The Telephone

• Telephone


  In the 1950s, represented the cutting edge of technology
• Telephones in the 1950s

  • Large and expensive to purchase
  • Inconvenient to use
  • Needed to call an operator to make long-distance calls
• Telephone calls in the 1950s


  • Expensive, charged in units of three minutes
  • Equivalent to 2-19 pence per unit
  • Milk was cheaper at about 3 pence per pint
• Telephone usage in the 1950s

  • Few people had a home telephone
  • Even fewer made long-distance calls
  • Most people used public telephone boxes
• The high cost of using a telephone in the 1950s ensured that anyone who had one tended to use it infrequently, and then only for short calls
• Subscriber trunk dialling (STD)


  • Introduced by the General Post Office in 1959
  • Allowed users to make long-distance calls directly, without an operator
  • Charged only for the actual duration of the call
• Subscriber trunk dialling (STD) introduction


  Telephone became easier and much cheaper to use
• Telephone becoming easier and cheaper to use


  More people began to use it and for longer calls
• First public call on a mobile phone

  • Made in 1973
  • On a Motorola device resembling a brick
  • 22 cm long, weighing about 1 kg
  • Talk time of just over 30 minutes
• Nowadays it is extremely unusual to find someone who has neither a home telephone nor a mobile phone
• Just as the telephone changed from a status symbol to become simply another piece of the modern world, so the computer has made a similar transition