The telephone - part of our everyday life.

The telephone - our friend and confidant. The telephone - our inseparable companion. Something no one can imagine life without.

There were times, however, when... Though let’s start from the very beginning.

Man has always wanted to transmit his voice to a distant point. First, news and public announcements were made by loud-voiced town criers or ‘shouting heralds’, until the speaking trumpet was invented which made the heralds’ job easier. Later came the speaking tube or the acoustophone enabling passengers to contact the train drivers. There were also various other ‘eccentric toys’ or impracticable inventions. In 1861, Philip  Reis in Germany created an apparatus transmitting sounds electrically and called it a telephone. But this first electrical sound transmission device, crudely constructed by a poor teacher in his school lab was not recognized to be a serious scientific invention. As Reis’s apparatus consisted of a cork, a knitting needle, an old violin and an unused galvanic battery found in the physics laboratory, it was assumed that any handicraftsman could have constructed a similar device. Reis’s experiments, however, inspired a young physicist Alexander Graham Bell at Boston University and to whom goes credit for the invention of the first telephone. Bell was studying the problem of teaching speech to the deaf and he got very interested in Reis’d apparatus. Bell’s studies of sound, vocal physiology and electricity led him to conceive the correct principle of the transmission of speech by electricity. Thus the first telephone came in being.

At the Philadelphia international exhibition in 1876 two miraculous inventions made their debut - Edison’s electric lamp and Bell’s telephone. But instead of enthusiastic reception, Bell’s calling device met with scepticism about introducing the telephone for public use. Transmission, it was claimed, was uncertain and poor at best. Individual words were lost, rendering the whole message incoherent. Thus, the telephone was labelled a   useless gadget. Bell’s claims of the invention of the telephone were trashed in prolonged litigation involving some 600 separate suits in 12 years, before Bell’s patent was finally upheld and his claims to be the inventor of the telephone established.

These hassles, however, could not arrest the rapid development of the telephone business. Numerous further experiments, as well as increasing demand for the telephone service led to a continued improvement and modification of Bell’s invention. The idea of the first telephone switchboard belongs to a Hungarian scientist Puskas. It was him who at the international electronics exhibition in Paris in 1881 broadcast live from the Paris Opera House. Several days later, the Georgian newspaper Droeba carried an excited article by the Georgian student Isidore Tserodze, an eyewitness of this event. The first publication in Georgian press about the telephone, however, appeared in 1877 in the Iveria newspaper. “Who knows if the reports are true, but if they are, glory to man’s unlimited power”. In 1880, Ivane Machabeli wrote in the Droeba newspaper, “It has not been a long time that the telephone was invented. It is a device that can convey conversation at a very long distance”.

Many gave journalists the ‘credit’ for the telephone’s enormous popularity. The news travelled fast and soon this unique invention appeared in Georgia too. In Tbilisi, the telephone was first used by journalists. They connected the Caucasus newspaper office to the print shop and the first telephone communication in Georgia was undertaken. At the beginning though, the public was rather apathetic and only few endeavoured to use this technological innovation. The Georgian Prince Jorjadze decided to connect his wine cellars to his office. Against the background of general scepticism, this was a very important decision. Prince Jorjadze was in favour of scientific progress  and promoted the introduction of scientific innovations in Georgia. He used the most advanced technologies in wine making and even received the first prize at the Paris international wine exhibition in 1890. Soon, others also followed suit and telephones were installed at Tbilisi Police Chief’s office, police units, prisons, the Adelkhanov and Akopov factories, several retail shops, chemist’s, and the Caucasus Railway Department.

Still, the construction of the telephone station in Tbilisi was delayed for some time. Firstly, because the permit and the equipment were to be received from Petersburg, and secondly, as the Georgian press reported in those days, “ people refused to have the necessary equipment installed on their houses”.
The newspapers in 1893 reported: “the telephone service will start to operate in Tbilisi in June. Yesterday they began to install telephone posts in the Vera and Ortachala districts. The receiving sets will arrive from Petersburg after Easter.” When the old telephone posts in Tbilisi were changed with the new ones, the switchboard operator Vano Mamucharashvili wrote with pride that he himself carried the posts on his back.

As soon as the telephone station began to operate, the Georgians repeated Puskas’ experiment and carried the Aida broadcast from the Opera House to the residence of the Caucasus Viceroy. ‘Remarkable! Remarkable!’ Marvelled the Viceroy. ‘Soon we may even be able to see the performance from here.’
Today almost nothing surprises us any more, not even tiny pocket computers to say nothing of the television and the video. Still, this small ‘eccentric toy’, our loyal friend and confidant cannot be compared to anything else or exchanged for anything.

NANA ZURABISHVILI