In trade and commerce the telephone was universal by the time of the First World War (1914-1918) but private subscribers were still a minority.
During the war, more people came into contact with field telephones in Flanders and elsewhere and so became 'telephone minded'.
After the war, the cost of a telephone at home was still out of reach for many people but the fast-growing number of payphones meant the service was at least available to all in an emergency.
The first recorded use of the telephone in war was in 1877. British officers in the Indian Army used phones experimentally for passing messages during operations on the North West Frontier.
They were used again in the siege of Sherpur during the Second Afghan War in 1879. In fact more phones were used there than existed in the City of London at the time.
During the Boer War, the British defences of Kimberley and Mafeking were directed by telephone. But it was in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War that the field telephone really came into its own, by allowing front line troops to call for artillery fire support, for example.
But the phone cables of the time - a single wire with an earth return - were a security hazard, as 'pickups' embedded in the earth allowed the enemy to listen in to phone conversations. This prompted a mass conversion of phone cables to double-wire circuits, which remain the standard today.
In the 20th century, the telephone soon found its rightful place in most homes - on a stand or table in the hall. This was the best compromise between being convenient for everyone but also sufficiently out of the way for an instrument that still required quite a lot of shouting right up to the 1930s.
In well-to-do homes, the master or mistress of the house would scarcely ever come to the telephone themselves.
Lady Troubridge in her 1926 Book of Etiquette defined part of a servant's duties as:
'...answering the telephone. If asked who is speaking, a servant should reply 'Mrs Dash's butler or maid' as the case may be. He should speak clearly and courteously and, if it is necessary to take a message, say: 'If you will kindly hold the line, I will inform Mrs Dash.'
She suggested that the householder should provide note books and pencils on the hall table and arrange that all written messages be placed there.
This little toy telephone is an example of how the phone has become a universally recognisable part of everyday culture.
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Switchboards have come in many forms, sizes and styles. This is a cordless model from Denmark that might have been installed on a private network. It used the 'matrix' system, which worked by pushing a switch to make a predetermined connection between two telephone lines, rather than by manually moving a plug and cable from one point to another to make the connection, as the cord system did.
The switchboard handled up to six lines. The operator could talk to any of them by pushing one of the six buttons on the top row, but if one line wanted to speak to another the operator would join them together by pushing the relevant button on the lower rows.
William Pitfield was born in 1921. His first experience with the phone was in the army during the Second World War using field telephones laid by the Signal regiment.
Having been demobbed, he became a journalist for a local newspaper in Dorchester during the 1950s, before working for some of the major London papers. During this period he began to use the phone in earnest.
Here he talks about how essential the phone became for filing copy through to the newspapers, and how he employed a runner to phone in football results at various times as a match progressed.
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