Life without a telephone

A recent house move left me without a landline connection for a whole week - and all this despite meticulous advance planning.  

The problem apparently was located in a local exchange but the company (not) providing me with a telephone connection kept assuring me that their computers showed my telephone was connected and working.  They never took me seriously when I tried to convince them that their computers were wrong and I was right.  The fact that these numerous "service" calls were conducted via my mobile phone failed to make any impression on them.  If they took the simple expedient step of ringing my landline number, they would soon find out that the line was as dead as a dodo and their computers in need of a serious overhaul.  Luckily they saw the error of their ways by the end of the week and my telephone now works perfectly.

A few days after full service was restored, I received a phone call from a very nice lady in customer relations: she was ringing to check that my telephone was working properly - she rang on my landline phone.  If only they had done this on day one, in the fashion of the early telephone operators who used to make daily telephone calls to subscribers to check if the lines were working.

I'm not a fanatic telephone user - neither mobile nor landline - but I must confess to feeling isolated and cut off from the rest of society during my telephone-less week.  Not just cut off in the sense that I was unreachable by phone for a week but in the sense that, without a telephone connection in the society that I live in, you're not considered fully part of that society.  Many public bodies and services ask for your landline number first; a mobile number is useful but a landline presupposes a fixed address with a householder who is registered in all the correct places.  So with a landline connection, you feel more 'permanent' and an established member of the community.  When people ring your number, they know precisely in which building you are located.  I had to rely on mobile telephony but never felt really safe with it - units might run out during a long phone call, the battery could go flat, I could lose the charger, or quite simply forget to take the phone with me when leaving the house.

What made our grandparents feel permanent and 'connected' to their communities before the telephone became commonplace?  Or did they not need to feel connected?  As an experiment, going cold turkey with telephone use could tell us all a lot about how we view our own personal use and need of the telephone (in a similar fashion to going a whole week or month without television or Internet).  But we can never experience pre-telephony life in this way - what has been learned cannot be unlearned.

How to untie a telephone tangle

A. H. Hastie(1) wrote in 1898 of the problems that beset the British telephone system.  He admonishes not only subscribers but also government and the General Post Office.

Subscribers themselves are to blame for shoddy service.  When they experience delays in connections, they should report this to the telephone company immediately, in writing.  Hastie considers this a subscriber's "duty" and if he performs his duty, then he can enjoy connections within London within fifty seconds (!)  Otherwise, his requested connection may need up to ten minutes.  Unreported delays remain a secret between operator and subscriber.   In modern parlance, I think we call this 'snitching': put your complaint in writing and then the company will tell the operator - make sure Mr X gets good service, or else.  To give him his due, Hastie does concede that "the telephone girls are only human; their work is most worrying work, and every allowance must be made for them.  He then ruins it be suggesting operators fob off subscribers, saying the called party is engaged, when in reality they are not.



It seems that the upper social ranks felt a little put out about having to answer their own telephones and complaints - satirical and serious - about the interruptions abound.  One such example is detailed in a previous post: a logical solution to this problem would be to get the servants to answer calls.  Anyone who could afford a telephone subscription could certainly afford at least one servant.  So, there are two alternatives here: either subscribers wanted their cake and to eat it (maintain a telephone for business contacts, not be disturbed by calls, not allow anyone else to answer calls); or, reports of putative disturbances are greatly exaggerated - by the press or subscribers, who knows?
 
A second area where subscribers can improve communications is by having two lines into their premises.  One line connects to an internal house exchange - employees can communicate in-house and make external calls.  A second line ensures that clients can ring up without being told the line is busy.  Hastie suggests this arrangement is adopted by private households - a servant should answer the phone and there should be connections in the remaining rooms.  In 1898, I can well imagine the cost would be prohibitive for all but the extremely well off.  Two lines meant having two separate subscriptions.


What about the government's part?  Hastie advocates a monopoly.  One organisation in total control is the only way to achieve good service.  (At the time, private companies provided local, town service and the Post Office the trunk, i.e. long distance, service).  If a town just wanted a telephone service operating within its boundaries, then every town council could set up its own urban service with its own specifications.  The problem arises when towns want to communicate long distance and then there is the matter of compatibility.  This is as much a technical matter as it is economic.

Hastie accuses the Post Office of operating a deficient trunk system.  Subscribers placing a long distance call had to wait up to twenty minutes.  (Why do they find this length of time unacceptable?  Yes, it's longer than making a local call, but when you consider the alternatives available a decade or so earlier in the pre-telephone age, twenty minutes to wait seems fine to me.)  Hastie suggests two trunk lines: the first, expensive and quick, and the second one, cheap and slow.  He stresses that "the business community require an efficient telephone service at once" - no mention here of domestic subscribers.

Interestingly, Hastie urges the Post Office to nationalise the telephones and provide the whole country with telephones (in emulation of the US, where growth was phenomenal in comparison).  His rationale is that the creation of the necessary infrastructure would provide jobs for twenty-seven different skilled trades and countless labourers.  Hastie is silent on how the Post Office responded.




(1) Founder of the Telephone Subscribers' Protection Association

A. H. Hastie.  "The telephone tangle, and the way to untie it."  Fortnightly Review.  December 1898.

Thomas Brennan - his life as a messenger boy, 1910

My previous post talked about the sarcastic instructions for telephone subscribers written in a Judy article of 1898.  In the 1890s the network was sparse and few people had a telephone at home, even among those that could afford one. 

By the eve of the First World War, this situation had not changed that much.  Other technologies (electric lighting, motor cars, cinema, etc.) were prevalent but I get the impression that for many, the telephone was still a bit of a novelty.

Thomas Patrick Brennan was born in 1896 in Liverpool, two years before the Judy article.  He spent his entire working life employed by the Post Office.  His very first job (at the tender age of 14) was as a telegraph messenger boy.  He had six hundred other boys as colleagues working in Liverpool then and he remembers that they were all exceptionally busy because "the telephone wasn't as efficient as it is today."  He recalls that the telegraph was used extensively by the business people in the town. 

Thomas's life as a messenger boy was more akin to that of a soldier's than working for the civil service.  One hour every morning was devoted to drill exercises, marching, presenting arms, target practice and saluting.  The boys had to salute senior officials of the Post Office whenever they saw them, so I can understand the logic of practising this.  And the drills and marching would help keep them fit.  I'm not sure, though, where the rifle practice comes in!

To complete the military lifestyle, the boys had to make sure their uniforms were spotless and that hair and fingernails were clean.  Boots and buttons were to be polished and shiny.  Since boys had a unique number on the collar of their jacket, identifying a culprit with muddy shoes was not a problem.  Any boy that didn't pass muster during the daily inspection was sent home to get clean.  I recall the discipline problems the telephone companies had with telegraph messenger boys working as the first switchboard operators.  Did the Post Office have this in mind?  Perhaps this explains the rigid routines imposed on these young boys: the Post Office didn't want the boys getting out of hand and they were, after all, delivering important telegrams at times.

In 1913 Thomas was sent to work in the engineering branch and it was here that he had his first experience with the telephone.  Naturally, he needed to know how the telephone worked and, more importantly, how to use it.  He was completely in the dark about these things.  An engineer in the office asked him, "Have you ever used the telephone, sonny?"  When Thomas replied in the negative, he was told, "Well, you'd better get onto it."  He then had to crank the handle on the side of the telephone and ring the Edgworth station (which was always engaged) and other places that he knew.  And what did he say when someone answered the telephone at the other end?  "Just ask a silly question just to get into the idea of answering the telephone."  This was one of his new duties!

Thomas wouldn't be alive today, so we can't go and ask him more pointed questions about his early working life.  This is just a tiny extract from his life story which has been recorded by historians (the written transcript runs to eighty-eight pages).  It is precisely this wealth of detail that adds social colour to the dry and sterile (to me) history emanating from company accounts and parliamentary reports.

Citation: see earlier post from November 2010 for details of the oral history project in which Mr Brennan participated.

"Telephonic instructions and notes," 1898

When she started her shift every morning, the switchboard operator of the early years had to telephone each of her subscribers.  This wasn't to wish him a good morning but to check if the line was still connected and working.  Faults were frequent and lines invariably became disconnected and the only way to test the line was by telephoning the subscriber.  Can you imagine such a thing happening today, and without caller-ID?  I mean the ringing up, not the disconnected lines.

The fact that this custom became the object of satire in contemporary publications, illustrates the strength of feeling against it and its prevalence.  Newspaper cartoons of the day also ridiculed the inefficiencies of the telephone service.  One of the "instructions" provided "not by the National Telephone Company, Limited" (in Judy) advises on Temper:

"Don't be put out if you are in medias rep [sic] with an intricate calculation, and have to descend sundry flights of stairs only to find that the telephone nymph wishes to know if you can hear her all right this morning."

Wouldn't it be more sensible to have the telephone situated in a study or sitting room, instead of the cold and distant hall?
Why not get one of the servants to answer the telephone, especially when it was predictable who was ringing?


Not only does the writer poke fun at the customs and practices involved in using the telephone apparatus ("turn the handle x times as if you were operating upon a barrel-organ") but he makes puns out of the new vocabulary used for telephone terminology: "If the (Official) Receiver is off to the Hook (of Holland), you naturally cannot ring him up."
Such vocabulary (receiver, hook, engaged, exchange, instrument) has now acquired new layers of meaning.  These double meanings are exploited for entertainment value, but also as a stinging critique of the infant telephone service.  The public were presented with a new technology for which they struggled to find a real need and a niche.  The public not only had to find a way to assimilate the telephone into their daily routines, and develop a telephone discourse with which to discuss these new practices, but they also had to deal with telephone companies beset by technical problems and inexperience.  Remember, the companies and their staff were new at this business too.

"Telephonic instructions and notes."  Judy, or the London serio-comic Journal.  9 March 1898.

Kleptomaniacs and the man in the moon

The following report was given in The Orchestra (of all places!) in an article “The British Association’s Telephone” (September 1877).  Note that it was around this time that Bell’s invention was demonstrated in Britain.

"But the instrument is still in its infancy, and who can foretell future results?  Suppose, for instance, that by means of a lunar telephone conversation could be carried on between the Man in the Moon and the various lunatics at large or under restraint on this planet: what a flood of light might be thrown on the feelings and inner consciousness of klepto-, dipso, mono-, and poly-maniacs."

All this ahead of Freud and space travel.  Some journalists had a vivid imagination.

German empire orders hundreds of telephones

The Journal of the Society of Arts (7 December 1877) reports that the Postmaster-General of the German Empire proposed to install telephones in telegraph offices.  Several hundred telephones had been ordered from Siemens and Halske for this purpose.

In addition, telephones had been attached to either end of a telegraph wire spanning the English Channel (Dover to Sangatte - site of the French end to the Channel Tunnel), for the Submarine Telegraph Company.                       

“Talking could be heard, and also the playing of a musical box on the French coast.”  (How quaint.)

Again, I get the distinct impression that mere conversation or exchange of information was alone not deemed an appropriate use of the new telephone.  When fishing around for a use, the Victorians always seemed to think that the telephone would be a good medium for transmitting musical entertainment.

As said before, the invention of the telephone was built on the technology of the telegraph and it was first seen as an aid to telegraph operators, in communicating with operators in other offices.  It was thought to be quicker than communicating with each other via telegraph.