Fun Phone Facts
The telephone is one of the cornerstones of the modern age, one of those inventions we cannot imagine living without although our ancestors managed just fine, thank-you very much, for thousands of years. Today we face telephones in every pocket or handbag. Here are some facts that speak to the early days of the wired phone, when the march of this inventiona cross the landscape of human history had just begun. How many of them are familiar to you?
- Heinz Ketchup was invented the same year Alexander Graham Bell made his first phone call.
- Alexander Graham Bell thought the phone should be answered with “Hoy, Hoy” instead of “Hello”.
- By 1910, New York Telephone had 6,000 women telephone operators.
- Mark Twain was one of the first to have a phone in his home.
- There was no technology for timing calls in the early days of telephones, so the phone company used to charge a flat monthly rate for service.
- In 1910 the train fare from New York to Philadelphia was $4.50. A phone call between the same two cities was 80 cents.
- 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.
