On this day in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes had the first telephone installed in the telegraph room of the White House. Hayes had the first telephone in W.H., May 10, 1877

On this day in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes had the first telephone installed in the telegraph room of the White House.

Hayes was an early adopter. Barely 14 months had passed since Alexander Graham Bell famously transmitted the words, “Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!” — proving his device worked.


The U.S. Patent Office granted Bell a patent on Jan. 30, 1877, for an electromagnetic telephone using permanent magnets, iron diaphragms and a call bell.

While Hayes embraced the new technology, few people called him. One reason: The phone, whose number was “1,” could be reached only from the Treasury Department, then as now, across East Executive Avenue from the White House.

More than 50 years passed before President Herbert Hoover had the first telephone line installed at his desk in the Oval Office.

By the 1940s, White House phones were ubiquitous. In the 1960s, top aides had a button on their consoles labeled “POTUS,” which allowed them to call the president’s secretary with a flick of a finger.

From 1961 to 1973, three successive presidents — John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon — arranged to have their telephones tapped, leaving behind thousands of hours of secretly recorded conversations.

These recordings document JFK’s ability to charm people and at other times reveal the limits of his powers of persuasion. LBJ secretly taped some 9,500 calls. Nixon taped more of his conversations than any other president; some 3,700 hours of subpoenaed Watergate tapes helped cement his downfall.

Since 1990, the National Archives and Records Administration has released presidential phone recordings — diverse subjects like Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis, Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam and Nixon’s nomination of William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court.

Source: http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org

This article tagged under: This Day In Politics