The invention that connected New Zealand to the world

Dr Paul Davidson, Marlborough Historical Society

On the 10th of March 1876 the limitations of human voice communication changed forever. Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell used his new invention for the first time, sending his voice along a wire to his assistant in another room of their Massachusetts laboratory. He combined two Greek words to name his invention – “Tēle” meaning “distant” and “phōne” meaning “voice” – and 150 years later his “telephone” lets anyone speak to anyone else on earth – and beyond.

As the President of Marlborough Historical Society, and a retired telecoms engineer, I have long been fascinated by the advances in telecommunications – especially in the years of my own lifetime.

New Zealand has always been eager to adopt these new technologies, probably because our distance from anywhere made early communication so difficult.

In 1865 a telegraph office using Morse code had opened in Picton, and the following year offices opened in Blenheim and Nelson. Just three weeks before Bell’s invention an undersea cable had been pulled ashore at Cable Bay near Nelson, coming all the way from Sydney. So, by 1876 it had finally became possible to send Morse messages all the way to Motherland England via Australia.

But to communicate by voice was another thing altogether. In 1877, only a year after its invention, the first telephone line in New Zealand linked Blenheim to Christchurch. A year later the line went all the way from Blenheim to Invercargill, the need driven by booming business and gold rushes in the South Island.

For the next hundred years, for two people to talk required that their telephones be connected by two copper wires no matter how far apart they were. This required a lot of copper cable buried in the ground, and a way to connect the two users. Thus - the Telephone Exchange.

The first Blenheim Exchange opened in 1887 with 33 subscribers, nearly all of them businesses or Government Departments.  Phones stayed much the same for the next 70 years, but eventually nearly every home had one.

Then came the communication satellites, taking our voice into space and back, and in 1987 a huge revolution – the mobile phone. Back then I made Telecoms first marketing video for their amazing new service, which we called “Answer it Anywhere”.

Today it has become “Anywhere” and “Anytime”.  Both a blessing and a curse for society.