Telephones in WW2

MarkEsq

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Does anyone know about the prevalence of telephones in WW2? Specifically, I'm wondering whether a senior police commander in Paris would have a phone in his home. Is that super unlikely?!
 

Siri Kirpal

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Can't speak for France, but they were common enough in the US that it wouldn't be out of the question.

Not sure if they had party lines in France, but they had them in the US well into the 1950s and maybe into the '60s. Factor that in, because private conversations by phone were rare then...at least on this side of the proverbial pond.

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WeaselFire

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With the state of the phone system in France, if your guy applied for a home phone in 1939 he'd probably be getting it installed next week. :)

It's plausible enough that you could use it in your story, but is there a reason it's important he have one and does it feature prominently? If not, just mention it casually and don't worry. And yes, it would go through a switchboard.

Jeff
 

cornflake

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Does anyone know about the prevalence of telephones in WW2? Specifically, I'm wondering whether a senior police commander in Paris would have a phone in his home. Is that super unlikely?!

I don't know why it would be?

I looked, in case I was missing some weird gap in French history where they didn't want phones, and found one thing saying there were more radios than telephones in households in France in 1939, and one explaining that the network expansion lagged behind that of the U.S., but picked up during WWI, when the U.S. gave up on having military members who didn't speak French try to work as operators connecting calls and managing the networks and just brought hundreds of French women to do it, and had American companies, which were more advanced than the French telecom, work on the network, which apparently helped bring it up to speed.

Can't find a specific % of households in France that had phones then but my French is the suck. In the U.S. 37% had them in 1940, 62% in '50, so... even if lower, no reason to think it'd be odd for someone with a job that'd require being called to gave a phone.
 

lonestarlibrarian

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Most of my Maigret that I have on hand is from the late 50's through the late 60's.

I do remember reading a story (set in London? set in New York?) that dealt with people who lived in whatever the 1940's equivalent of a high-rise apartment complex was. The interesting thing was that the phone operator was actually on the premises, in a little cubicle in the main lobby, and manually managed all the building's incoming and outgoing calls. It made me wonder how the phone system was set up for people who lived in single-family houses, and if having an on-premises operator signified that the building had its own dedicated exchange, or...?
 

Siri Kirpal

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Come to think of it, our schools had switchboard operators in the 1960s, but by then, our home phone was on a private line.

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GregFH

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Here's some info that should begin to give you some idea: "Until the 1970s the telephone service was notoriously bad: in 1970, France had fewer lines per capita than Greece and only one fifth as many as Sweden. Thereafter, the state made great efforts, and France virtually caught up with Britain and Germany in density (some 46 lines per 100 people). The percentage of homes with telephone service shot up from 16% in 1968 to 74% in 1982."
http://www.discoverfrance.net/France/DF_communications.shtml

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.MLT.MAIN.P2?locations=FR&view=chart
http://www.persee.fr/doc/reso_0969-9864_1994_num_2_2_3279