When did Egypt first have telephone lines ?
Perhaps because of its geographic position between Europe and the Far East, Egypt has historically maintained a substantial lead over most the Near and Middle Eastern countries in keeping pace with the rest of the world in the development of its " ;wired" and "wireless" communications. Telegraph traffic between Europe and the Far East in the nineteenth century, for example, although not directly involving Egypt, had to pass through the Eastern Telegraph system by way of cables in the Red Sea. As a result, the history of telecommunications in Egypt began long before the foreign intervention in the Egyptian administration in 1876 (intended to secure the payment of the debts in which Khedive Ismail had drowned the country) or the Britis h occupation of 1882. The benefits to Egypt of this early progress in telecommunications have been enormous.
Despite the absence of reliable documentation and statistics on the years before 1889, it has been established that telegraphic communication between Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez existed as early as 1856. Egypt was ruled at that time by Mohammed Ali's second successor, Said Pasha, who, like his successors, had inherited Ali's goal of modernizing Egypt along Western lines. In this period, two Englishmen obtained permission from the Sublime Porte to lay a cable from Istanbul to Alexandria. The cable expa nded on the link that was already present, which ran from Alexandria to Suez through Cairo, and ensured that all parts of the country had communications connections to the outside world. From Suez, this link was later extended to India (the exact date is unknown), though not without many technical and financial setbacks. Egypt was thus linked first to Europe and Istanbul and then to Aden and India via the Red Sea.
By 1870, there were sixty-six internal telegraph lines in Egypt, sixteen of which were in Sudan. The telephone was introduced eleven years later when the American company Edison Bell constructed the first telephone line between Cairo and Alexandria. T he period that followed was one of rapid cable expansion, and England's entry into Egypt in 1882 facilitated the development of Egyptian telecommunication. Although such development had begun many years before, it was significantly furthered by the Britis h administration's self-interested desire to link Egypt to the United Kingdom and the world.
Among the major developments of this period was the introduction by a telegraph company of the LeKlanche battery in 1883, which replaced the Minotto battery then in use. This new "Duplex System" was then used in the telegraph lines linking E gypt with Syria. In 1884, moreover, both Reuters and the French news agency Havass were allowed to send their telegrams from Alexandria to Cairo free of charge.
The first telegraph and telephone lines in Egypt were owned by the state's Railway Authority. Trunk lines were also government owned and leased to the telephone company in return for a 70% share of the company's income. In 1918, the government bought all telephone and telegraph lines, save for a few small offices, and a separate independent department for telegraph and telephone was later established. Investment in telephone service rose from 780,000 Egyptian pounds in 1920 to 2 million Egyptian pound s in 1930.
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