Half a Century of Telephones

When you start to blog your life, you realise that it is the differences in everyday things that is more interesting than a life story. So I have dallied a bit to write about telephones. When we moved to Essex in 1960 our house had a telephone - the number was Danbury 2148. Note the exchange name, you had to know that. It was a heavy, black phone made of Bakelite with a physical dial - you could hear the clicks and imagine the machinery clicking at the exchange. Many people we knew still did not have a phone, if you wanted to get in touch you had to write a letter, or in an emergency send a telegram. We had something which appears very odd now - a Party Line. This meant we shared the line with our neighbour, although we had different numbers. Sometimes you would pick the phone up to make a call and you could hear their conversation, so you had to put the phone down and wait until you thought they would have finished, then try again. So much for privacy! Calls were expensive, and tended to be short. Compare that with the way we live with phones now - mobiles, answerphones, Broadband, direct dial anywhere in the world, faxes, all taken for granted. There is one completely daft thing about modern telephony: I have a mobile phone that takes photos, records videos, is a MP3 player, is a radio, has my diary, is a calculator, is a cool piece of social jewellery and has a string of games on it. Can it always get a signal to make phone calls reliably? No. You would have thought they would get that bit right.