45 YEARS AGO

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 58, Issue 87, 22 January 1938, Page 9

45 YEARS AGO

FIRST LONG-DISTANCE CALL.

DOMINION TELEPHONE HISTORY.

It was only 45 years ago when the first long-distance telephonce conversation took place, Alexander Graham Bell had spoken the first sentence for transmission by wire.

Although the beginnings of the telephone are comparatively recent, the rapidity of its development into a medium of world-wide communication would be hard to parallel in the history of any other invention. In New Zealand the telephone has made extraordinary strides in the .55 years since the first exchange was opened with 27 subscribers in Christchurch. A few days later an exchange commenced to give service to 26 Auckland subscribers —there are 19,000 to-day—and a little later (Dunedin commenced telephone business with 56 subscribers. When Bell was able to make the first important long distance conversation, New Zealand had 22 telephone exchanges with 2829 subscribers, using equipment which would seem clumsy to modern subscribers with their hand-set telephones. The receiver of those days was fitted with headgear, carrying dual ear-pieces, and as these were cumbersome, the New Zealand Dost and Telegraph engineers evolved an improvement by producing an article which, to quote an old account, “consisted of only one little ebonite frame about the size of a watch, to held to the ear.” Long-distance telephoning made its first definite advance m New Zealand when a four-core telephone cable was laidi across Cook Strait in March, 1926. The route was from Seddon,*in Marlborough, to Lyall Bay, Wellington, and it was officially suggested at the time that it was destined to become an important factor in fostering the development of long-distance telephony in New Zealand, and in promoting a closer relationship, both commercially and socially, between the North and South Islands. How well that prophecy has come true is evidenced by the growth of eross-Strait telephoning to a total of 290,000 conversations in a year, and the introduction of the most modern of submarine cables, the coaxial, utilising high-frequency currents, in order to cope with the rapidly increasing volume of this business.

The “(Shouting” Days. Prior to 1926 it was only possible to telephone between the Nbrth and South Islands by using telegraph circuits, which limited the opportunities to between midnight and 8 a.m. when telegraphing had ceased. High frequency circuits, enabling one set of wires to be used simultaneously for more than one purpose, had not then come into general use, and the amplifier was also yet to come, so that it was a difficult business to obtain clear reception, and these were the “shouting” days of the long-distance telephone. Easy speech and' clear reception came, however, in 1926 when the greatest aid to long-dis-tance communication was provided by the introduction into the Cook Strait telephone circuits of amplifiers, or repeaters. They were also used on the Auckland-Wellington circuits, with a great improvement in efficiency. Christchurch was soon able to enjoy telephone communication with Auckland, an impressive extension of the range of the toll lines compared with the first toll line which had been operated between Dunedin and Invercargill in 1905, over a distance of 139 miles. In 1929 the introduction into the Dominion of carrier current telephony gave the next great impetus to the service, for it brought into greater use, simultaneously with their normal operation for telegraphy, the telegraph lines of the country. It was about that date that New Zealand could! equal the New York-Chicago commercial service by providing effective communication between the farthest ends of the country.

The automatic telephone made its first appearance in commercial service in New Zealand in 1912, when 500 lines in Wellington, and the same number in Auckland, were equipped and operated in association with the manual switch-boards. The Radio Telephone. Another distinctive advance in New Zealand’s telephone development was the linking up, through radio telephony, with the telephone systems of Australia and the United Kingdom and several Continental countries. This took place in 1930.

New Zealand stands high in the list of countries having the greatest telephone density in relation to population, and this has undoubtedly been promoted by the many services associated with telephone use, such as the “person-to-person call,” and the arrangement of appointinenets for conversation at a stated time. Public call offices are numerous, but this useful service could not have been effectively provided at the street corner unless New Zealand post office engineers had perfected a suitable type of prepayment instrument, which they improved, in due course by introducing an attachment limiting the duration of the first call to three minutes, thus reducing inconvenience which had been caused to waiting customers through the long conversation of someone who had got ahead.

Another distinctive point about telephones in New Zealand is that it is the only English-speaking country to provide penny-in-tlie-slot calls. The minimum charge in Australia, and Great Britain is 2d; in Canada and the United States it is 2Jd ; and in South Africa 3d.

New Zealand, though it was well behind the United States in being able to provide a thousand-mile telephone conversation, has made some contributions of value to the world-wide telephone industry, and in its general development of the service it has caught up, toll conversations of quite a thousand! miles in the Dominion being now common-place.