[Trade Journal]
Publication: Telephone Engineer
Chicago, IL, United States
vol. 31, no. 4, p. 35, col. 2-3
P. C. Burns, Independent
Pioneer Manufacturer, Dies.
Chicago, Ill. — Peter Cooper Burns, chairman of the board of the American Electric Company, Inc., died at Wesley Hospital, Chicago, March 22, of peritonitis following an operation for appendicitis. Mr. Burns was 62 at the time of his death. Interment was at Fond du Lac, Wis., the home of his surviving brother, James A. A sister, Mrs. M. F. Martindale of Nashville, Tenn., also survives him. Mr. Burns was a bachelor.
With the passing of the widely known “Paddy” Burns, the telephone industry suffers another great loss in the thinning ranks of the bold figures who made telephone history. He stepped, at the age of 16, into the drive of telephonic development from which he emerged as one of the leading figures. He was employed by the Bell company as an operator and later as an inspector at the Chicago exchange. He then worked in making Bell apparatus at the factory of the Electrical Merchandise Company and later became a salesman for this company, which eventually became known as the Knapp Electric Works.
Burns was an energetic factor in starting new enterprises. He started the first electrical supply agencies on the south side of Chicago and in St. Louis. He established and conducted the St. Louis Electric Supply Company, the Findlay Glass and Carbon Company, the Peru Electric Company, the Laclede Carbon and Electric Company, the American Electric Telephone Company, the Rose and Rein Electrical works and the Peru Porcelain Works. He went aggressively into the struggling Independent telephone operating field in the middle nineties, and by his vigor and inventive ingenuity, as well as his fearlessness walked boldly in where angels feared to tread and came out winner a good part of the time.
For 45 years Burns kept constantly at the job of pushing the Independent field forward. He had a lengthy list of notable achievements credited to him, among which were the standard compact magneto telephone cabinet, the concealed binding-post receiver, the first commercially successful self-restoring drop switchboard, the present standard type of desk stand, the adjustable headband receiver, the harmonic type ringing system, the removable lever switch-hook and the granular carbon “long distance” transmitter. These were but a few of Burns' technical achievements dating from the years in the ’80s when we went into the telephone manufacturing business on an aggressive scale. Then the Bell-Independent manufacturing fight was the hottest. He and Eugene L. Brown, a druggist of Noblesville, Ind., joined forces and as a result the Independent movement was put under way in Indiana.
Many of the foremost figures in the Independent industry today were close associates of Mr. Bums during some period of his active career and they, with the rest of the industry, lament the passing of this valiant figure.
