History of the Telephone


Woman with a telephone



It is not possible to retell the history of telephony exhaustively on a smaller website. Nor do I possess the requisite knowledge to do so. I will, however, briefly describe the development that makes up the background to the telephones and telephony accessories depicted herein. Advertisement Bell Company in Stockholm

Just like many other inventions, the origins of the telephone have been subject to controversy and already in the 19th century several of the valuable patents were litigated.

The question is also as to what level of development should be required to call the invention a "telephone".

The person managing to launch his invention successfully and during his contemporary period became the acknowledge inventor of a practically usable telephone was nevertheless the American, Alexander Graham Bell.

Bell submitted his patent application in February 1876 and had at this time only invented a rudimentary "ear piece" which by electrical means tolerably managed to transfer speech from one telephone to another. Man with double ear pieces

The news about Bell's invention and its rather simple construction spread like wildfire all over the world and the invention was then quickly improved by many others such as Watson, Edison, Berliner, Siemens, and in Sweden, Lars Magnus Ericsson

Although Bell was granted certain patents on his invention, almost all manufacturers in every country copied his original construction, but then the development followed a number of parallel lines.

The news about the telephone arrived in Sweden in any event by 30 September 1876, on which date the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, in a small press item, reported of a “talking telegraph”. The paper referred to an English scientist who had made acquaintance with the fantastic invention when travelling in the USA, and referred to it as one of several "scientific peculiarities".

The first telephones sold commercially were those of Bell's and they were made by Charles Williams JR in Boston. It was in his workshop that Bell had been aided in constructing his first telephones. The telephone line between William's workshop and his house is also considered to be the first in the world. 

A Norwegian engineer from Bergen in Norway put these telephones on display in Stockholm in August 1877. Among others, the Swedish King Oscar II, who reigned at the time, was then given the opportunity to test the invention.  Advertisement Bell Company in Stockholm

Two months later, on 13 October 1877, the Stockholm firm Joseph Leja advertised in Dagens Nyheter that they had telephones for sale and that it was "completely new". But already in December the competing Numa Pettersson also had telephones in his product range. The company’s asking price was 12 kronor per telephone pair and 8 öre per foot of double-threaded telephone wire. In both of these cases it was probably a question of imported American telephones. At the same time, a Danish firm advertised corresponding German telephones.

Thus, in the beginning, telephones were mostly sold in pairs and were intended to be installed as internal telephone lines, often between two different premises, and by the hand of the pioneer himself.

It was only in the autumn of 1880 that the first actual network was built in Sweden. It was the so-called Bell Company in Stockholm that relied completely on imported American equipment connected to a likewise American shared telephone centre - a switchboard - operated by telephonists employed by the company, and some of the telephones of this type are also included in the exhibits.

History of Telegrafverket

To the top

Telegrafverket was a Swedish government authority established in 1853. Its purpose was to develop a telegraphy network for the good of the nation following the invention of the electrical telegraph.

When the first telephones saw the light of dawn, Telegrafverket already had extensive operations all around Sweden, although the authority did not take much interest in the new invention.

There were not many at the time who realised the potential of telephony, and on the part of Telegrafverket there were no objections against people setting up telephone networks privately. The authority initally thought that the advantage of the telephone, in a larger perspective, was that it could help increase speed of telegram transmissions.

The proper telephone network built by Telegrafverket was a central network for the various government departments in Stockholm 1881. To this end, a number of American telephones were purchased from the Bell Company. Advertisment for the Bell Company in Stockholm

As the interest for telephone associations grew all around the nation, Telegrafverket also started to realise the significance of the technology. A particular concern was that the telephone networks would compete with the telegraphy traffic and that it therefore would have an adverse effect on the authority's interests.

In 1881, Telegrafverket started offering to the general public the opportunity to connect through private lines to the nearest telegraph station. The following year, the first publicly available state networks in Härnösand and Uddevalla were established.

In 1883 the government, through Telegrafverket, started to take over the private networks. First in line was the Malmö network, which was a Bell association. A first network in Lund was built subsequently, and at the same time the existing network in Landskrona was acquired. It was not long before TelephoneTelegrafverket held the larger part of Skåne in its hand, with the exception of the telephone association in Kristianstad, which for a long time resisted a takeover.

In the end, the situation for the private telephone associations became unsustainable and in connection with the acquisition of Stockholm's Allmänna Telefon by the state in 1918, all telephone operations in Sweden were, in practice, to be considered as a state monopoly. The private subscribers no longer had to have double telephone sets for different networks, which in some cases hade become necessary. Until the end of the 1890's, the government telephone networks mainly used LM Ericsson equipment. Then Telegrafverket started to build its own workshops in order to gain independence from private contractors.

It thus became simpler and more unified calling the smaller part of the population that could afford a telephone, but in return, the idealism and price control enjoyed by the telephone associations and the private companies often ended up in all but a memory.

At this time there already existed an extensive domestic telecom industry, both private and public through Telegrafverket, and the technological development began to distance itself by leaps and bounds from the time of the first pioneers.

Öller & Co.

To the top

Anton Henrik Öller was born in 1816 and had a diverse background when he in 1857 started the workshop Öller & Co with the intention, primarily, to work on telegraphy equipment.

Öller was the son of a pharmacist and had previously been employed as an office worker and ledger clerk, but had also set up and operated a smaller silk factory in Stockholm. Neither the factory nor the subsequent activity of growing mulberry trees for silk worms seem to have amounted to any particularly successful business operation.

Together with some fiends, Öller started to experiment with an electrical telegraph in the beginning of the 1850s, and in 1853 he participated in building the first electrical telegraphy line between Stockholm and Uppsala.

Subsequently, Öller held several other positions within the fledgling Telegrafverket and continued in his spare time trying to improve the equipment following his own ideas.

It is in this context that Öller starts his workshop in order to be able to work to an even greater extent with the technological and mechanical development. At the same time, he was for a long period on Telegrafverket’s payroll, and also received direct government grants in order to allow for the workshop to survive.

Öller’s employers and friends managed to persuade the government at the time to regard the workshop as something of a national necessity that had to be promoted. Man using a pulpit wall telephone

The business manufactured equipment primarily for Telegrafverket’s own requirements, such as Morse telegraphs and Morse keys, but also all kinds of other products, such as sowing machines, electro-therapeutic machines, ringing bells etc.

In 1875, when the business had reached its peak, Öller had 58 employees, among them several who would become important personalities in the development of the Swedish industry.

The more detailed circumstances surrounding Öller’s telephone manufacturing are not known, but is clear that he was rather early, probably already in the late autumn 1877 or early 1878.

The business produced magnetic telephones with a horseshoe magnet, and they may be regarded as very close copies Telefonof the corresponding telephones by the German Siemens & Halske. We are here talking about the model with the leather-clad metal cover.

Öller also manufactured wooden wall consoles for these telephones and we can see a couple of examples of these in the museum collection.

There is no evidence to suggest that Öller continued with any additional or more developed telephone models and it is not clear how many magnet telephones the firm manufactured in total. A qualified guess suggests that the production did not exceed the approx. 400 magnet telephones manufactured by Ericsson in the same period. Henrik Öller seems to have understood that younger and more business minded competitors soon would take the game home and already in 1886 he began winding up the business, but a certain part of the business remained for a year following his death 1889.

With hindsight, it might be possible to conclude that Öller was more of an enthusiast and pioneer than businessman. He did establish an industrial branch, but others were meant to celebrate its triumphs and the person who should have been able to snatch the leadership was another headstrong inventor in Jönköping

Hakon Brunius

To the top


Hakon was born in 1842 and made a living from a private mechanical workshop in Jönköping at the time of naissance of the telephone. Also Hjalmar Brunius, his brother, operated a workshop business in the same city.

Hakon had previously worked as a telegraphist, both at Telegrafverket and the State Railways, but seems to have been mostly interested in his own technical experiments.

He developed an early piece of safety equipment for railway trains, fire alarms etc, and carried out early experiments on electrical lighting; Brunius was even referred to as “Sweden’s first electrician” in the magazine Industritidningen Norden.

When rumour of the emergence of the telephone and its construction spread in the autumn of 1877, Brunius immediately started to experiment. At the end of November, the local papers in Jönköping wrote about how his telephones, probably made by his own hands, having been successfully tested on 27 November.

Brunius managed to sell such telephones to Jönköping Waterworks in March 1878 and already before then, Munksjö paper mill had obtained an internal telephone line with Hakon’s help.

Brunius also started early on to argue for telephone networks to be established both in Stockholm and in Jönköping, but it was first in the late autumn in 1881 that some thirty subscribers joined him and the first network could be established in Jönköping, one year following the Bell network in Stockholm.

During this time, Brunius himself had moved to Kyrkekvarn and launched ”Hakon Brunius AB, Göteborg” for the purpose of producing electrical devices in larger scale.

Hakon Brunius was the one who, with a little help from his brother, actually built and operated the Jönköping network, but the development was modest and in 1888 the network was sold to Stockholms Allmänna Telefon AB, only to be acquired by Telegrafverket three years later. 

The extent to which Hakon Brunius actually built telephones remains uncertain. We know that he constructed rudimentary magnet telephones with lathed wooden covers, and later also well-developed wall telephones with both inductor and ringing devices, and lastly a wall telephone with a handheld micro-telephone. To all appearances, the telephones first used in the Jönköping network ought to have been battery operated (galvanic) without inductors. We also know that he sought cooperation with Ericsson but was rejected.

It is clear that Brunius did not manage to assert himself in the competition and that his production remained a small-scale rural occurrence. Only a few of the company’s telephones were saved for future generations.

It seems as though Brunius sheltered the predestined inventor’s restless soul and therefore did not have the sense for systematic and financial long-term entrepreneurship. Instead, he greedily and curiously examined every phenomenon at the time. Symptomatically enough, Haakon Brunius passed away in 1902 after, driven by curiosity, having opened and stepped through a door at the hospital where he temporarily was being treated. It happened to be an elevator door, and the elevator was not there.

LM Ericsson

To the top


Lars Magnus Ericsson was born under modest conditions in Värmskog, Värmland in 1846. Already at the age of 14 years, he had begun to work at smithies in the home area and in 1866 he arrived in Stockholm.

In the Swedish capital he was offered work at the instrument-manufacturing firm Öller & Co. Ericsson proved to be gifted and received government grants for studies abroad. He was, inter alia, given the opportunity to work an entire year at the electro-mechanical firm Siemens & Halske in Berlin.

On 1 April 1876, Lars Magnus Ericsson, together with his earlier colleague Carl Johan Andersson, started the company:

”L.M.Ericsson & Co. Mechanical workshop business. Lars Magnus Ericsson and Carl Johan Andersson”

Also Andersson had studied the science of manufacturing instruments abroad.

Originally, the firm only rented a kitchen of 13 square metres in the courtyard house on Drottninggatan 15 in Stockholm. The work tools consisted of two pedal driven lathes and the two companions employed an errand boy, Gabriel Bildsten. Telephone catalogue

In the beginning, the business mainly repaired fine mechanical devices for the fire brigade, the police and various railroad companies.

In the autumn of 1876, LM Ericsson built two new pointer telegraphs of their own design and before the end of the year, they had employed an apprentice. The kitchen was now too small and the operation moved to a small premises on Jakobsbergsgatan 23B.

One year on, at the end of 1877, the firm had 6 employees, including the two business partners and the young Bildsten. Once again they had to move to larger premises. In the house on Lästmakeregatan 29 at Oxtorget the firm also had access to a smithy of their own. Ericsson telephone

The time when Ericsson himself first made acquaintance with a telephone cannot conclusively be ascertained. According to the books, the firm imported telephones on several occasions, starting 4 March 1878.

The Evangelic National Trust’s cashier at time, civil engineer Henrik Ahlborg, has revealed that he was resident on Jacobsbergsgatan 11 in the autumn of 1877, just a few houses away from Ericsson’s workshop and that he helped out with various speech tests on a wire connected between them. We also know with certainty that Ahlborg, during the same time, had a wire connected between the Trust’s office on Mästersamuelsgatan and Norman’s book printer on Karduansmakaregatan.

The Trust’s remaining equipment shows, in any event, that a rudimentary telephone, made by Siemens & Halske in Berlin, was used and shortly thereafter, probably in 1878, that they received telephones made by Ericsson. Telephone

In Telegrafverket’s collections, now stored at the Technical Museum, as well ass in our own collection, and those of a few others, there are unmarked telephones that seem to be pure copies of the German device. They were probably made by Ericsson for experimental purposes, but the books do not reveal any sales of such telephones. The design is relatively simple and could, in practice, have a different origin.

The pioneering

To the top


According to their own books, Ericsson delivered on 14 November 1878 their first telephones. The customer, Bredenbergs, paid 55 kr for a pair of magnet telephones with signal trumpets. Siemens

These telephones were direct copies of a somewhat updated magnet telephone from the German Siemens & Halske. The Siemens device was larger and more complicated than a Bell telephone and the previously mentioned experimental appliances. It contained a horseshoe magnet instead of a bar magnet. The design was more expensive but had an improved performance. Ericsson never kept it a secret that he made telephones following the German firm’s model.

As far as known, Ericsson manufactured at least 400 magnet telephones of this kind during the years 1878-1883. The design can mainly be attributed to two different models, one with a wooden cover and the other with a leather clad metal cover. Both models were very similar to the corresponding Siemens telephones. Spiral microphone

In 1880, Ericsson designed a new microphone which came to be referred to as the spiral microphone and at the same time a smaller magnet telephone, suitable as a receiver, was introduced. Both of these fairly independent designs formed the basis of the telephones that the business produced during the first half of the 1880s.

Advertisement Bell Company in Stockholm As Ericsson only published his fist product catalogue in1886, the challenge today for us collectors and historians is to document the various models that had actually been made during the pioneering years. The catalogue includes images of a desk telephone and a wall telephone but the development had already surpassed several telephone models that, at the time the catalogue was published, no longer were being produced.

Ericsson’s actual breakthrough as a telephone manufacturer took place in February 1881, when a newly founded telephone association in Gävle officially chose Ericsson telephones for its first network. Shortly thereafter, the telephone association in Bergen, Norway made the same choice. The business was thus already at this stage an export company.

The device ordered by the subscribers in Gävle was that which might be regarded as the firm’s first complete telephone. The wall telephone was equipped with a ringing bell, spiral microphone and receiver, as well as an in-built battery compartment. The model was galvanic (battery operated), i.e. without inductor.

Soon several new variations on the same concept followed, among others the firm’s first proper desk telephone, the so-called Lilly.

The global company

To the top

There is no room here to tell about the ever-increasing operation that quickly turned Ericsson into a global company, and I shall only mention a few more significant events and years. Ericsson telephone pulpit style After that I will let the telephones speak for themselves with caption texts for each telephone, for those of you who wish to learn more about the story of how each model came into being. I have consciously chosen to limit the collection of the museum to, in any event, the first fifty years of telephone history. Telephones with number dials and the era of mobile phones I leave to other collectors to account for, and the modern Ericsson company to manage.

In 1880 the firm moved to larger premises on Norrmallmsgatan 5, and four years later they built an entire factory of their own on Tulegatan 5 together with annexes. Ericsson telephone pulpit style

In 1882 Ericsson launched its traditional wall telephone in pulpit style with a crank inductor, and two years later the desk telephone called the “Skeleton”. These two telephone models came to be produced in different variations in their hundreds of thousands, even millions, until the beginning of the 1930s. The models also influenced countless other telephone manufacturers' designs.

The company established subsidiaries and set up factories in many countries, including USA and Russia.

Lars Magnus Ericsson himself resigned from active management in the company in 1903 and passed away in 1926.

The basis for the rapid development of the company was not, contrary to what one might think, groundbreaking innovations of its own, but rather an improved design and workmanship skill. This, coupled with an ability for systematic industrial production under strict financial management, without forgoing either technical quality or product finish. Lars Magnus Ericsson was simply equipped with the basic traits that the gifted pioneers Öller and Brunius had been lacking.