The phone as we know it did not simply arrive fully charged and ready to scroll.

Starting with operators and party lines, followed by rotary dials and push-buttons, telephones have changed a lot over the last 150 years. Today, the devices we call ‘phones’ are often used for anything but talking.

For millennia, humans used smoke, mirrors, symbols and sounds, to convey messages from afar. But it is American inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, who is credited with inventing the telephone in 1876. What made Bell’s invention different was that it enabled people to simply talk to each other.

Around 20 years after being invented, phones became an important tool for Manawatū residents. They were used to connect our growing population and eventually, our phones came to connect us with the rest of the world.

Call Me, Maybe explores how telephones have changed since they were first introduced to Manawatū, and how our lives have changed with them.