| God save the Queen! |
 December 2008 marks the Golden Anniversary of a ‘major milestone’ in the telecommunications industry. It’s 50 years since the Queen dialled the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, who was over 300 miles away, from the central exchange in Bristol with the words:
“This is the Queen speaking from Bristol. Good afternoon, my Lord Provost.” The duration of the call was 2 minutes and five seconds and cost 10d (four pence).
Subscriber trunk dialling allowed 18,000 Bristol customers to dial many other parts of the UK without an operator for the first time. This was followed five years later with the introduction of international subscriber dialling in 1963, allowing London subscribers to dial numbers in Paris directly. To see archive footage of this historic moment, visit: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7766147.stm |
