A Devilish Device: Attitudes to Telephony 1876–1920

Abstract

On 15 January 1881 the International Bell Telephone Company opened the first public telephone exchange to twenty-two connected subscribers in Denmark's capital Copenhagen. In 1920 the capital's sole telephone company was Danish, the Copenhagen Telephone Company. It had more than 100,000 subscribers, but growth had been far from smooth since the beginning. In 1918 the leading Danish author of books on etiquette, Emma Gad, could still call the telephone 'newfangled' and decide to assign the appropriate handling of this 'tyrannical, but indispensable' tool. This paper aims to uncover the attitudes of the Danish population towards telephony reflected in directories, fiction, newspapers, satirical magazines, revue shows, and films. The frequency of telephone subscribers in Emma Gad's own circle is revealed as well as the subscribers in a number of known personal networks appearing in the paintings of the epoch's most famous Danish artist, Peder Severin Krøyer. The telephone was initially marketed and accepted as a business investment, while it had much more difficulty in finding its way into private homes, even when the price was not an obstacle. By analysing these kinds of sources we are discovering trends that no telephone directory or statistic could expose single-handedly: that the private telephone was either reluctantly accepted or rejected completely by the cultural as well as the economic elite of the epoch. To the upper class the telephone threatened to destroy a number of core values. It threatened the need for regular personal meetings maintained by personal correspondence with all the related social graces, protocols and etiquette associated with good manners.