone Museum, San Francisco, California. 

San Jose has played an important part in the story of communications in the far west. In the early days of the Spanish ranchos, the only link between San Jose and Yerba Buena, as San Francisco was then called, was El Camino Real, The Kings Highway, one of this country's oldest thoroughfares.

The telegraph made its appearance in 1844. Eight years later a telegraph line was begun to connect San Jose with San Francisco, Stockton, Sacramento and Marysville. The line was completed in 1853. By 1859 it was possible to send telegrams to Los Angeles. Civil War days of 1861 found the telegraph spanning the continent.

The next step in communication came in 1863, when a railroad was completed from San Francisco to San Jose, then the capitol of California.

The San Jose telephone exchange was established on March 1, 1879, the same day that an exchange was founded in Sacramento. Thus, the two cities tied for the honor of having the third exchange to be established in California, for they were antedated by less than a year by the San Francisco and Oakland exchanges. The first exchange which was located "upstairs" at 28 North First Street, was established by the Sunset Telephone and Telegraph Company. Initially, local calling only was available. But by 1883-84 users could ask for parties in San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton, Oakland and many other Northern California cities.

About 1877, the telephone office moved to the second floor of the Knox Building at First and Santa Clara Streets, when the number of telephones jumped from 96 to 131. The next move was to the second floor at 65 South First Street in 1893. It was in 1898 that the then-longest telephone line in the world was completed from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon. Coupled with previous extensions as far south as San Diego, telephone service was thus made available over most of the Pacific Coast.

Large Image (297 Kb)

In the period spanning 1897-1900, the number of telephones in San Jose jumped from 694 to 1,873; and in October 1900 complete new central office equipment was installed in the company's first building at 130 South Market Street. This move also saw the conversion from the magneto or local battery service to common battery manual service.

Just a decade later, in 1910, the telephone headquarters made their biggest move to the new building erected by the company at 80 South Market Street. Again new equipment was installed to care for the calls made from San Jose's growing number of telephones, which then totaled 6,410.