Heading: (Telephone, 1880)
Author:
Title: Holcomb’s Automatic Acoustic Telephone, illustrated leaflet ca. 1880
Place Published:
Publisher:
Date Published: 1880
Description:

Holcomb's Latest Improved Patent Automatic Telephone... / The only Mechanical Telephone having a Clear Title to Patent, embodying all the latest improvements in insulation and connections / with new and perfect vocalizing Chambers and Compound Metallic Diaphragm (J.R.Holcomb & Co., Mallet Creek, Medina County, Ohio, undated, ca. 1880. 8.5 x 11 ins., 4pp.

Holcomb was an Ohio housepainter and card printer who began a successful "novelty" business in the 1870s, producing school toys, music instruments and supplies for children and publishing a widely-read teacher's journal. In 1878, he invented and patented an acoustic telephone, a sophisticated version of the "two tin-cans on a string" kid's toy, which, using no electrical transmitting or receiving devices - and thus not infringing on the Bell patents - allowed people to inexpensively talk to each over short distances. Costing $4 each and guaranteed to clearly transmit voices over a distance of one mile, "with such power as to be heard distinctly in all parts of an ordinary room", 10,000 of these "elegantly finished" instruments were sold to satisfied customers as "the best and cheapest speaking telephone manufactured" for short lines. Given the Holcomb's Company's reputation as "novelty" school supply firm, this brochure stresses that their Automatic Telephone was "not a toy or plaything" but rather "adapted for actual every day use for Social or Business purposes" being "far superior to the more costly Magnetic and Electric Instruments" on short lines. A rare imprint. WorldCat locates only two copies of another (probably later) version of the leaflet at the Harvard Business School and Ohio Historical Society.

Very good.