Moozings from Zoom - Some interesting Phone Facts

Today the telephone is an integral part of all our lives wherever we are but only a hundred years ago it was struggling to secure a foothold anywhere. So here are ten interesting facts on its development:


1. Alexander Graham Bell thought the phone should be answered with ‘Hoy Hoy’ instead of Hello.

2. The first telephone exchanges were built in 1877//78 and Automatic exchanges, or dial service, came into existence in the early 1900s - eliminating the need for human telephone operators.

3. There are 149,084,370 phone lines in the world and thousands more are being added every day. (wiki lists 1.27 billion lines and over 5 billion mobile devices)

4. The first telephone answering service was created in 1923, when a bedridden woman named Margaret Smith realized that she could make money by taking calls for busy doctors from her bed.

5. Telephone operators predominately used to be young men; however they were prone to prank calling and chatting up female callers.

6. The concept of allocating telephone numbers to individual phone lines was invented by a doctor.

7. In 1667 a string telephone conveyed sounds over an extended wire but it wasn’t until March 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the sentence: "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" using a liquid transmitter and an electromagnetic receiver – the basis of the modern telephone system.

8. An operator in Milan was once fined for contacting a wrong number.

9. While the concept for hexagonal cells for mobile phones was conceived in December 1947 the first handheld cellular mobile call wasn’t made until April 1973

10. One of the early cable operators in the UK, Cable London, connected its first cable telephone customer around 1990