The first telephone line in the Czech lands

People were able to make phone calls in the Czech lands – between Duchcov and Ledvice – a mere 5 years after Bell’s ground-breaking invention and 3 years after the first telephone line in the United States.

This was in 1881, and the Teplice District had the greatest steam power in the entire country at its disposal. It was there that the industrial heart of the monarchy was beating; and it was there where money from German, Austrian and English banks was flowing. Among the 77 lignite mines of the then mining district, you would have found only one giant open-pit quarry, that is, a mine of the same extent and with the same methods of extraction that we see in the same area today. It was Richard Hartmann’s facility, located between Ledvice and Chotějovice, where coal had been extracted from 1869.

Hartmann was an industrialist from Chemnitz (Saská Kamenice), where his machine engineering company manufactured locomotives. The boom brought about by the industrial revolution enabled him to invest in technological innovations. One of them was the miracle from America – the telephone.

Hartmann had the Ledvice mine connected by phone with the company’s administration building in Duchcov, which was two kilometres away, thereby creating the first telephone line in the Czech lands. Three years later (1884), the entrepreneur was the first to have his mine fitted with electric lighting. One more first concerning the telephone connected with Teplice, albeit shared with Ústí nad Labem, is the oldest long-distance telephone line, which was put into service between the port and the spa town in 1888.