What was the telephone number of the White House when the first phone was installed there in 1877?

On May 10, 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes has the White House’s first telephone installed in the mansion s telegraph room. President Hayes embraced the new technology, though he rarely received phone calls. In fact, the Treasury Department possessed the only other direct phone line to the White House at that time. The White House phone number was “1.” Phone service throughout the country was in its infancy in 1877. It was not until a year later that the first telephone exchange was set up in Connecticut and it would be 50 more years until President Herbert Hoover had the first telephone line installed at the president’s desk in the Oval Office.

Herbert requested, just after taking office, Hoover requested that a line be put in on his desk in the Oval Office. Previously, he was using a phone in the office foyer. The president has had his own phone ever since. But the president didn’t have a private line until 1993, when President Bill Clinton complained that anyone in the White House could listen in on his calls by picking up an extension and pressing a button.

Like any large government institution, the White House has always had a patchy relationship with the technology of the day. The White House Historical Association reports that it didn’t have gas lighting until the 1850s, after many Americans, while the first typewriter arrived in 1880, ten years after the first commercial typewriter went into production.