The Ubiquitous Phone
Even though Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, personal telephones took a long time to become popular. Even in the 1950s many homes in the UK did not have a telephone. Back then telephones were considered expensive luxury items, and even if you could afford one you would have to wait a long time before the Post Office got round to installing one for you. Also it was normal to rent a telephone rather than purchase one outright.
The majority of people relied on public telephones. These were very different from modern public phones. They had two buttons marked A and B. You needed to insert a number of penny pieces into a slot and then you dialled your number. If the call was answered you needed to press button A to complete the connection, and if there was no answer you could press button B to get your money back. If you needed to make a long distance call it was necessary to involve the operator.
Towards the end of the 1950s the first STD (Subscriber Trunk Dial) services were introduced, which meant that long distance calls could be made without the operator, and gradually the old button A and B public phones were changed to pay-on-answer models to allow STD. Home phones became popular during the 1960s, encouraged by increasing prosperity and improved technology.
The first mobile phone call in the UK was made in 1985. Then the phones were analogue and the size of a briefcase. There were quite expensive at over £2,000 and talk times were limited to twenty minutes a charge. They were a huge status symbol amongst the Thatcher generation of young city types.
As technology improved and prices were reduced, mobile phones became more popular, but even with the introduction of the first digital network in 1991 only relatively few people owned one. The real growth in mobile phone ownership happened over the last decade. In 1998 only 18% of the population owned mobiles, Ten years later this has grown to 98%, a staggering rate of growth. The mobile phone is now truly ubiquitous.