Dial H for history

The BBC reports on historic phone directories being put online. A wonderful read.

"The humble phone book, dating back to the Victorians, is providing a rich seam of social history. And as part of the boom in genealogy, back issues of phone directories have been scanned and published online in a venture between BT and a family history website.

Other Excerpts:

-- The honour for appearing first in the very first phone book goes to John Adam & Co, 11 Pudding Lane in the City of London.

-- Other entries making their debut in the early phone books were Alexander Bell - yes, he who invented the phone - and Keith Prowse. Yep, selling tickets.

-- It also shows how quickly the telephone spread. By 1914, the phone book was the largest single printing contract in the country, running off 1.5 million copies.

--Phone books give a snapshot through the following decades of the 20th Century of where people were living.

-- The re-published phone books stop at 1984, before the arrival of mobile phones and the proliferation of numbers and communications.

emily | 3:01 PM | Public Phone Booths |
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