January 15: Telephone directories

On this date in 1880, the London Telephone Company published Britain's first telephone directory. Here are 10 things you might not know about phone books.

1. It wasn't the first telephone directory in the whole world - New Haven, Connecticut had issued one two years previously, although it could hardly be called a phone book. It was one piece of cardboard listing the fifty people and businesses in the town which had phones.
2. London's first phone book wasn't much bigger than that. It listed just 248 telephone users.
3. It didn't have any numbers in it. Back then, all calls were connected via an exchange, so people just asked for who they wanted by name.
4. The Yellow pages, a directory listing only business numbers, was first published in Chicago in 1886. The directory for listing domestic numbers eventually became known as the “White pages”.
5. Phone books only cover land lines. In the US, efforts to produce a directory of mobile numbers have met stiff opposition from people fearing they will be inundated with junk calls. In any case, people can store most of the numbers they need in their phones. An increasing number of people don't bother with a land line at all. People can also pay to be left out of the directory so their number is "unlisted", "ex-directory", "private" or "non-published" depending on which country you are in. Most people I know do this – so I reckon in time, the London telephone Directory will go back to having no more than about 250 names in it!
6. In 1981 France was the first country to have an electronic directory.
7. These days, people are more likely to turn to the internet to find a number they want than a paper book. This, and the fact that producing the directories uses 1,400,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases and over 600,000 tons of paper every year has led to some communities, including Seattle and San Francisco, to try and get them banned. Mostly without success due to the companies making money from the advertising making counter-claims so they can carry on distributing. As it is they are made from paper which has been recycled so many times it couldn't be recycled into anything else, except perhaps bedding for animals.
8. In 1991 there was a lawsuit in America in which a directory producer tried to sue another under copyright laws. The court ruled that a phone book is not subject to copyright because there is no creativity involved in compiling a list of phone numbers.
9. Tearing phone books in half is an accepted feat of strength. The world record at time of writing for the largest number of phone books torn in half in two minutes is 33. The record is held by Cosimo Ferrucci, who achieved it in 2010. The record for most phone books ripped within three minutes by a woman is 21, and was established by Tina Shelton in 2007.
10. In the first Terminator film, the cyborg assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger has to find and kill a woman called Sarah Connor. He doesn't know exactly where she is, so he uses telephone directories to track down every woman by that name and kill them all. The press and police gave him the nickname 'The Phone Book Killer'.

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