By the end
of the 1870s, Mobilians began to get a glimpse of the emerging era of
technological achievement.While
in Europe, A.C. Danner, owner of a large lumber and coal company in Mobile,
attended a lecture on Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, which could carry
sound waves over long distances through wires.Intrigued by the telephones potential, Danner ordered two of
the new devices to be installed in his business upon his return.In 1879 - one hundred and thirty years
ago - Danner's employees installed a phone in the main office and another in
the shipping department, some 100 feet away.
Word about
the new device spread quickly throughout the city and Danner's friends and
colleagues flocked to his business for demonstrations.In November, Danner and other
businessmen established the first Mobile telephone exchange, which was a
network of connected telephones.Businesses embraced the new device and many stores began accepting
"call-in" orders for their products.
City leaders installed telephones in City Hall and the local
jail in 1883.Five years later,
Mobile was connected to Montgomery and Pascagoula, Mississippi by the area's
first long distance lines.By
1900, there were more than 1,000 telephones in the Port City.By 1925, the number had increased to
8,000.
The
remaining years of the nineteenth century yielded further innovations.The widespread use of electricity
transformed the transportation system in the city.Electric streetcars replaced mule-drawn cars and carriages
and, as a result, the city began to expand.Other life-changing innovations would follow during the
twentieth century.
On October 18, 1964, President Frederick Palmer Whiddon formally dedicated the University of South Alabama, a former extension campus of the University of Alabama.USA was the first college established in Alabama since 1896, when the University of Montevallo was established.
In 1944, the University of Alabama began offering extension courses in downtown Mobile in a small facility on St. Louis Street near Bienville Square. Students at the extension center could obtain associate degrees but had to travel to Tuscaloosa to take advanced courses.From 1944 until 1960, officials at the University of Alabama refused to offer advanced degrees or increase funding for the Mobile extension center.In 1960, Frederick Palmer Whiddon, a native of Newville, in Henry County, and recent graduate of Emory University, became the director of the Mobile Extension Center. He had hoped to improve and expand the institution, but when his efforts were blocked by the administration in Tuscaloosa, Whiddon began the process of removing the extension center from the University of Alabama's control. He joined with prominent Mobile businessmen to convince the Alabama legislature to create the Mobile County Foundation for Public Higher Education in February 1961 to encourage the development of a state-supported university in south Alabama.After two years of negotiations between the University of Alabama and the Mobile delegation to the legislature, the University of South Alabama (USA) was chartered in May 1963 and Fred Whiddon named its first president.
The USA board of trustees bought land in West Mobile and moved into its first new building in April 1964. The first freshman class at USA numbered 928 students, and they and the 34 full-time faculty members occupied a single building on the new campus originally designed to hold only 600 people. Plans for expansion were being finalized even before the facility was dedicated in October 1964.
Since its founding in 1963, the University of South Alabama has made a significant impact on the educational climate in south Alabama. USA has built an expansive 1,200-acre campus that features state-of-the-art technology and is home to the Mitchell College of Business, named for the families of Mayer and Arlene Mitchell. The Mitchells have donated more than $36.6 million to USA, including a $22 million gift to USA's cancer research institute, a $125 million research and treatment facility that opened in 2008.
Over the last four decades, the university has awarded more than 60,000 degrees. The USA medical system treats 250,000 patients each year at its hospitals and clinics. The university continues to be a major economic driver in the Mobile area and is the county's top employer.The university system's economic impact on the region is estimated at $2 billion.The university continues to play a vital role in south Alabama, and continues a long tradition of improving access to higher education in the Gulf Coast Region.
For three decades, the Mobile and Tensaw Rivers were home to hundreds of World War II-era cargo vessels as part of the National Reserve Fleet.In the aftermath of that war, many of the large Liberty and Victory-class Ships were towed into places like Mobile and moored, awaiting any foreseeable hostilities that would require moving a large amount of equipment and troops overseas.Skeleton work crews were assigned to combat deterioration of the vessels, which had to remain seaworthy.
The First Reserve Fleet ships arrived in Mobile 64 years ago this week, on August 20, 1945.Over the next three decades, nearly 800 massive cargo ships plied the waters of the Mobile and Tensaw Rivers as part of the program.Locals began calling it the "Ghost Fleet."It must have been an arresting site form the Cochrane Bridge to see the giant vessels that had been tempered by war resting in the quiet waters of the river.
Some 350 ships were moored in Mobile at the height of the Reserve Fleet program during the early 1950s.Many were refitted and put to use during the Korean War.More than 100 vessels from Mobile's Reserve Fleet reentered active service at some point after 1946.But combating decay on the old ships proved too costly in the end. By the late 1950s, the Ghost Fleet in Mobile began to shrink.Workers transitioned from refitting the vessels to dismantling them for scrap metal.By 1969, there were fewer than 1,000 ships in the National Reserve Fleet.
The size of the Ghost Fleet continued to decrease into the early 1970s.In 1973, Congress voted to give the remaining 15 vessels in Mobile to the conservation departments in Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, for use as artificial reefs. In June 1976, two former Reserve Fleet employees watched as a tugboat pulled the last of Mobile's Ghost Fleet away to be sunk off the coast of Florida.All that remains of the fleet are the wooden moorings in the water and the photographs and memories of a time when giant vessels sat awaiting a conflict that, thankfully, never came.
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