Scotland Chronological History – 1800s
1876
Six months after Bell spoke his historic nine words, Sir William Thompson (later Lord Kelvin) exhibits Bell's
telephone to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Glasgow, describing it as "the greatest
by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph".
1877
Bell and his financial backers form the Bell Telephone Company in the US and a year later he demonstrates the
telephone to Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight, with calls to London, Cowes and Southampton. They are the
first long distance calls in the UK.
1879
Britain's first public telephone exchange opens at 36 Coleman Street, London, and is followed by the first two
in Scotland, in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Four years later Dave Sinclair, an engineer with the National
Telephone Company in Glasgow, patents the first automatic device in the UK. This allows a subscriber on a
branch exchange to be connected to any other on the system by an operator at a central exchange, without
manual attention at the branch exchange
1885
Glasgow and Edinburgh are connected by telephone for the first time and Scotland's top two cities discover
that it's good to talk! The National Telephone Co. provides the longest telephone line in the UK to link the east
and west. Two years later, Edinburgh has 421 telephone subscribers, but the Glasgow patois is to the fore,
with 1321 subscribers on-line in the Dear, Green Place.
1889
Almond B Strowger, a funeral parlour proprietor of Kansas City, patents an automatic telephone system having
apparently discovered that his local telephone operator was diverting his business calls to another undertaker
who just happened to be her husband! Although his extraordinary experiments involve the use of brass collar
studs and matches, his switching system proves extremely popular and by 1922 will be adopted as the
standard for all automatic telephone exchanges in the UK. The Strowger remains a vital part of the UK
network until as late as 1995, when the last one was decommissioned at Crawford in Midlothian and timebased charging was introduced.
1892
North greets south as a telephone link is established between Glasgow and London and Dundee links up with
Glasgow and Edinburgh. Aberdeen gets in on the act the following year.
1895
In the early days telephone service in the UK is provided by the General Post Office, a Government department,
in competition with private sector companies. The Post Office trunk system opens and trunk lines link Glasgow
to London, Belfast and Dublin for the first time, while Edinburgh links up with London. The Glasgow-Ireland
link is via a submarine cable running from Portpatrick to Co Down.
1896
The Post Office takes over the private sector trunk service paying £459,114 3s 7d for 29,000 miles of cable
in 33 trunk lines, the telephone dial is invented and Marconi demonstrates his "telegraphy without wires".
Aberdeen now has a link with London.