Moscow Calling

1882: Telephones come to Russia

In Boris Akunin’s novel The Death of Achilles, which takes place in 1882, the great detective Erast Fandorin is attempting to obtain information crucial to solving his current case. Ever resourceful, he turns to the latest technology. He calls, or rather “telephones” (a new verb has just been born) a certain lady of mystery and pretends to be her lover and accomplice. The ploy works and our hero gets the information he needs.

The young man’s heart was racing. His idea was new and audaciously simple. Key to his plan was the fact that telephone communication, an overnight sensation among Muscovites, while extremely convenient, was technically far from perfect. It was almost always possible to figure out the general sense of what was being said, but the membrane did not convey timber and nuance. At best you could tell – and by no means always – whether it was a man or a woman’s voice on the other end, but no more. The newspapers were writing that the great inventor Mr. Bell was developing a new model that would transmit sound much better. But, as the Chinese saying goes, imperfection has a delight all its own. Erast Petrovich had not heard of anyone attempting to impersonate someone else over the telephone. Why not try?

Akunin’s plot device is historically accurate. The first telephone station did indeed appear in Moscow in 1882, and it really was set up by the International Bell Telephone Company. In May 1882, an advertisement appeared in the newspaper Русские ведомости (Russian Gazette) offering home telephone installation. The price was an astronomical 250 rubles, at a time when the typical Russian worker took home approximately two rubles a day and a pood (about 16 kilograms or 35 pounds) of rye flour cost ten kopeks. The telephone was certainly a luxury most people could not afford.

To drum up business, potential customers were invited to visit the building on Kuznetsky Most where Moscow’s first telephone station was located amidst fashionable shops and restaurants. Here the technologically curious could see the amazing device with the odd-looking “pipe” (in Russian, a telephone receiver is still called a “little pipe” or трубка) and arm (switch hook) that could connect you with a “young lady.” All telephone operators were “young ladies,” unmarried women, “so that an excess of thoughts and cares would not lead to an excess of connection errors.” It is hard to say who would really have been more inclined toward distraction by “an excess of thoughts and cares,” a mother with a family to support or a young lady with suitors on her mind, but it is true that the operator’s job was not an easy one. In the early days, when there were only 26 telephones in all of Moscow, the job was not too difficult. The operator had to respond whenever a light on her switchboard panel lit up, connect herself to the caller, find out to whom the caller wanted to speak, select the correct cord to connect the caller with the callee, and insert it into the correct jack. However, despite the high cost, there was no shortage of people who wanted telephones in their homes. Soon, there were hundreds of them. By the turn of the century there were thousands.

How could these young ladies possibly keep track of thousands of subscribers? At some point the telephone station borrowed a technique used by a doctor who had started numbering the charts of all his patients, which made them much easier to file and find. From that point on, all telephone subscribers were given their own numbers. Still, as the pool of subscribers grew, the operator’s job became increasingly difficult, and the poor young ladies were the targets of endless tongue-lashings. The frustration felt by callers is easy to understand, as they sometimes had to wait hours to get through to the switchboard, and when they were finally connected to their party, the line might go dead at any moment.

Being a telephone operator really was a high-pressure job that involved dealing with a constant flood of incoming calls and talking to subscribers over the din of their colleagues’ voices, forcing them to try to “out shout” one another. The rule had it: “The telephone operator must speak in such an emphatic intonation of voice that the subscriber will automatically listen to what she is saying.”

Frustrations aside, the intriguing voices of the young ladies with their “emphatic intonation” and unusual profession did make quite an impression. My grandfather told me about the telephone operator he fell in love with in his youth because of her beautiful voice. They spent hours talking on the phone, and she even sang to him. We can only imagine what her colleagues – not to mention the subscribers who were unsuccessfully trying to get through – must have thought of this. This telephone romance did not, in the end, lead to anything. The couple arranged to meet in person. So that they would recognize one another, they agreed that she would be holding a book and he a newspaper. When my grandfather arrived in the appointed place at the appointed time he saw a woman waiting for him who was by no means the beauty he had imagined. He fled in embarrassed panic, hiding his newspaper behind his back.

As time went on, the telephone network continued to expand and in more and more homes people were able to jiggle the switch hook and be connected with a “young lady” and then with the party to whom they wanted to speak. At the time, this cumbersome process and poor connection seemed to be part of an amazing leap forward in technology, and it was. The ability to obtain information without leaving your home – albeit from an extremely limited number of people who had telephones and after a lengthy wait – was at first simply a luxury, a plaything for the rich. But soon telephone lines covered the entire city and started to extend out into the countryside. When war broke out, there were military communications engineers out in the field connecting the commanders at the front to one another and to the General Staff.

Then came 1917. Lenin knew that in order to seize power it would be necessary to capture the most important points in the city: train stations, banks, bridges, and, of course, telegraph and telephone stations. (Today that list would include television towers.)

By the middle of the twentieth century, local calls could be made without the help of a “young lady,” although one still had to interact with an operator for out of town calls. You no longer needed to jiggle a switch hook either. The new phones were designed so that one only had to lift the receiver to get a line, and people dialed their own numbers by turning a heavy rotary disk marked with numbers and letters. Later, for some reason, the letters disappeared and only numbers were left. Using numbers alone probably offered more flexibility for the system, but for me the named exchanges of my childhood seemed much more convenient and simply nicer.

A few decades later, there was no longer a rotary disk to rotate and you could quickly punch a bunch of keys to “dial” a number and you could call anywhere in the country without having to deal with an operator.

Then came the nineties. In 1996, I returned to Moscow from a trip to London with wondrous tales of everybody talking on mobile phones. I recall being particularly struck by the sight of one man talking on his cell phone while jogging. It would be hard to amaze anyone with such stories today.

How often we now exclaim, “How did we ever get by without mobile phones?” Boris Akunin describes his hero Erast Fandorin dreaming (as he pursued some criminals in a horse-drawn cab) of a day when it would be possible to contact the police for back-up from anywhere.

But really, wasn’t life more calm and leisurely back in the day when, if you wanted to talk to a friend, you had to lift the switch hook, give it a good jiggle, wait for a mysterious young lady to respond, and then spend time waiting for your connection before finally, finally getting through?

The words spoken over the telephone in those days must have meant a lot more than our constant phone chatter.

* Estimated number of cellphones in Russia: 224,260,000 (155 percent of the population)
Estimated number of cellphones in the US: 327,577,529 (104 percent of the population)
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