2:51pm Wednesday 28th July 2010
By Chris Koenig
Even fogeys in their late middle years, who seldom use mobiles, must have noticed by now that a revolution in telecommunications has occurred. I refer, of course, to a change in the time that cheap-rate evening calls start for those of us with BT landlines: it is now 7pm instead of 6pm. Speaking for myself, the move amounts to a life-changing event. All my life the evening has begun with a drink and a telephone session, both carefully delayed until six.
Now I must take care to go steady on the drink bit while I wait impatiently until seven; otherwise I run the risk of inviting too many people round for supper, dinner, the weekend, whatever, in a mood of gay — sorry, I mean careless — abandon when the clock finally strikes.
Disappointingly, though, I now find — through a brief sweep of the Internet — that the six o’clock watershed does not in fact date back to the beginning of telephone time. Cheap rate was first introduced to the UK in 1903 by the Post Office, then in charge of the telephone system, and it then ran from 8pm until 6am.
Exactly when it changed to 6pm to 6am I have not yet been able to discover, but thinking about the matter one day during that vexing sundowner hour, I remembered being told once by a guide at Blenheim that the Palace was one of the first places in Britain to receive a telephone; puzzling that, because, of course, a telephone would not be much use if no one else much had one.
The BT Telephone Museum, in Speedwell Street, Oxford, has now closed, but a telephone historian at its successor, the web-based Connected Earth, told me that he understood that, yes indeed, Blenheim was one of the first private houses in Britain to have a telephone.
In fact the 8th Duke of Marlborough (1844-1892), who married the American heiress Lillian Price as his second wife, followed closely the development of the telephone in US and was chairman of the New Telephone Company over here. Blenheim then had installed the first internal telephone system in Britain. It was largely designed by the duke who also negotiated with the National Telephone Company, a pioneer of telephones in UK, to join the national network.
The English Heritage listed building document for Blenheim refers to the palace having the first domestic telephone systyem — “late C19 telephone sets in Long Library and estate office in Kitchen Court.”
When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Boston in 1876 very few people saw its huge potential. The 8th duke was probably one of them but the bosses of the giant Western Union Company were not. They dismissed the telephone as an “electrical toy”.
Ironic that, because the 8th duke’s son married the Vanderbilt heiress Consuelo, and by that time the Western Union was part of the Vanderbilt empire. The company then spent years unsuccessfully trying to wrest Bell’s patent from him.
If only the timing had been different: Patent No. 174,465 turned out to be the most profitable ever granted to anyone anywhere in the world, and the duke, had he been connected to the Vanderbilts at the time, might have convinced them to co-operate with Mr Bell from the start.
I gather from Bill Bryson’s amusing new book At Home (£20, Doubleday), that by the early 20th century, Bell’s telephone company, renamed American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), was the largest corporation in the US, with stock worth one thousand dollars a share.
But originally most people saw little money in mere chatter. Perhaps they thought of telephoning in much the same way as Dr Johnson thought of fishing: “a line with a fool on one end and a fish on the other” — except that a telephone line would have a fool on both ends.
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