Ahoy-hoy! Seven amusing anxieties caused by the invention of the telephone
Technology has come a long way in the 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for his newly invented telephone, on 7 March, 1876. Within a few years, this new method of communication was spreading across America, England, and then the rest of the world. But as with modern smartphones, Bell’s invention led to anxieties about the social changes it might bring about.
On Radio 4’s history podcast You’re Dead To Me, host Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Iwan Morus and comedian Catherine Bohart to learn about Bell’s invention, the spread of the telephone, and the concerns raised about the uses and abuses of this new technology. Here are some of the anxieties they uncovered...
1. How should people greet each other on the phone?
One of the first issues that Bell and others working on telephonic technology grappled with was a standard phone greeting. Bell favoured ‘Ahoy’ or ‘Ahoy-hoy’, both of which were used by sailors when hailing a ship. The inventor Thomas Edison preferred ‘hello’, a word used to attract someone’s attention (for example if you wanted to call to an acquaintance you saw on the other side of the street). It was an argument firmly won by Edison.
2. Phones might make people rude
There were worries that the telephone would make people less polite. The Irish Times once claimed that the new technology ‘encourages, and even requires, a graceless brevity of expression’.
3. The role of 'hello girls'
Initially, telephone users could not simply phone from their home to a friend’s. Instead, people rang a central exchange, spoke to an operator, and were put through to the residence or business they requested. These operators were almost all women, nicknamed ‘hello girls’ after their signature greeting when answering the phone.
So, the telephone was a positive force in society, providing a new source of income for women. But the rise of ‘hello girls’ also led to a huge number of anxieties about this group of unmarried young women who worked all hours, were on speaking terms with any number of men, and might even be rude to you over the phone!
4. Phones intruded on the privacy of the home…
Since the invention of the telegraph earlier in the 19th century, there had been complaints that this new, faster method of communication was making modern life too frantic and complicated. The telephone only accelerated this – and worse, it was in your own home, meaning there was no respite from the demands on your time and attention.
Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, complained in an 1889 letter to a newspaper that the new technology had invaded ‘our bed and board… our business and bosoms… bleating like a deserted infant’.
5. …and phone calls might not be as private as you'd hope
In the early days, multiple users in one geographical area might share the same telephone line, called a 'party line'. If your neighbour was making a phone call, you could pick up your own receiver and listen in on their private conversations!
There were even fears that this could lead to more crime, with people listening in to find out when occupants would be out of the house so it could be burgled.
6. What should you wear when speaking on the phone?
Some people worried about whether they needed to be dressed for calls, as though the person on the other end of the line was in the room with you. Was it, for example, rude to answer the phone in your pyjamas? Should a man talk to a woman on the telephone if he didn’t have his trousers on?
Others were less concerned with these sartorial questions, with some commentators even welcoming the informality offered by communication via telephone.
7. Phones broke down barriers between the classes
The invention of the telephone led to panicked conversations about its impacts on the rigid class system and its rules of etiquette. If anyone with access to a telephone could ring anyone up, that meant, in theory, a commoner could phone and talk to an aristocrat, or even the King!
Speaking on the phone also removed visual signifiers of status, meaning that correct forms of address and appropriate levels of politeness might not be used. For the wealthy, it became standard practice to have servants answer and screen calls, just as they would the door. And so the British class system found a way to incorporate this new – American – invention.
