1878
On 10 March 1876, with the words, ‘Mr Watson – come here, I want to see you,’ the world was changed for ever. Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone ushered in an era of instant long-distance communication that revolutionized commerce, industry, politics and personal relationships. The telegraph had already been invented, in 1837, but it required a specialist operator to put the (usually terse) message into Morse code, another operator at the receiving end to decode it, and then someone to deliver it to the recipient. The telephone, by contrast, put people directly and vocally in touch with each other.
There have been bitter arguments as to who was the true inventor. In the late 1850s the Italian-born inventor Antonio Meucci created a device to send voice messages between different rooms of his home on Staten Island, New York; another Italian, Innocento Manzetti, was reported to have transmitted his voice down a telegraph wire in 1864; and Elisha Grey, an electrical engineer from Chicago, attempted to register a similar device around the same time as Alexander Graham Bell.
However, it was Bell’s invention that was officially patented on 7 March 1876. And it was the Bell Telephone Company (later to grow into the modern telecommunications giant AT&T) that in 1878 licensed the construction of the first telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut. It was the success of that exchange that led to the first telephone directory.
The telephone also created an occasion for the new technology of telecommunications to join with a much older technology – print. Subscribers to the new telephone services needed to know how to contact other subscribers – otherwise the new invention would be little more than a toy. Hence the publication of the first telephone directory, called simply The Telephone Directory. It was issued in Connecticut in 1878 by the New Haven District Telephone Company, the world’s first, and comprised a single-sheet list of 50 subscribers. Most of the entries were for businesses or public services such as the police and the post office. Only 11 were for private residences, 4 of those for individuals connected to the company. The directory did not actually give the subscribers’ telephone numbers – callers had to ring the New Haven exchange to be put through.
The idea of a directory was not new in itself. All kinds of specialist directories had been published since at least the 18th century, a notorious example being Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, a bestselling annual directory of prostitutes in London’s West End that began life in the 1740s. Other examples include Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage, a genealogical guide to the British aristocracy first published in 1769, and Crockford’s Clerical Directory, founded in 1858, which gives details of thousands of Anglican clergy in the UK. All these, in one way or another, helped to put people in touch with each other – but it was the telephone directory that eventually enabled virtually everybody to get in touch with virtually everybody else.
The development of telephone technology was driven partly by governments, who recognized its military potential – the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) was the first major conflict in which field telephones were used to maintain communications between military units. But it was the mass market of increasingly affluent consumers that provided the main impetus; they wanted individual communication in just the same way that they wanted individual transport in the form of the motor car.
From its tiny beginning in 1878 in New Haven, the telephone directory grew into the most popular printed work in the history of publishing. Later in the same year, directories were issued in San Francisco and also in Chicago, and these, for the first time, gave individual telephone numbers alongside the names of subscribers. The first directory in Britain, containing 248 personal and business names in the London area, was issued in 1880.
The more widely the telephone spread, and the more numbers there were for subscribers to remember, the more important was the role of the telephone directory. Businesses rapidly realized the marketing potential of the new means of communication, and alongside the growing circulation of ordinary telephone directories, a new version of the phone book also made its mark. In 1886, only eight years after the first New Haven directory, an enterprising 21-year-old businessman in Chicago named Reuben Donnelley issued the first classified directory, with companies listed according to the type of business in which they were engaged. Legend has it that the printer producing the first edition ran out of ordinary paper, and had to complete the job with yellow pages.
It was in Britain, in 1896, that the first telephone directory listing numbers for an entire country appeared, a thick volume of 1350 pages with over 80,000 separate entries. By 1914 the telephone directory was Britain’s single biggest printing contract, with 1.5 million copies produced every year, while in the United States, the directory for New York’s Manhattan district alone was printing a million copies a year by the 1920s. That trend continued for much of the century, replicated in every industrialized country in the world.
No one would claim that the telephone directory has influenced the development of thought and literature in the way that Shakespeare’s First Folio or Tolstoy’s War and Peace have; but by releasing the potential of the telephone, it has radically changed the daily lives and expectations of billions of people all over the world.
Today, as more and more communication is conducted via email on the internet, users build up their own individualized directories – in much the same way as people tended to keep their own personal, handwritten telephone books beside the big printed volume. Communication via landlines is being superseded by cell/mobile phone calls and by texting, and users of mobile phones have resisted attempts to gather their numbers into publicly available lists. And, in the ‘Information Age’, fears over privacy have seen the size of printed directories shrink, as thousands opt to become ‘ex-directory’. The glory days of the telephone directory may well be over.