This is a picture of Victoria, BC, from 1903.
There are a ridiculous amount of wires going all over the place, on poles high above the road. Yet, there are no streetlights, no traffic lights, and I don't imagine many people had phones at home or many electrical appliances. Even if they were telegraph cables... that many for what was probably a very small town at the time? I thought telegraphs were something that was centralized, like at a post office.
What are all these wires for? What was the state of electric power and electric communication for people in Victoria at that time?
First, that is an electric trolley in the middle of the street. Part of the web is the electrified catenary from which it draws power. The pole sticking up from its roof at an angle has to run along live electric lines or it stops dead.
Second, if you look up from the front of the trolley and a bit to the left, you will see the streetlight. It just doesn't look like our massive halogen lamps - more like a conical bell on a bracket that puts it out over the traffic.
Naturally, what you imagine does not limit the technology of this scene. First, it is a business district, and there are lots of drops off the wires to the various buildings, powering their electric lights and business telephones. Both are carried on the same poles on the left, but at different heights. These probably contain no telegraph wires, though they would be among the phone wires (AT&T stood for American Telephone and Telegraph: the telegraph companies often moved into telephones).
Consulted over pic w/my pro. Great dpi - we could take it up a lot.
The poles on the right are electrical. We can tell that by the size of the wires, the insulators, their spacing, and the big boxes are transformers.
The poles on the left are telephone lines. They are much lighter, closer together, w/smaller insulators. They may be running "single wire & ground" or a "single cable pair."
You can trace the electrical and phone drops both to the near buildings and across the street. Telegraph lines would not go to so many buildings.
The "bell" is a light, but apparently for the stationer's front. There is a similar one farther down, above the head of the most forward man waiting for the streetcar. There are indeed several strings of bulbs wired in parallel, strung across the street at intervals.
that many for what was probably a very small town at the time?
Provincial capitol. Big enough to have very modern streetcars.
Here's Photos from the Days when Thousands of Cables Crowded the Skies makes your scene look like a piker. NYC in the 1880s was using 70-foot poles to handle all the telephone lines.
Thanks for asking - this has been fun.
