1 The Beginning
The telephone system has always fascinated me. A couple of my earliest memories about phones date back to the early 1970's, when I was about 9 or 10. My mother came from quite a large family and we used to travel up from London to Somerset a couple of times a year to visit them. On one such visit during a hot summer out roaming the countryside with one of my Uncles, who was maybe five or six years older than me, we came across a derelict coal mine. We ventured in and found what I guess must have been a few Series 300 Bakelite phones and decided to liberated them. Back at his home we took them apart and I remember seeing the governor wheel in the dial mechanism along with a set of driver cogs, fascinated by the way it rotated when the dial was turned. My memory is a bit hazy here but I have a recollection that my Uncle somehow connected two of the phones together with a battery and we talked to each other over the phones. Hours of fun. After a few days with my Mothers family we woul...