FIRST TELEPHONE IN PALMERSTON NORTH A PRIVATE AFFAIR

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6851, 5 March 1929, Page 6

FIRST TELEPHONE IN PALMERSTON NORTH A PRIVATE AFFAIR

Introduced in 1887

LATE LIB E. WARBURTON WAS FIRST USER OF INVENTION

“The telephone is the new necessity,” is one of the slogans which a business-like government department usos nowadays for the cancellation of stamps on mail matters. Away back in ISB7, the late Mr. Eliot Warburton, one of Palmerston North's best known early settlers, must have thought the same thing. Mr. Frederick Downey, of 74 Ferguson Street, relates that in the year mentioned he commenced work in the legal office of tho late Mr. Warburton and that one of his duties was to attend to a telephone, which his employer had just installed. This was some five years before the first public exchange was opened in the then Voting town and but 11 years after Dr. A. Graham Bell had patented his telephone in the United States. Palmerston North’s first telephone was a purely private affair, tho connection being between Mr. Warburton's office situated near tho site of the present Public Trust building, and. his residence in Main Street, now the Dofence department headquarters. In commenting on the innovation. Mr. Downey stated that it was a source of wonderment to clients of tho office and further that he would relate with a mystic superiority to his boyhood friends how he talked to his employer hundreds of yards away without even raising his voice. It is indeed a strange change to-day when one can speak to Dunedin or Auckland with no greater inconvenience than waitiug for the call to get through. ______