Etymology of "telephone pole"

April 3, 2024 10:34 AM

In my part of the world, the things that look like this and this and carry power, telephone, and data cables in non-transmission-line settings are almost universally (colloquially) called telephone poles. Why?

They are formally called utility poles but could just as easily be called power poles - I believe that in my region anyway (northeast United States) the introduction of telephony and residential electrification happened at basically the same time, so it doesn't seem like they would have necessarily entered the popular consciousness as telephone poles first. (In fact they probably first entered societal consciousness as telegraph poles).

Several English-speaking countries have a variant on the children's rhyme "liar, liar, pants on fire, hanging from a telephone wire" which raises the same question about why "telephone" gained the role of "metonomy for utilities."

So:

• Is my history wrong? Did telephone service come early enough before electrification in enough places to motivate the metonomy?
• Is there some other historical explanation for the choice of name?

posted by range to Technology (11 answers total)

In fact they probably first entered societal consciousness as telegraph poles

I suspect this may actually explain it--started out as "telegraph poles," and the reference naturally transitioned to "telephone" with the technology.
posted by praemunire at 10:42 AM on April 3 [10 favorites]

I think that telegraph poles & wires definitely pre-dated electrification, particularly in the West, where the poles and wires paralleled railroad lines through otherwise sparsely populated territory. I feel like there are many evocative references to telegraph lines in song and literature as metaphors for westward expansion, knitting the country together, connecting distant cities, railroad lore, etc. but not so much about electrification and it's infrastructure. And as praemunire says - it's not such a jump from singing about telegraph poles to telephone poles.
posted by niicholas at 10:50 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

I don't have time to verify this, but I believe that in many parts of the United States, telephones spread more quickly than electrical service. It's much simpler to run a lower power phone line than it is to run AC voltage.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:57 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

I agree with praemunire. Google ngrams of these terms in the AmEng corpus is consistent with the the idea that in the US, they were telegraph poles first, then telephone poles, then utility. The BrEng corpus ngram shows "telephone pole" only gaining traction this century, likely due to increased US media dominance in the Anglosphere.

I don't think your US history is wrong so much as looking at the wrong thing. Sure, lots of people got phone and electric at the same time. But the term was set by the easterners, and they were used for telegraphs long before phones, per the wikipedia article. Also note the several terms listed at the start. I'd never heard of "hydropoles", despite regular contact with Canadians. And Aussies do call them "power poles", fwiw.
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:02 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

They're telegraph poles in the UK.

Telephony and electricity arrive at our house from under the ground. But, before they dug up the road, both services shared the same poles. We lost our phone line once and BT had to coordinate with the electricity company (or the other way round) because they owned the pole.
posted by run"monty at 11:04 AM on April 3 [1 favorite]

I have always thought it was because the poles belonged to the telegraphy company, which was later the telephone companies, and that histoprically, utilities leased space on them. Very similar to how today we still have radio towers but they lease space to cell companies and people still call them radio towers (though we are evolving to calling them cell towers even though they carry 5G now.)
posted by DarlingBri at 11:20 AM on April 3 [2 favorites]

There's also that telephone and telegraph lines would have run along (rail)roads to provide long-distance communication, where in the early days electricity would often be generated locally, if at all.

So a row of poles carrying wires on isolators, going off into the distance, would more easily be associated with telegraph or telephone than with electricity.
posted by Stoneshop at 12:54 PM on April 3 [1 favorite]

Just spitballing here — telegraph certainly came first. But telegraph lines weren’t run through neighborhoods, going house to house. Telegraph lines more likely ran from train station to train station along railroad right of ways, or maybe down main streets to town centers. There would have been an order of magnitude more poles needed to run residential telephone service than there were for telegraph service.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 2:25 PM on April 3

A couple of thoughts.

All “telephone poles” look like that. Some power lines are giant transmission towers which definitely don’t look like that.

Ma Bell used to be a single entity for the entire United States, which gave some uniformity throughout the country.

Power lines generally radiate outwards from a generating or transmission facility. Phone lines connected station to station, so out in the country there might have been phone lines connecting two nearby towns but weren’t also power lines. The start of this may be a rural thing that blended into the cities.

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. Nuff said.
posted by Huggiesbear at 3:01 PM on April 3 [3 favorites]

Telegraph poles ran from telegraph office to telegraph office, and the telegrams themselves were usually delivered by a bicycle messenger. This means that they tended to only run to one central location in an area with dense construction. That would be the commercial district of your town, or possibly the railway station because they might follow the railway lines, so that one station could communicate with another station to let them know that a train was coming through and the line needed to be clear.

If you lived in a residential or a rural neighbourhood the first utility poles you would have seen on your road would have been the telephone lines. There was no substitute for the phone. You could easily go on lighting your home or your business with kerosene, and heating with coal or wood, but if you needed to communicate with other people your only option was to send someone out in the weather, either with a horse or a bicycle. In really bad weather, sending out a buggy was impractical, because the same conditions that made you want to not be traveling exposed to the elements meant that the buggy was likely to get stuck... The phone was absolutely wonderful for people who couldn't leave their children, or their sick family members, or who couldn't allow the fire to go out, or who simply weren't up to a four mile trudge down the road and back.

The telephone was extremely popular. People on rural roads enthusiastically clubbed together to pay for the expense of a party line. In villages they often only had one phone, at the pub, or some location belonging to some clever entrepreneur who knew it would ensure a steady stream of prospective customers coming in. If you wanted to use the village phone, or you wanted the landlord to send his boy running to your house with a message, you naturally would patronize his business, not the pub up the road.

For most people the telephone poles were the first utility poles they saw in their own neighbourhood. And in many districts they remained the only poles for a few decades. Electricity was nasty dangerous stuff. President Harrison and his wife reportedly went to bed with the lights on in their bedroom in the White House when electricity was first installed because they were afraid they would be electrocuted or start a fire if they tried to turn it off. What if the electricity leaked the way gas would if you put the pilot light out? The adoption of electricity was not nearly as fast as the adopting of the telephone. Many people DID get electrocuted, or have a fire in those early days. Nothing was grounded, so as late as 1960 children were being taught to ALWAYS DRY YOUR HANDS COMPLETELY before your turn the bathroom light off. You could get a nasty shock touching a switch with wet hands.

The current used for phones though was below the level that could provide a lethal shock or serious burns. The only danger was using the phone when there was a thunderstorm, and people were taught to wait until the storm was over in case lightening struck the house or the lines and the wires carried it to the person trying to make a call. Telephones used to responsible for 1/4 of all the lightening strike injuries in the UK.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:22 PM on April 3 [7 favorites]

Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. Nuff said

Eh? No mention of the poles in the lyrics (by Jimmy Webb); it's all about the wires.

However, since you brought it up, let me recommend this great Soul Music program about the song. Part of it features an actual Kansan lineman whose band plays this song.
posted by Rash at 5:37 PM on April 3