October 6, 1880 – In an advertisement in the Iowa City Daily Republican, Frank Moffitt lists several advantages the telephone has to offer. A person could use it to call the doctor or to order groceries, and it’s potentialities in the world of business were unlimited. Merchants who had once installed a telephone “would not part with it for four times the cash.”
When Alexander Graham Bell introduced his new innovation at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, no one believed the telephone was much more than a plaything. But within five years of when the first telephone exchange office opened in Iowa City (1881), the whole city was buzzing with excitement. Over the next 100 years, the telephone transformed everything. Come read how it all started.
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