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Home phones mark their 85th anniversary

Broadcast Date: July 10, 1962

On July 10, 1877, home telephones went on sale for public use in Canada. Today, on July 10, 1962, CBC cameras mark the home phone's 85th anniversary at Toronto's Bell Telephone office. Forty telephone operators are hard at work connecting lines for the city's 850,000 subscribers. A lot has changed since the first customers signed on back in 1877. Then, only 40 Torontonians were willing to pay $50 a year for a phone line.

Then-prime minister Alexander Mackenzie was the first to make a commercial telephone call in Canada. At the time, technology only allowed for one house to contact one other household. On the anniversary in 1962, one of the Bell operators says by 1965 the latest innovation will allow customers to dial a code for forwarding calls to another number while they are away.

Home phones mark their 85th anniversary

• On July 26, 1874, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in Brantford, Ont. Using a Gallow's Frame telephone, he made the first long distance call on Aug. 10, 1876, to Paris, Ont. In June 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives disputed that Bell invented the telephone, claiming that Italian immigrant Antonio Meucci tried to patent his teletrefono in 1871 but ran out of money. Bell spent 18 years in court defending his patent.

• In 1878, the first telephone exchange in the British Empire was established in Hamilton.
• The Blake Wall Magneto telephone, invented by Francis Blake in 1878, was the first standard phone used in turn-of-the-century Ontario communities. It's shape resembled modern-day pay phones. The top portion had a magneto generator with a hand crank to ring the operator. The mouthpiece was in the middle, and the bottom section contained a wet battery to conduct the electrical current.

• During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Bell Canada disconnected more telephones than it connected.
• In 1964, telephone companies introduced Touch-Tone service.
• In 1958, Dr. Kazuo Hashimoto invented ANSA FONE, the first commercial answering machine sold in North America. In 1971, Casio introduced the PhoneMate, an answering machine weighing 10 pounds and able to hold 20 messages.

Also on July 10:
• 1940: The Battle of Britain begins as Nazi forces attack southern England by air. The Royal Air Force repells the 57-day assault, handing the Third Reich its first defeat and ending the threat of a German invasion of Britain.
• 1946: Canada's first drive-in theatre, the Skyway, opens in Stoney Creek, Ont. The movie is Casanova Brown,starring Gary Cooper and Theresa Wright.

• 1985: The "Rainbow Warrior," a ship owned by the Greenpeace environmental group, is bombed and sunk at Auckland, New Zealand. Four months later, France's defense minister resigned after it was reported he knew that French agents planted the bomb.

Home phones mark their 85th anniversary

Medium: Television

Program: CBC Television News

Broadcast Date: July 10, 1962

Guest(s): Doreen Johnson

Reporter: Bill Harrington

Duration: 2:12

Last updated:
July 3, 2008