Main Street, Wyoming; 1003; Wyoming's Communication Pioneers

There's a special significance to telephone history and sparsely populated places. Well Wyoming by the very nature of it is a huge state and the people are spread out. I wait for them to communicate. So that telephone is a three way gets the population together. Were. The first telephone companies figured if it could work in Wyoming it could work anywhere

and if it didn't work. Well it was only Wyoming. A great place to test. New technology. Wyoming welcomed barbed wire phone lines and the world's first broadband wireless Internet network. I wanted to get on the Internet. These are the people who dialed the state in and accelerated its conversations. These are Wyoming's communications pioneers. Did you troubles with. One. Pine bluffs Wyoming April 1868 a young telegraph operator named Theodore Vale goes to work manning the telegraph lines after stints as a pool shark and semi-pro baseball

player Vale learned Morse code from Samuel Morse himself. To travail who is acknowledged as the father of the Bell Telephone System and his first real job then was as a tool like a for in you know in Wyoming and up for the railroad. And as he was doing his job he noticed. How the mail was handled in the and mail cars in the road and he his analytical mind saw that the way they were doing it was just awful. Dale devised a new method and from Pine Bluff he rose rapidly through the ranks of the railroad Postal Service gaining minor fame for his SOU Purba administrative skills. Then in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Two years later Bale was hired on as general manager of Bell Telephone.

It seems Vale never forgot his roots in Wyoming. During his first year at the helm Vale shipped to telephones to Cheyanne for a demonstration on February 24th 1878. The future Sen. Francis Warren and Cheyanne and the noted humorist Bill Nye in Laramie carried on the first long distance conversation of record in the Mountain West and that was purely a publicity gimmick. Whose is the same as we do today. I think. They're movers and shakers who made those early calls. Realized just what this med I mean they they could see the future. A future that would continue to be influenced by men and women in Wyoming. In 1881 to left and he became a profession in the state with the opening

of the Wyoming Telephone and Telegraph Company. The company's first directory was printed on yellow paper by mistake making Cheyanne the birthplace of the modern Yellow Pages. In 1883 Chugwater became the first Wyoming community to receive telephone service via a line made of barbed wire and by nine thousand nine hundred forty local telephone exchanges offered service to two hundred seven communities around Wyoming even when a collection of companies jointer for Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1911. Some parts of Wyoming like the village of Mountain View were left to fend for themselves. Well it's kind of the forgotten part of the world you know. You're taught don't

claim us neither do the Wyoming. Ranchers themselves started building lines between. Each other's houses. Just one wire or ground circuit. And. They continue to do this. And there was about four. Major lines but they're thinking of all this me thought he was on the hook calling lines together with the switchboard so they take it even further. Yeah. He put together the whole switchboard made out of. 30 30 part reaching the 30 40 for creature and he kept the back off the 30 40 dark regions so he could slip through a 30 30 car greet you with a 30 40 car greets you and make a connection. And so he made this a little switchboard and that was the first one to

use. True they started to connect these lines together. The rancher lines all fit into Mountain View where the witty family founded Union telephone company and where Howard Woody was literally born into the business. I was born. In a bedroom hind a switchboard in Mom view. Young Howard went to work as soon as he could helping his father maintain Union slowly growing network of lines. Union telephones reach was limited and in some nearby communities the bartender doubled as the local operator. I grew up in Carver Wyoming we do not have a telephone you know on the phone that was there was up in the barn cafe. So if anybody called you they would have to come down and get you and you'd go back out there after Howard when he graduated from high school and he entered the U.S. Army and shipped off to

war in Europe. Back home. Woody's father served the war ever by delivering bad news to the families of fallen soldiers. The United States government would call him. And. Tell him he grew to love family. He said it was one of the worst you'll see ever. Howard returned for more to face other hazards of the family business. Yes it was serious business. A contractor that was working for us. In my. Last alignment. Due to. A wire patching and sage brush and slipping up in the power line and it killed a lineman with. Him. Why not a challenge. Oh only electrical lines. But the lightning.

Lightning. Could be way off in the distance and travel down those lines to knock a man off a pole. Man will tell you that there have been balls of lightning just huge balls of fire running right down the line. That line just attracts the loophole attracts them. Winter storms were another problem. The summers work erecting new lines could be a race by a single blizzard. When Howard when he started thinking about the long hours and low pay that came with running a small town telephone company he figured the best idea was to sell off the family business to the much larger Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company. I suppose I have no money. He said no. They're not. But the useful idiot is you've got to make the decision. I said well let's see if we can so they said

no we can't. You don't cost too much to do it if you don't want to know a name. We don't offer to get into for a dollar but I said to that. We're. Tell us. Woody decided to broaden Union telephone service area and begin competing with Mountain States Telephone commonly known as mountain bell which by this time controlled most of the lines in Wyoming and he could only do this by taking out the large loans. Oh my father he was a PMA Burrill he he at first. You just can't floor yourself rich. Howard mortgage the family ranch then beat Mt. bell for the contract to bring service to Dutch John and the newly formed Flaming Gorge National

Recreation. At the time you will see the biggest construction project. And so far this. Before. Yours It wouldn't be the last time union telephone company latched onto an economic boom. But union telephone was still a mom and pop operation and when the woody boys wanted to speak with grandma all they had to do was dial the operator and things were too busy she talked to they were busy she answer some calls. All over Wyoming. The telephone offered a bygone audible intimacy between customers and operators. The larger cities and towns were served by Hello girls who worked the switchboard patching calls they were called hello girls.

They were well trained they were fine. And they gave service. They were polite. They knew what to do and how to do it. We had cards and we just plugged in one and ask for their number and then plug in the second one. Our number is very different than mine it is now. And besides have you. I would tell from cost. Too if we had to call the fire department we had caught the place department we were the Nine one one also. When hello girl Dee lam and her husband Bill left jobs in Lander and purchased the tiny independent Dubois telephone exchange they took over for a Boland a retired cop from Riverton who wasn't always vigilant about his operator duties. Ade would turn the system down anytime he wanted to go for coffee. You just didn't make it. Because you know it was a switchboard. But

we promised 24 hour service. So we had a bell on the switchboard if anybody called. After we went to bed that would ring and I'd get up and go an answer and place their calls for them in Dubois and across the west phone service was delivered on a common party line. We first got our first telephone I was sure it was a dial phone. It was a system where you you write a letter to two long rings of the short rail that was your raise any one of your neighbors to pick up the phone. You're exactly what you're saying. The social significance was that it was difficult to keep people from listening in on other people's conversations. You could hear all kinds of telephones could loss of. Lives the way you got the news back there. But you'd always have at least one or two troublemakers on a party line. It was. The newspaper. Yeah it was

valley communications. Somebody had a funeral. For Raider rude for long from everybody you get on there and tell them when the funeral was over and the basketball game was going to start or whatever needed everybody needed to find out. Party lines in Wyoming were a remote extension of a network offering unique opportunities for telephonic experiments and the first tranche of cotton that a line a telephone line. Of course mostly went to Wyoming and the first multi layered frequency hard long a conduit for carrying multiple private conversations at the same time was field tested in the 1950s by the National Bell Laboratories. Along the route between Lander jacks.

Oh there isn't any water source. Well try someplace to work before we split off of the experimental line between Jackson and lander. Worked. As did a new microwave system. Wyoming was a major place for the Transcontinental microwave. System. The golden spike of Mike Royko I think which it croaked in Wyoming. In Wyoming and across the nation cations technology was germinating into the Jedi in the telephone industry tried to portray itself as the bookish leader in the laboratory and a tech savvy savior in the outback. That's one reason why 1955 when a United Airlines flight crashed into medicine bill peak the recovery effort was led by now bell. We have a full crew rushed through and everything for.

This is just just the way it's done it just the way it's always been done. Mt. bell and the smaller independent companies always tried to project a positive public image but the relationship between a large company and little exchanges like the ones and do boys in Mountain View was not always harmonious especially when it came to sharing long distance revenues. What was it exactly. Oh yes but it was pretty close. Well we were working with mountain bell and we were working with Public Service Commission and most of us were not getting settlements for the long distance money that was mean generated in our areas and it was a huge battle. I think we were the first to know. Three in the family and I remember the vice president of the Bell System saying there's going to be no war.

Well oh there was plenty more of that as the independent telephone exchanges around Wyoming were granted a much larger slice of the Long-Distance pie. And so they were made of like Baguio. It was a gift of life to many of them. They were skating along pretty wobbly that that allowed them to. Not only live but to expand and grow stronger. And let's face it that that was good for the whole nation because it was good for the network a network that expanded in new ways with the arrival of wireless in the 1980s. In addition to a web of hard wires telephone companies began constructing wireless broadcast towers to serve the first cell phone customers. Yes Ron Paul you're probably. By far. At the time no one knew if cell phones were a passing fad or the future

and small operators like Howard Woody wondered if their companies should invest in expensive wireless towers. I started thinking of a field and. Started. Putting in my time sure. Then the energy boom created a large well financed customer base for wireless service and union wireless was there to cash in. In addition to the new gas oil and coal customers Union Wireless has capitalized on another Wyoming resource. Howard would talk to your friends above football on union wireless nationwide. Is that my new right. Your right is out. All right. We just we just looked and I said That's Howard. I looked up and there was Howard.

Cool thanks I thought with the lariat Union wireless is the largest employer in Mountain View where Howard and his sons oversee an aggressive expansion across Wyoming Colorado and Utah. For us it's just build build build build to get that coverage so that we've got continuous coverage everywhere. We really like it to be that there was a place in line you mean that you couldn't pick up your phone and couldn't get service. Oh that's still a long ways off. Laramie's Brett glass isn't the type to sit around and wait for service just like the ranchers who build up their own party lines a century ago glass and his company lariat dot net are connecting Internet customers in rural areas not served by larger high speed providers where we're playing

David to their Goliath then we're doing the best we can. Yes you get to play that role well. Glass was an early inhabitant of the Internet and a former collaborator with John Perry Barlow the Grateful Dead lyricist and Cora Wyoming native credited with popularizing the term cyberspace. In 1997 Barlow envisioned ways the Internet would help Wyoming ites telecommute. There's no strong reason why you gotta live in. You know I'm sober. That is an hour and a half away from the cubicle where you work if all you're going to do is sit in the cubicle and stare at one of those screens all day. The wireless broadcast of high speed Internet service makes this possible for customers not connected to a hard landline. Brett glass is a hero to some of these Internet users and glasses service area in and around Laramie offers a glimpse of Wyoming's telecommunications past and future.

There's telephone road just above town which marks the route of the first long distance telephone wires in the state. This is where some of the first women went to work on the lines and where switching technology allowed the city to become the first in the region to convert to dial in one thousand twenty one. Then in 1993 glass made Wyoming's college town home to the world's first broadband wireless Internet network. Yes we were the world's first wireless internet provider at Stanford University I worked on wireless systems which were the great granddaddy's of the wireless that you have in every laptop computer today. There was no Internet here. About the only thing you could do if you want to get on line was go to coffee served at a blazing speed of twenty four hundred bits per second. Well Brett's pretty much the same guy now as he was a very intense energetic individual.

If you call lariat dot net customer service you get Glass who still lives in the off campus home where he launched his company. One of the reasons why Larry it is so popular is that more and more people nowadays are cutting the cords. You know that was really ideal for what we were looking for. Because you don't need a phone line for it and it's cheaper. It's it's 30 bucks a month. And the speed is it's fast enough that you can run voice over Internet Protocol. Between that the cell phone I was able to drop my my landline. We can cover areas which have extremely low population density. We cover branches I was out on a farm two days ago literally installing Internet on top of a farmer's pigsty because that was a building that had the best view of our antenna so that we could to provide Internet to the entire farm where several people live. So we provide a vital link for those people even inside the city who have other options but don't want them outside the city on the other hand. There is virtually no way to get high speed internet except wireless

wireless. The evolving chapter in Wyoming's ongoing communications story from little old Mountain View to the horizon tower in Denver. Wireless companies are evolving into high tech conduits for all kinds of information and services. There's there's a lot of new technologies coming on board and we'll be able to give Whitely and data throughout the state of Wyoming. And while we do it in the population areas first of Mantua it will cover the entire state although we still get a lot of towers to build. It's going to eliminate the need for a person that already has being at a wellhead or a location logging. The air flow of gas or oil. We're doing that now with data over cellular so that they know how much fuel are transported through there is for mentation.

And. Via a modem that talks back to the cell site that was then and this goes over the Internet. Take it down to Houston or wherever the Home Office is they can actually see what's going on and that's all the cell you were getting. Oh my sees you going through the air. Come on Sean you'll be late for soccer. I'm on. Oh hi honey. Sorry I got blown away. Relate as usual. Oh that's OK we'll pick it up tomorrow Xan. Ok bye. Bye honey. We're 400 miles apart but we can be together any time we want. That's what wireless technology has done for us. A laptop and the cell phone. Our history now it's just one device we call for personal intelligent community. Here is exactly what you want to do when you want to do it. Lock your door. Turning the AC. To. Watch the news

a movie. It's a long list. Just. Yet. There's a special significance to telephone history in sparsely populated places. Communication drives the course of human events and Wyoming is a difficult place to communicate. That's why it became a place where people dedicated their lives to connecting their neighbors to the rest of the world. You have pitched me to figure you know what will you do. While Wyoming. By the very nature that is. A huge state and the people are spread out. And so. You need to wait for them to communicate because you're not going to get very far.

If you align. Yourself so that telephone. Is a threat. To. Its population together. Wireless technology. My youngest daughter. President of access to her patients. I got her problem. Hi Sarah. Well the ultrasound shows a baby's fine but your glucose and blood pressure are higher than I like to see some post here today and it looks like you missed your. Drowsiness morning. Oh you may be right. Can you or another scan cycle for me. I'd like to transmit it to our Brookside clinic for a second opinion. Sure. Let me put you on hold like a set up. Great. Oh let me take this other call while you're doing. I'll be right back. OK. OK. Am ah you're coming to argue Hey says I'm tryin but something's up

here that might need my attention. I mean it's a big deal you need to be there and I haven't seen my niece for ages. I know I know. I'll do the best I can. Gotta go. I'll see you there. Bye bye. OK so here I've got Dr. Brendan here. While an AMA discovers profound ways to communicate with your patients. Trish now talks regularly to her refrigerator and it's not a strange as it sounds. This is your refrigerator. Try to speak slowly. Butter celery ketchup bread the next day. Yes. Authorize you purchase. Health care delivery delivery place. Delivery control 3 p.m.. Thank you. Oh thank you.