Herbert Hoover: Would it kill you to call?

This fun excerpt from Ammon Shea’s The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, comes courtesy of the great Marginal Revolution:

“The first American president to have a telephone on his desk was Herbert Hoover, who had one installed in 1929. The White House did have a telephone well before most of the country, as Rutherford B. Hayes had had one installed in the telegraph room of the executive mansion in 1878. It received little use at first, since so few other people had telephones at that time. The very first telephone book for the city of Washington, D.C. lists this presidential telephone simply as ‘No.1.'”