House number 15. After the Rostopchins, the last owner of the estate is the princess Shcherbatova Sofia Stepanovna, nee Countess Apraksina(1798 - 1885), the widow of the former Moscow military governor-general, Prince Alexei Grigorievich Shcherbatov, a woman of extraordinary responsiveness and generosity, who left a good memory of herself in all sectors of society. She owned the estate from 1852 until her last days.
Sofia Stepanovna Shcherbatova, ur. Apraksina (1798 - 1885) belonged to the circle of the most noble nobility. Her father, Stepan Stepanovich Apraksin, was a cavalry general, an associate of Suvorov, and a godson of Catherine II. Apraksin was one of the richest landowners in Russia and was considered the first handsome man of his time. Her mother Ekaterina Vladimirovna is a maid of honor, a lady of state, a cavalry lady, a sister Dmitry Vladimirovich Golitsyn, Governor-General of Moscow, who he and his wife lived for some time during cholera in this house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya during the time of ownership of the Nebolsina estate,. And her maternal grandmother was famous.
Sofya Stepanovna's parents are thin. Lampi Johann-Baptist the Elder "Portrait of Count Apraksin S.S.", art. Louise Vigée Lebrun "Portrait of Ekaterina Vladimirovna Apraksina".
The marriage of the parents was happy, the Apraksins usually spent the winter in their Moscow house on Znamenka 19, built according to the project of F. I. Camporesi, and in the summer in the luxurious estate of Olgovo.
In his house and estate, the rich philanthropist S. S. Apraksin constantly gave luxurious feasts for those invited, and on some days for everyone. His hospitality and hospitality were legendary even for hospitable and hospitable Moscow. Balls and evenings in Moscow gave way to festivities in Olgov.
In addition, Stepan Stepanovich had his own fortress theater, the troupe of the Moscow Imperial Theater played with him, the troupe of the Italian opera and many other guest performers performed here.
Prince I.M. Dolgoruky recalled - " In Moscow, Apraksin's house was a temple of all sensual pleasures ... Incessant balls, daily congresses the best people... I controlled this spectacle, as the head of the entire troupe". Who just has not been to this house.
st. Znamenka, 19. The former house of the Apraksins. Photo 1895 - 1910
The Apraksins had five children, two sons and three daughters, but one of the daughters died in early childhood. All the children received an excellent education, Ekaterina Vladimirovna was engaged in raising children herself. Her daughters studied languages and literature, they were taught music and art.
From the early childhood Apraksin children were surrounded by outstanding people of their time. Grandson of Sofia Stepanovna Shcherbatov S.A. in his book "The Artist in Inferior Russia" he wrote that his grandmother's album was kept in his house on Novinsky Boulevard - " Life can be judged by the following autographs, not collected, but personally inscribed in the album, under mostly unpublished poems, and handwritten whole pages of notes dedicated to my grandmother. The album was signed by: Alexander Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Prince Vyazemsky, Tyutchev, Boratynsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Mickiewicz, Gizo, Casimir de la Vigne, Barant, Liszt, Mayerbeer, Rubini, Rossini, Aubert Patti, Pauline Viardot and others. There were also two donated drawings by Bryulov and Kiprensky, who also made portraits of my grandmother, also lost". Here Shcherbatov S.A. is mistaken, the portrait of S.S. Shcherbatova, made by Kiprensky O.A. in 1819, has been preserved.
In 1817, Sofya Stepanovna married the widower Prince Alexei Grigoryevich Shcherbatov, who was twenty-two years older than the bride. His first wife Vyazemskaya Ekaterina Andreevna, the sister of the poet P. A. Vyazemsky, died in childbirth at the age of twenty.
Hood. Firmin Massot "Portrait of Princess Shcherbatova S.S.", art. J. Dow "Portrait of Prince Shcherbatov A.G."
Alexey Grigorievich Shcherbatov(1776 - 1848), infantry general, participant Patriotic War 1812, later from 1844 to 1848 Moscow military governor-general of Moscow.
Their wedding took place in their father's house on Znamenka, then the Shcherbatovs settled in house No. Tverskoy Boulevard, in the parish of John the Theologian, which belonged to the wife of t.s. N.V. Golokhvastova.
Passage of Tverskoy Boulevard. On right - former house Golokhvastov. Photo 1903
The first years after the wedding, the Shcherbatovs traveled a lot around Europe. They lived in France in Paris, traveled all over Germany, Austria, Italy, and then proceeded further to England and Ireland. Upon their return, they lived in St. Petersburg and Moscow. In the summer they went to their estate near Moscow, Litvinovo.
In marriage, the Shcherbatovs had seven children, two of whom died in childhood. Sofya Stepanovna, like her mother, herself was engaged in raising children, attracted the best teachers for their education. All children received an excellent education.
It is usually written that the Shcherbatovs finally moved to Moscow in 1843, when Prince A.G. Shcherbatov was appointed military governor-general of Moscow, replacing Prince D.V. Golitsyn. However, already in the reference book of 1839. it is mentioned that the Shcherbatovs live in Moscow, on Vozdvizhenka, in the village of Kozlova.
Having become governor, Alexei Grigorievich took over from Golitsyn the concern for medical and charitable institutions in Moscow, began to fight the pollution of the city and child labor at night. In addition, Prince Shcherbatov took care of the implementation of the architectural and urban planning plan of the city, created by his predecessor. He was also one of the main donors for the construction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, and having become the mayor of Moscow in 1844, he headed the commission for its construction.
His wife did not lag behind him. In 1844, Princess Shcherbatova founded the "Ladies' Guardianship of the Poor" in Moscow. The society existed at the expense of donors and the largest donations were made by the Shcherbatovs themselves, as well as their daughter Olga and son Alexander. Subsequently, since 1854, the "Ladies' Guardianship of the Poor" was included in the Department of Institutions of the Empress Maria Feodorovna.
Initially, the "Ladies' Guardianship of the Poor" included 17 branches, they were dispersed in different districts of Moscow and often bore the names of their donors. As needed, the number of branches increased. One of these branches was located at B. Predtechensky per., 10. Photo from 1895 (now in its place, a building built in 1902).
By the way, on the PastView website, this photo is out of place. And yes, it's the same house.
In addition, by 1855, there were four educational institutions for the children of poor nobles and officials under the guardianship: at the Prechistensky department. Petrovskoye educational institution, founded in 1846; at the Serpukhov department. in the same year, two shelters Ermolovsky and Fedorovsky shelters were founded, in memory of the deceased husband of Mrs. Yermolova;
Yermolovskaya vocational school for girls on Donskaya street. Later, this section of the street went to psychiatric hospital them. 3. P. Solovieva. Photo 1895
at the Khamovniki department, an educational institution for noble maidens, children of poor parents, established in 1851 and at the Lefortovo department. - a shelter for girls, daughters of nobles and officials, established in 1952 by V.E. Damn.
Under the jurisdiction of the Ladies' Guardianship were two educational institutions of the highest category ( first schools, then institutes): Mariinsky, created in 1851 by the wife of the Privy Councilor Talyzina Olga Nikolaevna and Alexandro-Mariinsky, founded in 1857 and transformed in 1861 by the widow of a senator, general of infantry Damn Varvara Evgrafovna.
In 1856, shelters were enlarged. In this regard, the Ermolaevsky and Fedorovsky shelters became part of the Mariinsky School, for which large building on Sofiyskaya embankment, 8.
Mariinsky School. Photo 1895
And for the Alexander-Mariinsky School, which included the Petrovsky and Prechistensky Schools, they rented the estate of Lieutenant N.P. Voeikova, on Prechistenka, 19\11.
Alexander-Mariinsky School. Photo 1895
Together with Dr. F. P. Gaaz, Sofya Stepanovna, during the cholera epidemic in 1848, founded the Nikolsky community of sisters of mercy in Moscow at the Sushchevsky department of guardianship. At first, the community was located on Dolgorukovskaya Street, near the Butyrskaya prison.
In 1851, having received the estate as a gift, bequeathed E.V. Novosiltseva (she is the daughter of a big man statesman the second half of the 18th century, the youngest of the five famous Catherine's "eagles" - V. G. Orlov. Novosiltseva in 1825 lost her only son Vladimir, after his death, she completely went into charity), the Nikolskaya community moved to Vorontsovskaya Street, not far from the Novospassky Monastery. Photo 1895
It was a large area between the modern. st. Gvozdev, Vorontsovskaya st. and Vorontsovsky per. With funds donated by the princes Shcherbatovs and other benefactors, a whole complex of charitable institutions was built here, which included: an orphanage, a school, an almshouse for elderly women and a hospital for visiting patients.
Hospital of St. Sophia in Moscow, founded in 1860 by Prince. Shcherbatova S.S. Photo 1895
The sisters cared for the sick in the First City Hospital and in the hospital established by Dr. F.P. Haas hospital for laborers, later named after the emperor Alexander III. At the request of private individuals, the sisters were released to care for the sick at home. In 1855-1856, during the Crimean War, the sisters of the Nikolskaya community, together with the compassionate widows and sisters of the St. Petersburg Holy Cross community, assisted the wounded in the hospitals of the Crimea.
In 1886, after the death of Sofya Stepanovna, institutions on Vorontsovskaya Street. awarded the title of "Institutions of Princess Sophia Shcherbatova".
Part of the buildings of this complex has been preserved. House No. 2 on Vorontsovsky Lane, where the almshouse and orphanage were located, was built on, now it belongs to the Institute for Advanced Training of Executive Workers, one of the buildings of this complex has also been preserved, presumably, this is the building of a shelter for terminally ill children on Vorontsovskaya Street, 30a, however , it was built after the departure of the chairman Sofya Stepanovna, in 1880. Inside the building, an old cast-iron staircase and the layout of halls and classrooms have been preserved.
Vorontsovskaya st., 30a. Photo 1987
Princess Shcherbatova was also among the founders of the Moscow Department of the Society for the Care of the Wounded and Sick Soldiers, established in 1867 ( in late XIX in. renamed to Moscow Society Red Cross) to organize hospitals for the wounded during hostilities, to provide assistance to victims of natural disasters, refugees and to train nurses.
In 1866, the "Ladies' Guardianship of the Poor" created a completely new institution for Russia - an orphanage in the name of St. Mary Magdalene for women, girls and young girls who were engaged in prostitution and wished to stand up for the righteous life path. The shelter was arranged on Dolgorukovskaya street. in the house number 24, which belonged to the guardianship. The first head of the orphanage was the princess Olga Alekseevna Golitsyna, daughter of Princess S. S. Shcherbatova.
Dolgorukovskaya st., 26, 24. Photo taken in 1986 (Presumably, in this two-storey house, there was a shelter of St. Magdalene).
Not without the participation of Sofya Stepanovna, the Komissarov Technical School was also created, because. Initially, it was a craft school under the Arbat Guardianship of the Poor, and in memory of the miraculous rescue of Emperor Alexander II by Komissarov, it was named the Komissarov Technical School, which was transferred to another department.
Komissarovskoe Technical School. B. Sadovaya, 14.
And this is only part of the good deeds committed by the book. S.S. Shcherbatova. Even after leaving the post of chairman of the "Ladies' Care of the Poor" Sofya Stepanovna remained an active participant in it. By the end of the XIX century. 33 charitable institutions were part of the Ladies' Guardianship.
But back to the estate on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street. Sofya Stepanovna buys a house and an estate here, already being a widow. Together with the house from Rostoprichna A.F. she gets antique ebony furniture with gilding, which served as an adornment of the Rostopchins' mansion on Lubyanka, later this furniture will move to the house of Shcherbatova's grandson on Novinsky Boulevard. Shcherbatova owned this estate from 1952 to 1885.
For more than 30 years this house was the center of all Moscow, a well-born secular and charitable one; it preserved for a long time all the old Moscow traditions described by Tolstoy in War and Peace, and the patriarchal life of pre-fire Moscow. Princess Shcherbatova, very smart and educated, was the personification of "grande dame", she spoke the truth in the eyes of the sovereign and mere mortals; brought up in luxury and wealth, she was distinguished by simplicity in life, she liked to get up early, sit with her legs crossed, saying that she was a "Tatar", hinting at the Tatar origin of the Apraksins.
The plan of the estate for 1881, made by the architect V.P. Desyatov, who carried out repair work in the estate, has been preserved. It is known from this plan that by this time there were 12 buildings here - "a two-story stone residential building, two-story residential extensions, in which the bottom is stone, and the top is wooden partly with non-residential basements, a two-story residential building, a stone bottom, a wooden top, wooden porches, a one-story non-residential an extension on a stone non-residential basement, stone descents to the basement, a stone one-story passage, a stone one-story non-residential, a wooden one-story gazebo, a wooden one-story gatehouse, a garbage dump, a well.
Sofya Stepanovna was an active and energetic person, ready to help the suffering even in last years of her life, the princess monthly in the house of the Barykovskaya almshouse received poor visitors, asked them about their needs and helped with personal means.
Princess Shcherbatova S.S. in the last years of life.
A week before her death, she wrote a will with her own hand, by which she signed off her estate to her children. Princess Shcherbatova died of pneumonia on February 3, 1885 at the age of 88 and was buried next to her husband in the Donskoy Monastery.
In memory of the late mother, her children at the family council decided to donate this estate to the city for the placement of a children's hospital in it, which bears the name of Sofia, in honor of their mother. More about the new purpose of this estate in the next part.
We invite students of grades 4-7 to an excursion to the Museum of the History of Telephone Communications of MGTS!
The museum of OJSC MGTS visually presents all stages of the development of telephone communications in Russia. It is considered one of the best corporate museums in its field, and its collections are comparable to the most famous expositions two Russian capitals.
The Museum of OJSC MGTS was opened on July 8, 1982, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Moscow City telephone network. The initiators of its creation were the head of MGTS Viktor Vasiliev and deputy. chief engineer Evgeny Dubrovsky.
Here you can see collections of payphones and telephones, the oldest of which is Bell-Black's apparatus of 1890. There are many real historical and technical values among the exhibits: this is Bell's handset of 1878, and the book "Guide to the Construction of Overhead Telegraph Lines" of 1878, and even a working model of the first automatic telephone exchange. It was put into operation in 1930 and entered the Guinness Book of Records as the longest operating automatic telephone exchange in the world.
Date: February 26, 2018
Time of the tour: from 15:00 to 16:00.
Address: Moscow, st. Zorge, d. 27 (4-storey yellow brick ATS building, opposite residential building No. 34)
Directions:
From m. "Sokol"(exit to the streets Peschany, Alabyan) behind the church stop trl. 19,59,61, bus 100,26,691. Get off at the bus stop "st. Levitan", go to the other side of the street and then walk to the street. Sorge towards railway. On st. Sorge go left along residential building number 36. Travel time from metro 15-20 min.;
From metro station "October field"(the last car from the center, when exiting to the left and again to the left) at the crossroads, turn right to the stop trl. 19.59.61, author 100.26. Exit to
2nd stop "st. Levitan", then walk to the street. Sorge in the direction of the railway. On st. Sorge go left along residential building number 36. Travel time from metro 15-20 min.
) has been in operation for 18 years. He is exactly 100 years younger than the company itself. It would seem that it is impossible to turn back the clock and collect exhibits that fully reflect the century of development and activity of MGTS. However, the museum staff largely succeeded.
General view of the museum exposition
The idea of creating a museum arose in the late 70s from Viktor Faddeevich Vasiliev, who at that time was the director of the Moscow City Telephone Network. He entrusted the development of the concept, the collection of materials and exhibits to an experienced signalman Evgeny Petrovich Dubrovsky. The former deputy chief engineer of MGTS for the operation of linear facilities willingly retrained as a director of the museum. Yevgeny Petrovich managed to rally like-minded people around him and in three years he gathered with them an excellent collection of material evidence of the past and present of telephone communications in Moscow. On the opening day, the MGTS Museum presented more than 2,000 exhibits.
The repository of information about the development of the Moscow telephone network now has its own history. The museum was opened on July 8, 1982 in the old building of the Central Telephone Exchange on Markhlevsky Street, two years later it moved to the street. Zorge, 27. In 1993, Yevgeny Petrovich passed away and Lidia Nikolaevna Makridina took over the museum, Valentina Ivanovna Goldaevskaya was appointed curator. Thanks to the efforts of these two women, the museum not only replenished with exhibits - today there are more than 3,000 of them, but also acquired a new modern look.
Bell-Black telephone set
The exposition begins with the oldest Bell-Black telephone set. Its construction consists of the actual Bell telephone (see Fig. "Bell Labs: 75 years of innovation"), which is built into the tube, bell, inductor and Leclanche elements to power Black's microphone. Today, this rarity impresses with its antiquity, size and weight - 8.5 kg. And at the end of the 19th century, it was considered a miracle of technology. This, however, did not last long: the device was imperfect and inconvenient in operation. The microphone was on the panel, which forced the speaker to bend down. And in order to avoid problems with the lever system, the instructions suggested, "removing the phone from the lever, press the latter with your hand from the bottom up to make sure that it is fully raised and has the correct position." Such phones were used by the first Moscow subscribers until the end of the century.
Next to this unique museum exhibit are two photographs - the American Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), the creator of the first telephone, and the patent he received in 1876 from the American Patent Office for the invention of "telegraph, with which it is possible to transmit human speech" . Bell's name is firmly established not only in world history but also in the domestic In the autumn of 1881, his company began building telephone networks in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Riga, and Odessa.
The first manual telephone exchange of the Moscow city telephone network for 800 numbers was opened in 1882 in house 6 on the Kuznetsky bridge. The list of its telephone subscribers included 26 people. They were mostly wealthy merchants, industrialists who could afford such a luxury.
Gradually, the number of subscribers increased, and with it the number of complaints against the company increased. During peak hours, normal operation of the station became impossible due to design flaws in the Ghileland system switches used by Bella. Subscribers sometimes had to wait for several hours, and errors in connections were not uncommon. The girls-telephone operators, in order to connect their subscriber to the switchboard, behind which another operator worked, had to talk loudly, shouting over each other. In museum photographs of that time, everything looks quiet and safe, but written evidence tells a different story. Telephone operators had to work with great effort.
By 1901 there were 2860 subscribers in Moscow. Most of the phones were installed in the center of the city, but a lot of them were installed outside the Boulevard Ring, especially to the north of it.
A special place in the museum is occupied by materials about Russian inventors of telephone technology. And among them - Pavel Mikhailovich Golubitsky (1845-1911). Our compatriot not only repeated Bell's telephone, investigated its shortcomings, but also in 1880 created a multi-pole telephone, recognized throughout the world as the best. It significantly increased the range of telephoning. Pavel Mikhailovich owns many inventions. The most significant is the central battery (CB) system for powering subscriber sets. Previously, each subscriber had his own, so-called local battery, from which the microphone of his device was powered. Golubitsky's system made it possible to concentrate power supplies at the telephone exchange. This invention is still in use today.
Phone numbers of the Swedish-Danish-Russian joint-stock company
As the stages of history change, so does one museum exposition replace another. 18 years have passed since the opening of the first telephone exchange, in Russia the era of the Bell company was ending. Contemporaries reproached the Americans for their unwillingness to invest in reconstruction, despite the fact that the subscription fee was huge for those times - 250 rubles a year. Therefore, when the concession period of the American company ended and the Moscow City Telephone Network was put up for auction, one of the main conditions for the tender was to reduce the monthly fee. As a result, the Swedish-Danish-Russian joint-stock company won, which indicated in the application the tariff - 79 rubles per year. Another condition was the radical reconstruction of both the station and linear structures of the MGTS, which by the beginning of the 20th century were almost entirely airborne.
The second period in the history of the Moscow city telephone network - Swedish-Danish-Russian - began on November 1, 1901. By 1903, the network capacity increased to 4650 numbers due to a temporary auxiliary station. And in Milyutinsky Lane, the construction of a multi-storey building of the Central Telephone Exchange (CTS) with a capacity of 60,000 numbers was in full swing. It was the most difficult technical task. When creating the design of the station, the specialists of the Swedish company L. M. Erickson used the experience of building a similar station in Stockholm. She was considered the best in terms of equipment. But Moscow surpassed her. In 1904, the installation of the first stage (hall "A") for 12,000 rooms was completed.
Simultaneously with the reconstruction of the station facilities, the Swedish-Danish-Russian joint-stock company also improved the linear facilities: underground cable lines were built. On the main routes, multi-hole concrete pipes were laid. This is clearly evidenced not only by photographs of those years, but also ... by our contemporaries, cable operators. In some places the buildings are not only preserved, but are in working order.
In the center of the hall of the museum of the history and development of MGTS stands a multiple (connecting) switch - an object that vaguely resembles a piano. At the time of the opening of hall "A" at the Central Station, such " musical instruments 112 stood along the walls. And behind each of them sat a young lady with a headset - a set of an earpiece and a microphone.
The girls were not allowed not only to leave the hall without the permission of the administration, but also to get married.
The requirements imposed on telephone operators by the administration of the Swedish-Danish-Russian Society were extremely strict. The girls were not allowed not only to leave the hall without the permission of the administration, but also to get married. With a huge daily load, the day off was supposed to be only once a month. One of the exhibits of the museum is a collection of "Customer Service Rules". It strictly stipulates not only the technical actions of telephone operators, but also the rules for communicating with subscribers. For example, girls were forbidden to answer subscribers: "I did not disconnect you," because "it does not concern the subscriber who exactly disconnected him." If the subscriber had to wait a little, in response to his irritation, the telephone operator was obliged to say: "Excuse me, what number do you want," and not to explain: "I answered the first signal." Probably, in no case did they want to make it clear to the subscriber that there are many like him, and there is only one telephone operator. And one more obligatory rule: "The telephone operator must speak with such an expressive voice intonation that the subscriber involuntarily listens to what she repeats."
Small capacity manual switch
In 1910, each telephone operator had an average of 160-170 connections per hour, not counting "busy" answers. And the total number of conversations for 1910 amounted to 194,764,127. The number of subscribers this year reached 27,370, and by the beginning of 1917 it exceeded 60,000.
The revolutionary events affected the Central Telephone Exchange in the most sad way. Experienced civil engineers were convinced that as a result of fierce fighting to capture the station, it had fallen into a state that could not be restored. However, nine years later, nothing on the CFTS reminded of numerous damages. And by 1930, 14 substations were put into operation in Moscow, each with a capacity of 100 to 1000 numbers.
A fragment of a machine-type automatic telephone exchange occupies a special place in the MGTS museum. She is not just an "old lady", but world celebrity- the first of its kind in Moscow was built in 1930 and the last one in the world was dismantled. In 1998, during the period of dismantling, this station under the index 231 was listed in the London Guinness Book of Records for the longest work experience - almost 68 years. Amazingly, it still works, now in the museum.
Fragment of the first machine telephone exchange, installed in 1930.
"Long-liver" is one of the three stations presented here. In the exposition, next to it, an automatic telephone exchange of a decade-step system (ATSS) is installed. The first such station for 2,000 numbers was put into operation in 1949. And in 1968, the first coordinate exchange (ATSC) with a capacity of 10,000 numbers began to work. In the museum history of MGTS against the background of her two predecessors, she looks like a "white swan". Light, clean, silent. The introduction of a coordinate system at MGTS stations changed the established proportions between capacity growth and the number of service personnel. Due to their greater reliability, they require less maintenance work. By 1982, there were already 153 coordinate stations operating on the Moscow City Telephone Network.
ATS coordinate system. Such stations now form the basis of MGTS station facilities.
And then came the time of electronic PBXs. Their development began in 1987. In terms of the quality of communication, the speed of service, they are much superior to their predecessors, do not require a large number of personnel, and allow them to provide many new services: from an alarm clock, call forwarding to conference calls. Gradually, the old, decade-step and coordinate stations are being replaced by electronic (or digital) stations.
MGTS is being modernized and developed. Currently, it has 573 exchanges with a total of 4,039,927 lines. The network serves more than 4 million subscribers and is one of the largest local telephone networks in the world.
Today we suggest going to the Museum of the Moscow City Telephone Network.
The MGTS Museum opened in the building of a telephone exchange on Zorge St. back in 1982 and during this time has accumulated quite large collection interesting exhibits. It's great that there were caring people and everything that was simply written off and should have been sent to a landfill was carried to the museum. Now there are many rare samples of telephone equipment here.
Walk around the museum, see the exhibits and read their interesting history —>
To begin with, very briefly about the history of the phone:
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented in the United States "a method and apparatus for transmitting speech and other sounds by telegraph using electric waves." By the irony of history, Bell's wife was deaf, so he was not destined to talk to her on the phone. Yes, and he invented the telephone almost by accident, dealing with the problems of the hearing impaired and trying to make their lives easier with the help of his inventions.
But Bell's phone could only connect two people, switching numbers was not thought of until two years later. In 1878, the first telephone exchange with 200 numbers appeared in the city of New Haven.
The first call in Russia took place in Moscow on July 1 (13), 1882 from Popov's house (now Kuznetsky Most, 12). Switchboards were installed in rented premises on the 5th floor of the house. The telephone operator girls sat on the switches and connected the subscribers to each other.
General view of the museum
Until the beginning of the 20th century, telephone communication in Moscow was available only to the richest people. At first, only 26 people connected to the phone, since the monthly fee was 250 thousand rubles a year (the most expensive fur coat - 60-85 rubles, a loaf of bread - 2 kopecks), "telephone ladies" knew subscribers by voice. The network, despite the high cost, grew rapidly and by 1901, 3,000 people had already connected to it.
In 1901, a Russian people's "honest tender" was arranged for the modernization of the telephone network with the main requirement that the subscription fee be no more than 125 rubles per year. The “fair tender” was won by the newly created Swedish-Danish-Russian joint-stock company, which offered a subscription fee of 79 rubles per year.
The concessionaires knew which companies to bring in to win the tender. The Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, mother of Emperor Nicholas II, nee Danish Princess Dagmar, was very fond of Danish companies, and the Danes, unknown to anyone in Europe, suddenly became suppliers of the Russian court and incredibly enriched. The technical part was carried out by the Swedish company of the notorious Lars Magnus Eriksson.
Manholes of cable collectors before the revolution (in some places of the capital they still lie). The logo of the pre-revolutionary society is not at all embarrassed in Soviet time took over the People's Commissariat for Communications (later the Ministry of Communications), and already the Soviet plug with lightning can still be seen on almost every Moscow street.
They didn’t clog the air with an uncountable number of wires on poles and pulled lines in cable collectors
Bell's telephone, outdated at the beginning of the 20th century
Cruel, cruel rules
Ericsson's replacement apparatus for Bell
In 1903 they held a telephone to the Kremlin. The event was timed to coincide with the next visit of Nicholas II to the Mother See. The emperor was presented with an apparatus inlaid with gold and ivory as a gift. Newspapers wrote that the sovereign was quite upset and generously thanked the donors.
By 1904, a Gothic-looking telephone exchange was built and launched in Milyutinsky Lane.
The central entrance of the building is still decorated with two cute sculptural images:
Angry caller
And a nice "telephone lady"
And here is the switchboard, behind which the "young ladies" worked, connecting subscribers using such cords-wires:
Interestingly, at the dawn of the telephone era, men were hired to work on the switches, but since the connection was far from ideal, and breaks were generally common, there were enough angry subscribers, and it soon became clear that subscribers behave more calmly when communicating with a nice girl and, in addition, the girls held out longer and did not break down at the callers in response.
Although the work was hellish. At the same time, they paid 30 rubles per month (the salary of a skilled worker is 12 rubles / month), but the selection was cruel. Firstly, married people were not hired to work at the station, it was believed that the character of the married deteriorates and at the same time thoughts are always busy with the house, which leads to errors in the connection. Secondly, there were purely physical limitations: they measured height (at least 165 cm) and height in a sitting position with arms extended upwards (at least 128 cm), the young lady had to be able to quickly reach the most distant nests. At the same time, all the young ladies had to have impeccable speech and be, in general, well-bred. Among subscribers, it's all the same before the revolution ordinary people there were few, and rumors kept circulating among the young ladies about how one or another telephone operator had successfully met a profitable representative gentleman.
Headphones, plugs, switches - everything had to be handled quickly and accurately. And not a moment of peace.
Collection of telephone special devices
And only in the 1930s, telephone exchanges were gradually transferred to automatic
The current model of the first machine exchange
Proprietary insulators
Collection of payphones:
Payphone 1930s
Experimental anti-vandal phone
Experimental sphere for a telephone booth. Inside, amazing soundproofing and echo. It was made at the Sukhoi Aviation Plant using appropriate high technologies, but did not go into series.
Another pay phone from the 1950s
A small collection extracted from payphones
Virtually Skype
Telephone equipment of stations
There is a concrete payphone booth in the yard, for some time it was tense with metal in the country and a few booths were made in this form
In a separate pavilion, a collection of payphone booths
A modern copy of a pre-revolutionary booth
This is how it looked in the original
Useful information:
Zorge st., 27 (metro station Sokol, metro station Oktyabrskoye Pole)
The museum is free (with a guided tour!), but, alas, only by prior request from groups and only on weekdays from 10:00 to 16:00
With applications (at least from 5 people) please contact here:
Tel.: +7 499 198-05-63
Fax: +7 499 943-86-68
Email mail: [email protected]