To celebrate 150 years since the first telephone call was made, Michael Kay and Coreen McGuire describe how the device reshaped social interactions in Britain – and the somewhat surprising ways it was first used
In autumn 1883, an unusual news story captured the imagination of the British public. It was a tale of deception, fraud – and telephones.
On Friday 21 September, a young barrister’s clerk in Birmingham, Robert Danks, set in motion a plan to commit fraud. First he forged a message from a solicitor asking his boss, Jesse Herbert, to travel out of town. Next, he telephoned the office of Herbert’s friend, Alfred Young. Speaking to the clerk, Danks – impersonating Herbert – said he had been called away but had left his cheque book at home. Would Mr Young please lend him £5 (equivalent to more than £500 today – five times Danks’ weekly wage)? Deceived, the clerk agreed, and was told to expect Danks to collect the money – which he did, absconding with it the next day.
The story was reported at length across the country – not least because of the novel and ingenious (for the time) method of Danks’ deceit. This was, one commentator noted, the first time the telephone had been used for such fraud – a landmark of sorts in the technology’s short history.
Sound idea
The first practical functioning telephone was developed by Scottish-born engineer and inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who lived and worked in Canada and the US during the second half of the 19th century. He worked extensively on hearing and speech, experimenting with hearing-aid devices and then acoustic telegraphy – efforts that led to the development of the telephone.
Bell was issued the US patent for his telephone on 7 March 1876 – 150 years ago this month. The Bell Telephone Company was established the following year, and within a decade tens of thousands of telephone sets were in use across the US.
The first successful demonstration in Britain took place in 1877, and the first telephone exchanges opened in London two years later. By the time of Danks’ fraudulent call, small exchanges up and down the UK were being operated by different companies, invariably serving local business communities.
But were people talking about telephones more than they were talking through them? When it was first introduced, everyone agreed that the telephone was a marvellous invention – though its purpose was far from clear. Was it a device for relaying the sounds of concerts and church sermons? Perhaps it was more useful in the mining industry, utilising the telephone microphone’s sensitivity to vibrations in order to monitor the quality and density of air, and so guard against the build-up of explosive gases?
People did use the telephone to speak to each other, but a subscription to a telephone exchange was expensive – often £15 or £20 a year – so for the first several decades in Britain it remained very much a business tool. As well as barristers such as Herbert and Young, early exchange telephone subscribers included companies involved in large local industries – for example, wool in Yorkshire, cotton in Lancashire, jute in Dundee and steel in Sheffield. Also prominent in early telephone directories are professional firms such as solicitors, doctors and banks, as well as local councils and chambers of commerce.
In those first decades, contemporaries observed how few telephone subscribers and devices the UK had compared with other countries. That’s in part because the communications context at that time was rich and diverse. Thanks to the success of the telegraph system, the effective penny post service and cheap messenger boys, the telephone had less immediate impact on communication in Britain than elsewhere.
In addition, the usefulness of exchange telephony depended entirely on who else was also using it. This did not necessarily mean that being in a bigger network was better: many subscribers preferred smaller, more exclusive networks. Subscribers were also concerned about privacy: they didn’t want to be available to just anyone who could wander into a public call office and make demands on their time – nor to leave themselves open to fraudsters like Danks.
In short, it suited many subscribers to keep the telephone network limited. And certainly, no one could imagine why the ‘working man’ might need a telephone. Regardless of subscribers’ preferences, exchange companies realised the importance of encouraging groups of subscribers to join at the same time. This often meant targeting professional communities such as lawyers or doctors, whose offices tended to cluster together in the same geographical area within a town. Many companies sold telephony by advertising that they connected their exchanges up to local police and fire stations, and sometimes also to doctors.
In sickness and in health
In August 1879, shortly before the first British telephone exchanges were established, Eva Lückes wrote a letter to the Telephone Company, which had been established to promote Bell’s patents in Britain. Lückes – the lady superintendent at the Hospital for Sick Children in Pendlebury, Manchester – wanted to thank the company for her telephones. These were used throughout the hospital, but had proved most valuable in the fever ward, where telephony enabled communication without the risk of infection.
Over the next few years, other medical professionals extolled the virtues of the telephone. “All of us must have felt the heartaching anxiety of longing to hear the voice of a dear friend when either ourselves lying on, or the friend being confined to, a bed of sickness,” noted the medical journal The Lancet.
Unlike the speaking tubes that had been common for some time, but through which infection could be transmitted, telephones allowed contagious patients speak directly to family and friends while remaining safely isolated. Following an outbreak of scarlet fever in London in 1887, The Lancet was moved to recognise that this kind of remote contact had a curative power. The strength of this belief increased as the system proliferated, and special telephones for hospital patients were increasingly commonplace in the interwar years. In addition, the telephone achieved lasting clinical utility as an audiometer – a device to quantify individual levels of hearing loss in numerical terms.
Despite these benefits, many people feared that the telephone might pose risks, particularly to users’ mental health. In May 1879, The Times lamented that businessmen’s lives had become increasingly busy, unpredictable and reactive following the advent of telegraphy – a situation that would only get worse with the proliferation of telephones. Concerns about how telephony had increased the pace of modern life, and the associated stress that came with this, were commonplace in this period.
On fever wards, telephones enabled communication without the risk of infection
In October 1882, the popular science writer Phoebe Lankester encountered a telephone in a private house, and wrote in her newspaper column that: “Extraordinary as this novel invention is, I am not sure that I quite like the idea of its intrusion into our domestic scenes at any moment of the day… [W]hen it comes to being at the beck and call of any intrusive person who may possess a telephonic wire… no man’s house can thenceforth be called his castle, unless he be brave enough to resist such innovations, and leave himself far behind the rest of the impetuous world – in peace.”
This combination of excitement and anxiety typified the Victorian response to the telephone in the business and domestic spheres. In public spaces, too, overhead telephone wires raised concerns, being viewed as unsightly at best, and even dangerous. Accidents involving falling telephone wires were rare but reported widely. In 1885, the council in Bath was reluctant to establish an exchange at all, citing concerns that overhead wires would disfigure the city, a picturesque and popular tourist destination.
The GPO intervenes
In most towns and cities, exchanges were established by large companies that were offshoots of the US Bell Telephone Company, operating using Bell’s patents. The largest of these was the National Telephone Company (NTC), which eventually absorbed the other companies operating in different regions around the UK.
However, in late 1879, as the first British telephone companies began to establish exchanges, the General Post Office (GPO) successfully argued that the telephone came under its monopoly on telegraphic communications. This was based on its ownership of the telegraph network, which had been nationalised in 1870. As a result of this legal decision, telephone companies required GPO licences to operate. In addition, the GPO began to open its own exchanges around the country.
In towns such as Sheffield, Dundee, Swansea and Preston, local people also established their own exchanges. Despite patent disputes and fierce competition from the larger companies, these were able to operate for many years. Cleverly branding themselves as being run by and for local people, these companies charged lower subscriptions, enabling a broader range of businesses to sign up. They often inspired greater loyalty among their subscribers than the larger companies. Together, these factors meant that, by the late 1880s, towns such as Dundee and Sheffield had some of the most developed exchange telephone infrastructure anywhere in the country. For 30 years, therefore, provision was quite messy, with different companies and the GPO providing services in different areas. This situation ended only in 1912 when the NTC, the last remaining private telephone company, was nationalised.
Wartime lifeline
Although telephony seemed to be gaining ground in Britain, many in the military still viewed it with scepticism. Telephones proved suitable for point-to-point communication with surveillance balloons from the ground below, and were used as Morse receivers, but they seemed unlikely to replace messenger communications. How could you trust that a barely audible message relayed via this method was sufficiently secure during battle?
The dark, isolated and stagnant conditions of mechanised conflict in the First World War changed everything. Suddenly, telephones became a lifeline – a crucial means of communicating between trenches and relaying news from the battlefront to headquarters. By 1920, the GPO had, at great cost, supplied 40,000 specially protected telephones to the army, meaning they were unable to invest in the development of telephone technology on the home front. Yet this expense was hidden from the public, who complained extensively about the failings of domestic telephony.
Reliance on this technology in the context of war drove innovations in audibility and portability. Crucially, clearer transmission of speech was vital, and equipment needed to be light enough for repeated dismantling and movement. These aims were in tension, because improvements to audibility added weight.
Improved audibility was also important for the generation of men who had fought in the war. Many of these servicemen suffered deafness or hearing loss from the bombardment of artillery and shells. In 1928, the National Benevolent Society recorded that “33,768 men were discharged from the army and navy on account of deafness”. Symptoms of deafness or deaf mutism also presented with shell shock. So hearing loss was regarded as a national problem in the interwar years.
Though valve technology had improved the telephone, individual voices remained hard to comprehend. Early telephone lines were noisy, open and messy, with background noise described in a Birmingham newspaper in 1888 as “a buzzing obbligato which gives a faint suggestion of bees, but has no precise resemblance to anything in nature”.
In addition, problems of induction between overhead wires, with signals from one call leaking into another, often led to subscribers being able to overhear supposedly private conversations. This had obvious privacy implications for those engaged in business conversations, as did fears of exchange operators listening in on calls.
In 1897, a Glasgow corn merchant, Anton Kufeke, described overhearing a conversation between his competitor and a customer, thereby learning that the competitor was selling more cheaply than he was. This was sensitive business information. In 1893, another Glasgow subscriber recounted a conversation he had overheard between a man and a woman: after a brief exchange, the man announced that he was going for a clean shave – and another listener on the line commented “Is that a clean shirt you’re going for? You need one badly”. The conversation finished with various listeners joining in a rendition of a popular song.
Agitations from exchange subscribers in Leeds and Glasgow in local newspapers in the late 1880s and early 1890s illustrate the great difficulties many faced in trying to use their telephones. One correspondent in Leeds wrote that: “I occupy more time in communicating through it than I should do if I went to the offices or places of business of nine out of ten of the persons with whom I wish to communicate.” A Glasgow subscriber said that one thing he had learned from using the telephone and overhearing his colleagues and neighbours was just how much they swore when frustrated.
Restricted information
A broad range of people struggled with such issues, including some who had trouble following telephone conversations yet didn’t consider themselves to have hearing loss in other contexts. It was strange to have access to speech without visual information. Moreover, the frequency band of the telephone was restricted, so people making or receiving calls were receiving far less sonic information than when talking in person.
In 1923, the GPO issued instructions on speaking with maximum audibility and effectiveness
These difficulties are clear from a 1923 advice sheet issued by the GPO. This gave instructions on what to say when picking up the receiver, and how to speak with maximum audibility and effectiveness. Users were counselled to speak “clearly”, and to roll the rhotic R when saying the number three, because the telephone would blur consonants and elide vowel sounds.
“The telephone is no louder or clearer now than it was 40 years ago,” HA Garratt complained to The Times in 1934. Although he admitted that he was “just the least bit deaf”, he still could hear the wireless perfectly well, which led him to conclude that the telephone model he possessed was faulty. Faced with such criticisms, it became clear how the GPO could both recoup financial losses sustained in the war and move beyond issuing edicts to encourage clear speech: by repurposing technology used in the trenches to create amplified telephony.
When the telephone was first introduced, the deaf community was excited about the possibility that the new device could be used as a hearing aid. Bell’s wife and mother were both deaf, and the telephone had in fact been initially designed as a type of hearing aid. Instead, it initially excluded the hard of hearing. Moreover, its development encouraged the measurement of levels of deafness in increasingly narrow and strict terms.
The first amplified telephone designed for people with limited hearing was advertised by the GPO in 1924 “for the use of ‘Deaf Subscribers’ who experience difficulty in the use of the standard telephone”. It featured a controlling key to adjust the volume; this was stored in a separate wooden box, along with the valve amplifier.
Following numerous complaints from customers about the stigmatising box, an improved amplifier telephone was released in 1934. The new device was cheaper, with a freehand microtelephone – the volume control being embedded in the telephone itself rather than in a box – and more powerful valves to boost the signal and increase the volume.
Previous models comprised a separate receiver, held to the ear, and a transmitter into which one spoke. Newly integrated receivers combined the two, creating the telephone familiar to us today. When using early devices, people with hearing loss had been able to press the receiver to their mastoid bone, behind the ear, receiving the sounds via bone conduction. As the GPO explained, such users “had been accustomed to holding the bell receiver to the bone at the back of the ear to obtain best reception for his [sic] particular deafness”. This was not possible with the integrated receiver, and the GPO received a flood of complaints.
The GPO was a repository of expertise in electroacoustics during the interwar years
In the UK, categories of deafness were defined according to audiological tests that were themselves biased, being driven by the GPO’s development of Artificial Ear technology. This machine designated standards of normal hearing in narrow mechanical parameters.
The standardisation of ‘normal’ hearing and the categorisation of the deaf was therefore created in line with the priorities of the Post Office’s telephone system. Those who did not fit within the GPO’s standards were categorised as customers in need of a “telephone service for the deaf”. So ‘deafness’ was constructed both socially and technologically at the behest of the GPO.
Despite these obvious limitations and biases, the GPO was a repository of expertise in electroacoustics in Britain during the interwar years, and it engineered the first NHS hearing aid – the Medresco.
Change and change again
Today, an irony often highlighted is that technologies designed to bring us together are actually having the effect of isolating us. Yet, as we have seen, communication and isolation have been in tension since telephony began. The telephone was always perceived as a threat to societal mental health, and there were always isolated portions of society unable to make and receive calls easily.
In recent years, mobile phones have changed our behaviour. Domestic landlines are becoming rarer, for example, largely replaced by smartphones. For a time, landlines were important for the roll-out of the internet, with dial-up connections being the norm before broadband usurped that technology. Today, many young people dislike speaking on the phone, instead preferring to communicate through text. But as we embrace a more individualistic model of telephony, do we appreciate what has been lost with the decline of the home phone, with access to it shared by members of a family or friend group?
Whatever your take on such a question, aspects of mobile-phone culture might well seem familiar to our forebears. In 1885, a London-based commentator wryly described a group “telephone party”: “There sat about 15 well-dressed persons, gazing straight in front, apparently deep in thought, and with a black tube held up to one ear. They heeded not the entry of anyone, and silence and inactivity reigned supreme.”
The ever-evolving telephone has radically reshaped our lives – but concerns about its impact on mental health and wellbeing are nothing new.
Michael Kay is a senior learning designer at King’s College, London. Coreen McGuire is a historian of interwar Britain, and assistant professor of history at Durham University
This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine