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Legacy: The Island's First Telephones

Rhoda Amon | Staff Writer

In 1881, Henry A. Roberts installed a private telephone line in his Glen Street drugstore, making Glen Cove the first community in Nassau and Suffolk to have phone service, although it only reached to neighboring Glenwood Landing.

Roberts had five subscribers, but two years later, the New York & New Jersey Telephone Co. bought out his system and installed an 18-line switchboard. Roberts' drugstore became the first central office east of Flushing. G.A. Roullier, a Flushing civil engineer, got the first Queens switchboard that same year.

During 1879, J.L. Haigh, who manufactured wire for the Brooklyn Bridge, communicated from his Brooklyn factory to his downtown Manhattan office over lines strung across the half-finished span. ``Haigh was the first paid phone subscriber in both Brooklyn and New York,'' said Willard Elsasser, a retired telephone technician and founder of the Telephone Pioneer Museum in Commack.

By 1889, Flushing had 65 phones, Glen Cove had 17. The telephones were mostly in stores, the switchboards in homes where the housewife was the operator, according to Ralf Krause, curator of the telephone museum at 445 Commack Rd., which holds an open house on the first Sunday of each month. Elsasser tells of the first phone in Rockville Centre -- in a barbershop back room shared with a bathtub. ``Baths cost 25 cents and when someone was in the tub, all telephone service was tied up.''