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A
company, known as the Mount Albert Telephone Co, was formed
to manage the service. Initially it had 22 subscribers.
The first telephone office was in the back of Mr. T. Lloyd’s
drug store and was operated by Mr. Lloyd. In those days,
when you picked up the phone, the operator would answer and
ask whom you wanted to speak to. You then, gave the
name of the person you wanted and the operator connected the
call.
In
January 1907, the Telephone Company completed the extension
of its service to Ballentrae to connect with the Stouffville-Bethesda
system. This gave the people on the Mount Albert circuit
free communication with all the towns on the Stouffville-Bethesda
circuit, reaching a large number of subscribers in the townships
of Scarborough, Markham, Whitchurch, Pickering and Uxbridge.
Over 600 phones were on the united system.
Later
that month, the Telephone Company issued the first phone
book for the village. It was a list of the 60-70
names of people who had phones.
In
1911, the Mount Albert Telephone Company bought the original
building on this site to use as their telephone office.
In
1958, Bell Telephone bought out the local phone company and
continued to operate a switchboard centre from this location.
In 1963, the dial system was installed and the switchboard
office was no longer needed.
The
ERA Banner reported the changeover. " One Sunday
in June 1963, Mount Albert converted from a manual switchboard
telephone system to a direct dial system. With the new
dial system, a dial tone replaced the operator asking, “what
number please”, when the phone was picked up.
With
the new system, all phone subscribers received a new phone
number. The new phone number included a 3-digit exchange,
473 for Mount Albert, followed by 4 numbers.
Sunday
morning was chosen as the time for the changeover because
there were few telephone conversations at that time.
Every long distance centre in North America was notified of
the changeover so that calls would be correctly routed to
Mount Albert.
The
actual cutover was a closely coordinated procedure.
First, a crew disconnected the wires that were connected to
the manual switchboard on Main Street. This was set
up so that all the wires for the entire switchboard could
be removed by pulling on one wire. Once the manual switchboard
was disconnected, a signal was sent, using a special telephone
line set up for the purpose, to a crew waiting at the new
dial exchange. At the new exchange, blocking switches
had been put in place so that the dial exchange would be blocked
as long as the manual system was active. These blocking
switches were also designed so that they could be removed
from the entire exchange very quickly.
The
changeover took only a few minutes with virtually no disruption
of service."
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