History

here's a tiny bit of telephone-history for you guys.


On Tuesday I was in the office building in Ghent for a course named "customer excellence", comments on that course will follow, but what I want to write about might me extremely boring for you guys, but to me it's actually quite fascinating. In that OB there are classrooms on the second floor and in the coffee area they keep an old telephone switch board (one of the first ones ever made) and some of the first phones, and to me it's quite interesting to see how it all worked in the old days.





This is the first switchboard, which had an operator sitting in front of it 24/7 (I do hope they took shifts though), when a customer wanted to make a call he'd wind up the handle on the right side of the phone (image underneath), then their number would appear because the small black valve covering the numbers would fall down, then the operator put a line in and talk to the other person to hear whom he or she wanted to be connected to and then he'd connect the two lines. If it was an interzonal call, he'd switch to the other operator, and so on and so on until the caller could be connected to his or her correspondent, pretty cool huh!?

here's an image of the first phone, I really like the design of it, especially since it kind of looks like a funny face to me... you'd put the faces ear to yours and speak in the mouth, the handle on the left is only to make contact to the operator.