On this day – March 18th

Britain first linked to Continent by telephone

Or should it be the continent first linked to Britain?

Telephony began in 1875 in Massachusetts, USA, albeit with the Scottish Alexander Graham Bell carrying out experiments in the town of Salem. By 1878 he was demonstrating his new-fangled device to Queen Victoria , making the first long-distance calls in Britain from her residence on the Isle of Wight to Southampton and to London . Three years later long-distance telephony on a commercial basis was started, linking an office in Cannon Street London with Norwich nearly 120 miles away, using telegraph wires to carry the call, and by 1879 the first public telephone exchanges in Britain had opened.

It seems strange that with the accelerated development noted above, the next logical step, the linking of island Britain with the continent, should have taken so long to arrive. The delay was due in part to the unhelpful intervention of the Post Office, extending its monopoly on the telegraph business to telephones through a court case in 1880. After that case telephone companies were forced to pay what amounted to royalties to the Post Office, to obtain expensive licences from it, and even more restrictively they were given licences for very limited areas of operation.

The Post Office undertook to develop the telephone system itself, with all the dynamism, flair and entrepreneurial spirit typical of government departments the world over.

Eventually the first purpose designed telephone cable was laid between Britain and the European mainland, and the two capitals of England and France were officially linked telephonically.

So the link up first happened on March 18th, but in which year?

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