In the last century we have seen a massive revolution in telecommunications. Technological advances have brought the world closer together, but we have lost something too. Liz Garton looks at the shift from manual to automatic telephone exchanges - a roll out that took nearly a century.

Today most people have the world at their fingertips. But it wasn't that long ago that we shared phone lines and there was no SIRI. Instead, we had The Operator.

Liz Garton looks at the shift from manual to automatic telephone exchanges - a rollout that took nearly a century.

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The shift from manual to automatic telephone exchanges ushered in an era of rapid technological advances which have made our current means of communication, Skype, social media, hangouts, almost unrecognisable to someone born just a few decades ago.

Maurie Challinor is nearly 87 and began working for the Post Office in 1948, back when it was in charge of pretty much all the country's communications. Now he volunteers at Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology .

Maurie Challinor with a telegraph receiver at MOTAT.

He says the advances in communication technology since he started has been out of this world and it's still improving all the time.

"If anyone had've told me at the time, I'd have said no, you're joking, that will never happen, it's impossible," Maurie says.

But while the change was rapid for some, for others it was excruciatingly slow.

Telecommunication came to New Zealand about 150 years ago - in 1862 when the first telegraph line was set up between Lyttelton and Christchurch

The first electrical transmissions of sound happened in early 1878 and by 1881 New Zealand had its first telephone exchange - in Christchurch.

A telegram Maurie sent to his young daughter while he was postmaster in Antarctica.

Brian Potter volunteers with Maurie at MOTAT. He spent 45 years working for Spark, Telecom and the NZ Post Office, essentially living the evolution of the telephone.

"When you consider the phone wasn't invented until 1876, New Zealand was very early in the game," Brian says.

Early adopters, but perhaps not thorough ones.

Because while the Morse system closed about 1963, the telegraph service as an entity didn't close until 1988.

"The phone saturation in the country wasn't immediate. A lot of people couldn't afford telephones for a long, long time. Not only that, the technology wasn't available to supply everybody with them anyway," Maurie says.

"I think this country was quite behind in getting full coverage of phones."…

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