By Maury Thompson
William B. Eddy attended a Sunday church service in early 1883 with the help of a technological forerunner of contemporary live streaming — albeit with sound only.
“The Whitehall Times says that on Sunday last, manager W.B. Eddy sat in the telegraph office at that place and by telephone and transmitter listened to a church service held at Plattsburgh,” The Ticonderoga Sentinel reported on Jan. 19, 1883. “The circuit was also opened between Plattsburgh and Rutland, and a brisk conversation carried on between the two places.”
Eddy had a legendary career in the region’s telegraph and telephone industry across more than six decades.
“William B. Eddy … begins this month on his sixty-fourth year of continuous service with the New York Telephone Company or its predecessors,” The Adirondack Record of Elizabethtown reported on April 8, 1926. “He has the longest service record of any employee in the Bell System.”
Eddy’s career stretched from the dawn of transcontinental telegraph service through early experimental telephones to the beginnings of radio broadcasting.
“At three o’clock yesterday afternoon, Manager W.B. Eddy of the Whitehall telegraph and telephone office held a conversation by telephone with a man in Chicago,” The Morning Star of Glens Falls reported on Nov. 18, 1895. “Mr. Eddy could hear as distinctly as if he was addressed by a person in New York or Albany.”
By the 1920s, he was guiding a Schenectady radio station’s broadcast of a choral music concert.
“Wherever a radio phone was installed in Whitehall, a few or many were gathered Tuesday evening to enjoy the Albany Community Chorus,” The Post-Star reported on March 9, 1923. “Local interest was shown in the concert because a former well-known Whitehall man, William B. Eddy, was in charge of the program.”
Eddy had an early interest in telecommunication, and in 1863, at age 13, he landed his first job in the industry, setting up the telegraph office at Glens Falls and training a local operator.
He returned to Whitehall about three or four months later to manage the local office of The American Telegraph Co., which later became part of Western Union.
In 1877, Eddy wrote to Thomas Alva Edison seeking to purchase a telephone device, but he was told none were available for sale, the Sentinel reported on July 23, 1925.
The same year he became local manager in Whitehall for the American Speaking Telephone Co., a Western Union subsidiary that hired Edison to attempt to develop an alternative to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone device. Within a few years, however, the company would join forces with the company associated with Bell.
In 1880, American Speaking Telephone merged with National Bell Telephone to become the American Bell Telephone Co., which eventually evolved into the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., now AT&T.
A news story by the The Argus of Albany on Nov. 7, 1920 explained that when some of the then-current telephone company officials “were in swaddling clothes, Mr. Eddy was pounding brass up in Whitehall, and he was one of the first telegraph men to recognize the importance of the telephone.”
Eddy later was manager of Hudson River Telephone Co., based in Whitehall, which in 1892 advertised having “over 10,000 subscribers,” in large part thanks to Eddy’s efforts.
“W.B. Eddy, manager of the local office, is quite a hustler and is always on the lookout for the best interest of the company,” The Whitehall Times reported on July 12, 1897. “Through his energies the local exchange has been brought to a high state of perfection and is used by
all the leading businesses, houses and private enterprise.”
Eddy was at the forefront of the early expansion of telephone service throughout the region.
“In 1887, the first demonstration of a telephone in Ticonderoga took place in the reception room at The Burleigh House,” a
local hotel, the Sentinel recounted in a story published June 16, 1949. “W.B. Eddy, manager of the telephone office of Whitehall, brought a telephone to Ticonderoga and that night, when the wires were clear, he connected the phone to telegraph wires, and his brother performed the same operation with an instrument at Whitehall. A crowd gathered to watch the demonstration, and many of them talked over the wire to Eddy’s brother.”
Eddy supervised the creation of a telegraph connection between The Burleigh House and a hotel in Hague, The Morning Star reported on July 11, 1887.
It would not be his last time supervising work at Hague.
“W.B. Eddy of Whitehall is making arrangements to change the present telegraph line into Hague into a telephone connect,” The Morning Star reported on Oct. 10, 1893.
Eddy sent the first telephone messages to Rutland, Watertown, Plattsburgh, Ausable Forks, Whitehall and Ticonderoga, among other locations, The Adirondack Record reported.
After his years in Whitehall, Eddy worked in Albany for New York Telephone Co., which bought out Hudson River Telephone Co.
He became known as a kind of ambassador for the young telecommunications industry.
“Mr. Eddy is a pleasant and affable gentleman who on many occasions has been called on as peacemaker to the company,” The Argus reported. “Sometimes a subscriber would get riled up, but it only took a few minutes of Mr. Eddy’s persuasiveness to bring him back and make him a happy and smiling patron.”
Eddy served as president and general secretary of the White Hall Rail Road Young Men’s Christian Association, and he was active in the Masonic lodge. He also was involved in Republican politics and was elected in 1895 as a Whitehall village trustee.
He celebrated in the streets in 1892 when news reached the Whitehall telegraph office that Benjamin Harrison has been nominated for re- election at the Republican National Convention at Minneapolis.
“In five minutes afterward, W.B. Eddy appeared on the street wearing a handsome Harrison badge and a Minneapolis convention badge, which was sent by friends at the convention,” The Whitehall Times reported on
June 16, 1892.
In 1907, Eddy was among those who attended
an Albany Republican banquet at which Gov. Charles Evans Hughes was keynote speaker, according to a Feb. 25, 1907 report in The Argus.
And in 1916, Eddy volunteered on the U.S. Senate campaign of Robert Bacon, a former assistant secretary of state and ambassador to France who lost the Republican primary to Hiram Calder, The Argus reported on Sept. 12, 1916.
Eddy had a lifelong interest in music. He co- founded the Albany Community Chorus, which grew to a 1,000-voice choir around the time of World War I, and he served at various times as its president and treasurer.
Eddy often compiled themed slide shows that were projected at concerts, synchronized with the music.
Maury Thompson was a reporter for The Post- Star of Glens Falls for 21 years before retiring in 2017. He now is a freelance writer focusing on the history of politics, labor and media in the region.