150 years of the telephone

Seven things you didn’t know about the office phone

Bell wanted us to answer with “Ahoy”. Hold music began as a wiring accident. The desk phone has a stranger history than its beige exterior suggests.

Comstel ICT · Cloud phone systems · August 2026

The desk phone is so ordinary it has become invisible. But it turns 150 this year, and its history is full of arguments, accidents and at least one accidental copyright crisis.

1. Bell wanted us all to say “Ahoy”Alexander Graham Bell proposed the nautical greeting as the standard way to answer a call. His rival Thomas Edison pushed for “hello” instead — and won. Bell never conceded: he answered the phone “Ahoy” for the rest of his life.
2. “Hello” was barely a word yetIts first known appearance in print is 1827, and it wasn’t a greeting at all. It was what you shouted to get someone’s attention, or to express surprise. The telephone turned it into the greeting we now use face to face.
3. The first phone book told you how to hang upThe very first telephone directory, published in New Haven, advised readers to open with a firm and cheery “hulloa”. To end a call it recommended announcing “That is all!” That one, mercifully, didn’t stick.
4. Hold music began as an accidentAs the story goes, factory owner Alfred Levy traced a fault to a loose wire touching a steel girder, turning his building into a giant radio aerial — and piping a nearby station down the phone line to anyone on hold. The tale may be industry folklore, but the patent is real: filed 26 March 1962, granted April 1966.
5. Early hold music was just the radioFor decades businesses simply wired a radio into the phone system. It worked, but a broadcaster’s licence doesn’t cover retransmitting music to your callers — which made a great many ordinary companies accidental copyright infringers.
6. Queen Victoria got a demonstration in 1878Bell showed her the telephone personally, two years after the first call. Royal approval did rather help the technology along.
7. The telephone turns 150 this yearBell made the first call on 10 March 1876, with the gloriously mundane words: “Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.” A century and a half later, the handset on your desk is a computer that happens to make calls.

One thing that hasn’t changed

Silence makes callers hang up. What they hear while they wait shapes what they think of you.

Sixty years after Levy’s patent, the principle holds. On-hold audio is the one piece of marketing that only reaches people who have already decided to call you — and most businesses still leave it to chance, or to a radio station they aren’t licensed to rebroadcast.

The modern version of the thing on your desk

Today’s business phone is a cloud service, not a box in a cupboard. BizTel runs on the Ericsson-LG iPECS Cloud platform, hosted in Australia, with a line per extension, unlimited local, national and mobile calls, and a softphone app that puts the same number on a mobile, laptop and desk handset at once.

Seven bundles, from $25 per user per month excluding GST, with handset, installation and training included. Most sites are live in three to seven business days.