The telephone was invented in 1876. Two years later, in 1878, there was already one in Mexico. That’s no small feat: it means that while Graham Bell was still perfecting his invention, Porfirio Díaz was already installing it in the National Palace. The Minister of Development, the writer Vicente Riva Palacio, met the businessman Alfred Westrup and immediately convinced Díaz that this device was the future. Westrup was hired with a very specific mission: to establish a telephone link between the National Palace and Chapultepec Castle, the six police stations and the General Inspectorate, and the offices of the governor and the Minister of the Interior. The first official call in Mexico took place on March 13, 1878, between the Tlalpan police station and the General Inspectorate of Police, a distance of 18 kilometers, and the call lasted sixty minutes, becoming the first long-distance telephone call in all of Latin America. And that same year, on September 16, Porfirio Díaz picked up the telephone at the National Palace and spoke with someone at Chapultepec Castle. Before that call, he listened through the receiver to the National Anthem being played elsewhere in the city, and he was so convinced that he ordered the permanent line to be installed that very day.
What came next is equally fascinating. Díaz became number 64 in Mexico’s first telephone directory, published in 1888 when the service already had 800 subscribers. The city was growing connected, but Díaz had something else in mind: he wanted telephony to be Mexican. When a company tried to register as Mextelco but turned out to be a subsidiary of an American company, Díaz refused to grant it the concession and waited until Mexican investors bought the business and renamed it Cotelmex. In 1884, he granted them their first formal concession, and in 1883, that same company had already made the first international long-distance call between Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, Texas. By the time the Revolution broke out in 1910, Mexico had 16,000 telephones installed. And as a historical curiosity that we still use today: the “good” with which Mexicans answer the phone originated in that era, when operators would ask if the line was in good condition and the user would respond with exactly that. Porfirio Díaz left us the Angel of Independence, the railroad, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and also the “good” greeting.
Source: donporfiriodiaz
