“My phone rang” an object exhibition from the museum’s stock collection

Under this name, the B. Mailin Museum of Local Lore organized an exhibition of phones from stock collections. The exhibition presents landlines and cell phones from the middle of the nineteenth century of the last century and the beginning of the twentieth century — these are copies with the most interesting stories full of secrets and riddles. The need to transmit information over long distances has been inherent in mankind since ancient times. The idea of a phone and the need for it has been in the air ever since people had a need to communicate. The history of the telephone, which transmits sound through electricity, begins in the second half of the XIX century. Thomas Edison made a great contribution to the development of telephone communication, in 1877-78 he invented a microphone with carbon powder. The first telephone exchanges were manual. In order to connect two telephones, there was a telephone operator at the station who made the connection. Later, the development of telephone communication was given great importance. In addition, in 1877 there was a release of telephones with two handsets, one for reception and the other for speech transmission. At the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, the telephone boom began all over the world, extensive construction of telephone exchanges and intercity lines was underway. Officially, the first conversation on a mobile phone took place in 1973 in New York. But there is a version that the world’s first wireless devices did not appear in the United States at all, but in the Soviet Union. In 1961, TASS reported that radio engineer L.I. Kuprianovich had developed a sample phone that could transmit voice over radio to a base station located no further than 25 kilometers. The device weighed 500 grams and could operate in standby mode for 20-30 hours. It looked like a box with a numbered dial, a pair of toggle switches and a plug-in handset. The exhibition at the museum presents home devices of various types, here you can see both dial-dial phones and push-button phones, as well as radiotelephones and cellular phones, which are very widely used by the population today. Dial-dial telephones are now very rare and are mostly museum exhibits. Radiotelephones are mainly used in household use. For a more detailed acquaintance with the exhibition, we are waiting for you at the museum! We will be glad to see everyone.