Object of the Month

Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site has a large museum collection consisting of thousands of objects, many of which are not regularly displayed in the house's furnished exhibit rooms. Every month, an object will be featured on this page, providing a look at an unusual piece from the collection.

 

Alice Longfellow was born in 1850 and was the primary resident of the Longfellow family home on Brattle Street after her father Henry’s death in 1882. In the early 20th century Alice was responsible for bringing the house up to date with much of the latest in modern conveniences and technology, including electricity, modern plumbing, an elevator, and an electric intercom system, part of which is shown above. The callbox with its earpiece pictured here is installed on the wall next to the bed in Alice Longfellow’s second floor bedroom.

The separate earpiece, which would originally have been connected to the callbox by an electrical wire, is labeled on the back with a patent date, Aug. 14, 1900, the word “SOLID”, and the name “Couch”. S.H. Couch was a company that manufactured electric communications systems including telephones and intercom systems. Founded in Boston around 1901, by 1905 the company had moved to nearby Quincy, Massachusetts. Based on the Couch trademark on the back of the earpiece, this device was made between 1903 and the 1920s.

Sometimes called a butler phone, this device would have been used by a resident of the home to communicate with the domestic staff. In this case, the counterpart to the piece in Alice’s bedroom is mounted on a wall in the kitchen on the first floor. When the earpiece was lifted off the hook extending from the side of the callbox it would activate the phone by ringing the bells affixed to the top of the box on the other end of the system. Someone in the room at the other end of the line could then pick up the earpiece on the corresponding box and engage in a conversation.

This intercom system was an update to the earlier arrangement of call bells operated by bell pulls and (non-electric) wires installed in the Longfellow home during the 19th century. Alice also had a system operated by a push button attached to an electrical cord kept by her bedside that would have activated a bell located somewhere in the servants’ quarters, possibly in the attic. The newer intercom system would have allowed Alice to make detailed requests to the kitchen regarding meals and to address other needs, as opposed to simply indicating an unspecified need for assistance.

Intercom systems like this one started to fade in popularity in the mid-20th century, as systems that used buttons, wall-mounted speakers, and the incorporation of the transistor, invented in 1947, became more common. But for Alice Longfellow, who died in 1928, this bell-and-callbox system would have represented the latest in-home communication technology.

 

Click here to view past Objects of the Month.