The Development of Telecoms - Hull
The important port and fishing centre of Hull lies in the Hull Corporation telephone area, the last of its kind in the country, but the disposal of the heavy traffic to and from the Corporation telephone network is via the Hull Post Office Trunk Exchange. This bring problems of its own, quite outside the routine of normal area working.
During March 1964, Kingston upon Hull Telephones supplied an area of 120 square miles including the City and County of Kingston upon Hull, municipal boroughs of Beverley and Hedon, urban districts of Haltemprice and parts of the rural districts of Beverley and Holderness serving a population of 386,933.
The City is served by seven automatic exchanges and one manual exchange and the surrounding area is served by eight automatic exchanges. These serve 53,115 exchange connections, 74,255 telephones and 325 public call kiosks via 260.050 miles of underground and overground wire and 11,441 telegraph poles. The total number of people Kingston upon Hull Telephones employs is 640 and the annual revenue is just short of £1,000,000.
Hull is also the birthplace of a very special comedian who was born on Christmas Day 1925 – Norman Collier.
One of Norman’s famous routines involved a faulty microphone and when singing the song, “I lost my heart in San Francisco”, the actual word he breaks up is the word Cisco in San Francisco.
How interesting, that a few years later this company would become one of key businesses involved in the building of the internet and Voice over IP. Isn’t it weird that if a voice over IP installation is poorly implemented, the voice quality sounds exactly like Norman’s faulty microphone.
