Bill Sutliff (Monroeville. PA) wrote to me in early January of this year and
asked if I had any information on a porcelain sign he had acquired. He bought it
from a collector in South Carolina. who said he'd found it in Ireland during the
1960's. Bill loaned me the sign so that I might take the photo shown below. The
letters N.T.C. are in cobalt against a white background. and the sign measures
approximately 14" x 8", its weathered condition having robbed it of
1/8" in both directions. In the bottom right corner, the sign maker is
identified as Hancock & Corfield Ltd. of London.
I sent Bill some information that had been given to me by David Hibbert, one
of the managers at British Telecom in London. This material was taken from a
report put together by Gwen Jones Lewitt of BT archives and published in 1989 by
British Telecom to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the National Telephone
Company's establishment in England -- an important anniversary in the world of
telecommunications. I would like to share it with our readers:
"Exactly 100 years ago the American Almon B. Strowger patented his
automatic telephone system. He was a Kansas City undertaker, and allegedly experimented with automatic
Telephony on discovering that his local telephone
operator was connecting customers' calls to a rival business.
After Strowger applied for UK patents in 1891, there were several demonstrations in Britain
of
his and other automatic systems. But it was Strowger equipment that was
installed in the UK's first automatic exchange in Epsom in 1912.
His system was a
great improvement on the existing manual equipment in that it replaced the
exchange's magneto generator and the local batteries at subscribers premises
with a common battery at the exchange. It also meant a reduction in the work
involved in making a call, both for subscriber and operator.
By 1922, the Strowger system had been adopted as the standard Post Office automatic exchange,
and it survived, suitably improved and refined from time to time, until
superseded by the first electronic systems.
It was also a century ago, in 1889,
that three of the larger independent UK telephone companies amalgamated to form
the National Telephone Company. It sold its trunk telephone lines to the Post Office in 1896, but still existed as a private
company running its own
exchanges and local plant until bought by the Post Office in 1912.
Sixty years
ago, the Post Office introduced a new type if telephone (Tele 162), which
incorporated its first successful design for a handset with combined receiver and
transmitter. This telephone was a great advance on its predecessor in
transmission efficiency. The Tele 162 was also among the first to be manufactured
from bakelite and to be available in a choice of colours. The manufacture of telephones, as one if the earliest large-scale uses
of this
material, was an important early stage in the progress of the plastics industry
in the UK.
In the same year, 1929, the BBC began experimental television broadcasts
for the first time, under license from the Post Office, using the
equipment of the Baird Television Company. John Logie Baird's experiments had
begun in 1923, but the BBC executives were skeptical if them for many years.
After seeing two demonstrations of the equipment, the Post Office declared
that the trial had been sufficiently successful to justify regular experimental
BBC transmissions.
The Postmaster-General hailed Baird's work as a 'noteworthy scientific achievement' and,
grudgingly, in June 1929, the BBC agreed to short
broadcasts being made.
The first transmissions began on 30 September of that
year. When asked how many viewers there had been for the first programme, Baird
estimated the total at 29.
Subsequently, Baird's work was superseded by the
development if the cathode-ray tube, and it was EMI 's equipment which was used
for the first transmission of the BBC's regular broadcasts in November 1936.
Thirty years
ago saw the first pay-on-answer coinbox introduced in UK telephone kiosks. The
old Button A and B prepayment coinboxes which had been in use since 1925 could
not be modified for use with Subscriber Trunk Dialing, introduced in 1958.
Datel services came in a quarter-century ago in 1964 to meet the demand
for facilities
to enable digital data for computers to be transmitted over telegraph and
telephone lines. The service started with Datel 100, which provided data
transmission facilities on telegraph circuits up to a maximum speed of 110 bits
per second.
And just 10 years ago British Telecom opened its second satellite
earth station at Madley, Herefordshire. The first terminal built there took over
the Indian Ocean service from Goonhilly 1, the original Telstar/Ear{y Bird
terminal.
From a Kansas City undertaker inventing an automatic telephone to stop
rivals poaching his customers to a satellite earth station keeping us in touch
with the rest if the world -- all anniversaries which have been celebrated this
year. Only through the wildest leaps of the imagination can we begin to guess at
what anniversaries will be celebrated in the next hundred years".
)