Telephone Recording

Unfortunately, the American Telegraphone Company failed without producing very many machines, so there was little chance for its use to become common. About the time of World War I, the Dictaphone Corporation introduced a new, phonograph-based recorder capable of recording reliably from the telephone lines. AT&T forbid its use on the public lines, although a few were used by power companies and railroads on their private lines.

Recording devices were rarely used for surveillance in the United States in the period from the introduction of the telegraphone to the end of World War II, despite the many suggestions that they would be useful for this purpose. Instead, improved electronic devices like the Dictagraph (not made by Dictaphone despite the name) were popular among private detectives and the police. The story was somewhat different in Europe where (although I have not documented it) that the Nazi part relied heavily on a new technology-the magnetophon tape recorder-in surveillance gathering operations during the 1930s and early 1940s. A somewhat comparable use of recording was undertaken by the U.S. government during World War II to monitor telephone and cable transmissions between the U.S. and Japan.