Rutherford B. Hayes was the first U.S. president to use a telephone and to have one installed in the White House.

Quick Scoop

  • The White House got its first telephone during Rutherford B. Hayes’s presidency in 1877.
  • The phone was installed in the executive mansion’s telegraph room, not on the president’s desk.
  • Its number was simply “1,” and at first it could only be reached from the nearby Treasury Department, so very few people actually called the president.
  • Hayes’s early adoption came barely a year after Alexander Graham Bell’s pioneering telephone demonstration, making Hayes an unusually tech‑curious 19th‑century leader.

Fun follow‑up detail

  • A telephone was not installed directly on the presidential desk in the Oval Office until Herbert Hoover requested one in 1929, more than 50 years later.

In modern terms, Hayes was the president who “jumped on the new gadget early,” even if almost nobody else yet had a way to call him.

TL;DR: Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to use a telephone and to put one in the White House, starting presidential phone history back in 1877.

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