When Long Distance Was L-O-N-G-E-R ...

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A postcard from back when when long distance was l-o-n-g-e-r.

The awful halftone printing does not allow me to read the rates etc.

The back was dirty, boring, and unused, with this imprint:


Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who remembers visiting the local RCA Global office to place U$D ~3 / minute trans-Pacific calls back in the day)

Not a U.S. postcard, but how's this for old-timey long distance? This telephone card was good for a five-minute call between the government telegraph offices in Vienna and Brno, some 111 km as the crow flies. This was the first long distance line in Austria-Hungary, established in 1886. The cost of the call was one gulden, which was fifty times the price of mailing a postcard.

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Man, that's old!

Number 1002?

Do you suppose its possible that they started numbering from 1000?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who remembers a banker in Dallas telling him that he could make his new SubChapter-S corporation seem more established if he ordered checks starting with a later number ... 1801 it was!)

I was quite surprised to discover that such things existed. My previous knowledge of phone cards had been limited to the plastic ones used in the 1990s and early 2000s, such as the chip cards that I used in Kartentelefone in Germany in 1992 or the Japanese ones that I occasionally buy as collectibles (usually adorned with images of my favorite female Japanese pop stars).

I wonder how these Austro-Hungarian ones worked, though. If the appointed call was made between the two telegraph offices, how did the call reach its intended recipient? Could the office at the receiving end patch the call through to a private phone? Or did the caller have to send a telegram or postcard to his intended recipient, telling him to be at the telegraph office at 12:40 pm on October 23rd to receive a call?

I'm reminded of Alexander Graham Bell in this recent Geico commercial:

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Reaching into a dark place and pulling out a guess:

Most countries enjoyed an integrated "PT&T" infrastructure: postal, telegraph & telephone.

If an office received a telegram for you, they sent a runner.

If an office got word of a scheduled telephone call, they sent a runner.

Works for me, but I cannot tell you if it worked for them.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

If that's how it worked, I wonder how far in advance the receiving office would be notified of the scheduled call. I also wonder how far in advance someone needed to buy one of these cards and book a time slot.