subject: Some Interesting Facts About The Telephone [print this page] -Heinz Ketchup was invented the same year Alexander Graham Bell made his first phone call.
-Alexander Graham Bell believed the phone should be answered with Hoy, Hoy instead of Hello.
-New York Telephone had 6,000 women telephone operators by 1910
-Mark Twain was one of the first to have a phone in his home.
-There was no method for timing calls in the early days of telephones, therefore the phone company used to charge a flat monthly rate for service.
-As a tribute to Alexander Graham Bell when he died in 1922, all the telephones stopped ringing for one full minute.
-From one telephone in 1876, the count grew to 11,000,000 (million) telephones nationwide by 1915.
-In 1956 the first transatlantic telephone cable was placed on the ocean floor and rests as deep as 12,000 feet! It runs from Newfoundland, Canada to Scotland!
-There are 149,084,370 telephone lines in the world and thousands more are being added every day.
-One third of the worlds population have never made a telephone call, while sub Saharan Africa contains about ten percent of the worlds population they only account for 0.2% of the worlds billion phone lines.
-There are under five telephones per one hundred people in India
-In the world, there are over 1.2 billion fixed telephone lines, 1.3 billion cellular subscribers and 140 billion international telephone traffic minutes each year
-Willy Muller invented the first automatic answering machine is 1935, it was a three foot tall machine that was popular with Orthodox Jews who were forbidden to answer the phone on Sabbath.
-The city of Hull is the only place in the UK not served by British Telecom. Hull City Council was granted a license to operate a municipal telephone system in 1902, a role now fulfilled by Kingston Communications.
-The automatic switchboard was inspired by an undertaker rivalry. Almon Strowger was an undertaker in the USA; he suspected that he was losing business to his rival. His rivals wife worked on the switchboard and he believed that she was diverting calls to her husband. These suspicions were confirmed when he read in the paper that a close friend had passed away and been buried by his rival.
-In 1896 a comedian Ernie Wise made the first telephone call from a mobile. The call was made to Vodafones head office in Newbury, at the time mobile phones were the size of a briefcase and cost 2000.
