The police signal box: a 100 year history

Within a few years of the invention of the telephone, many police forces around the world immediately embraced the new technology in the ever increasing fight against crime. By the turn of the 19th century police telephone boxes were appearing on city streets for the use of officers and the general public and by the early 1930s there were a few thousand boxes in the UK. By the late 1960s, however, the the advances in telecommunications resulted in the signal boxes being surplus to police requirements and most were removed. This paper looks at the history of police telephonic communications, and in particular at the creation of Glasgow´s network, which was one of the largest in the UK, with 323 on-street police signal boxes