Thanks to the inventor George KoiNew Haven, Connecticut, is a city that can claim a series of “firsts” related to early phone development. Within two years after the Alexander Graham Bell He first patented the phone, the revolutionary, the data of the time, a way of communicating, Koi and his company applied a series of innovations, which were to determine the way in which the phone all over the world.
In January 1878, Koi put into operation at his company’s headquarters, the first commercial call center, which allowed telephone users to contact many interlocutors through a central distribution table. Until then, if two people wanted to chat, their phones had to be directly connected to each other. However, since the direct connection of a phone with many households and businesses was a expensive, complex and non -useful operation, it was not a practical solution for most people. As a result, the early use of telephone devices was limited to prosperous businesses and private homes.
Koi’s distribution table radically changed this situation, since it was now needed only one installed line between the user’s phone and the company’s central office: there, a pilot was able to promote any call to its recipient. OR New Haven District Telephone Companyas Koi’s company was called, had this service with subscription. Subscribers paid $ 1.50 a month and had easy and immediate access to the telephone lines of each other subscriber.
A special feature of the first telephone directory is the lack of any phone number.
Koi’s innovations did not stop there. On February 21, 1878, about a month after the launch of this pioneering call center, the company issued the first telephone book in the world. They consisted of one page and included the telephone numbers of 50 subscribers. The list included nine home phone owners – the first from the rich elite of the city who acquired a home line -, three doctors and two dentists, who hoped to attract new (and rich) customers, police, post office Meat and fish.
A special feature of this first telephone directory is the lack of any phone number. Only the names of the holders and the services were mentioned. This is explained by the fact that each call was manually linked by a central operator, while the subscriber list was very small – therefore, the disclosure of the numbers was not necessary.
Soon, however, these sizes changed. Within nine months, the number of subscribers was almost eight, resulting in a new telephone directory (this time of 40 pages), which included the names of the company’s 391 subscribers. This new telephone directory was also a kind of “driver of use” on how a telephone receiver works properly, since technology was still new and unknown to most users.
Column: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poumenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
