The collection of the Unecha Local Lore Museum includes a telephone from the late 1920s — the first telephone (and the first device of its kind) to appear in the town. It is a wall-mounted model housed in a large wooden case, characteristic of equipment produced by the Swedish company Ericsson.

The device was manufactured by the Leningrad Telephone Factory “Krasnaya Zarya” — the former pre-revolutionary Russian Ericsson factory, which, after nationalization, became part of the Electrotechnical Trust of Low-Current Plants. The original design dates back to 1900, when a similar model was first developed in Norway. It featured a hand-cranked inductor for signaling the operator and a separate battery box that supplied power to the circuit.

In the early 20th century, only three telephones were used in Unecha — located at the police station, the town hospital, and the railway station. Until 1926, all calls were manually connected through an operator: to place a call, a subscriber would turn the inductor crank to alert the station attendant. The operator — typically a young woman, often referred to as a telephone operator or telephone lady — would then plug cords into the switchboard to establish a connection between callers. Only after this manual link was made could the conversation begin.

The history of the telephone stretches back more than 140 years. In the mid-19th century, numerous inventors sought to create a device capable of transmitting sound over electrical wires. By the 1870s, two figures — Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray — independently developed working prototypes capable of transmitting human speech. Bell, a former teacher at a school for the deaf, was inspired by his father’s work on “visible speech” and famously believed that if the deaf could be taught to speak, then “iron could be made to speak” as well.

Bell was the first to secure a patent for his invention. March 10, 1876, is widely recognized as the birthday of the telephone — the day Bell successfully conducted the first intelligible telephone call, summoning his assistant with the now-famous words: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you”. In Russia, the first telephone conversation also took place in 1876, though widespread adoption did not begin until 1882. By 1910, the country’s telephone network served approximately 155,000 subscribers.