Urban infrastructures of the Second tecnological Revolution. The diffusion of the telephone in Spanish cities, 1877-1930

Abstract

The use of the telephone in the globalized world of today is something so very indissolubly related to our daily habits that turn out almost unthinkable to conceive a time at which such service was absent. To deepen in the study of the origins and development of the telephone equals, then, to face some of the keys of the present civilization. The diffusion of the telephone in the Spanish cities between 1877-1930 took place with a relative delay with respect to other European countries. To this relative delay they contributed as much economic reasons (rent and tariffs) like institutional, mainly the oscillating governmental policy and the regime of concessions. The period analyzed here is rich in contrasts since it includes the passage of an overwhelming predominance of local networks, private as well as public, in regime of virtual monopoly to the creation of a system unified under a private monopoly.