Home > About us > A History, part 1, the Zinc Company
A History, part 1, the Zinc Company
The year 1900 was a time for beginnings. The new century was full of promise. The Industrial Age with its noisy, smoky factories, spawned in the last century, was spreading prosperity across the nation and particularly across Pennsylvania.
Anthracite coal from Carbon County had fueled much of this expansion. Its coal mining and transportation centers were experiencing growth and prosperity. Now that expansion itself had entered Southern Carbon County with the establishment of a Zinc smelting and refining operation just North of the Lehigh Gap, at the site of the present borough of Palmerton.
At the turn of the century the beginnings of a town could be seen near the Zinc plant. This was to become the classic "company town" of the era. The zinc company owned most of the land, the water system, and many of the houses lived in by the workers and their families. Company buildings and offices dotted the landscape.
In 1900 the management of the fledgling New Jersey Zinc company decided that a communications system was needed to enhance the efficiency of its operations. So in that year an invention of the second half of the nineteenth century, the telephone, came to the yet unincorporated town of Palmerton.
Bell and Watson had invented the telephone in 1876 and the Bell companies were soon well established as providers of telephone service in large cities and towns nationwide. While the Bell Telephone Company was catering to the urban areas, rural areas and small towns were going without telephone service. Bell found it easier and more profitable to serve areas where there was a high concentration of potential subscribers than expend the company's capital to serve more sparsely populated areas. These areas were left to telephone associations, cooperatives and small companies to serve. Additionally the manufacturing arm of the Bell companies, Western Electric, would not sell equipment to any non-Bell company. Bell management probably reasoned that without adequate equipment the small rural companies would fail or that their subscribers would rush to the "superior" Bell system when Bell finally got around to serving small towns. This was not to be.
Bell's basic patents for electric telephony had expired in 1894 and numerous small manufacturers had sprung up to serve the rapidly expanding rural market. Today we would call these people entrepreneurs. It is not known which of these companies supplied the equipment for that original system, but it may well have been Federal Telephone Company, a company that supplied equipment to Palmerton Telephone Co. in later years. A single line serving seventeen subscribers was constructed and what was to become Palmerton Telephone Company was born. A directory of that era might have listed various New Jersey Zinc Company offices, the Chestnut Ridge Railroad, the Horsehead Inn and the residences of some of the more important Zinc Co. officials.
Seven years later a telephone association was formed to oversee the new telephone operations. In 1912 the Palmerton Telephone Company incorporated taking the name of the newly incorporated borough of Palmerton. This new corporation operated as a subsidiary of the New Jersey Zinc Co. as one would expect in a "Company Town". By this time 121 telephones were in use on this growing system. The telephone system was owned by the Zinc company until 1948.
In 1915 a new two position switchboard was installed on the third floor of the Zinc company's administration building. This allowed two operators to work at the same time to connect calls for the company's 300 subscribers. Two operators were employed full time, one for the day shift and one for the night shift, with part time workers filling in as needed.
By 1921 the demands of the company's 635 subscribers had exceeded the capacity of the manual switchboard and improvements were necessary. Automatic switching of telephone calls was invented by an Indiana Undertaker in 1879. It was first used for a local exchange in the Bell system in Norfolk, Virginia in November of 1919. By 1921 it was in use in Allentown, Rochester, Beaver Falls, Hazleton, Harrisburg, Erie, York and Philadelphia, Pa. Only one of these places, Erie, was an independent company This was soon to change. In this year, Palmerton Telephone Company became the second independent company in Pennsylvania to offer automatic local switching to its customers.
Installers from the Automatic Electric Company of Chicago, Ill had just finished installation of an automatic dial exchange in Philadelphia when they came to Palmerton. The new exchange was installed on the third floor of the New Jersey Zinc Company Administration Building. Automatic Electric was the name taken by the company founded by Almon B. Strowger, the inventor of Automatic switching. The old manual switchboard was not discarded. It was put into service to handle toll calls to and from other places.
As the borough of Palmerton and the New Jersey Zinc Company grew, so did the Palmerton Telephone Company. In 1943, during World War II, when the Zinc Company was operating at full capacity to meet the demands of war production, there were 1236 telephones in use on the system.
Part 2
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