In 1876, on a Stockholm backstreet, 30-year-old Lars Magnus Ericsson opened a workshop to repair telegraph instruments and take on small mechanical engineering jobs. The telephone was the novelty of the times, and Lars Magnus soon got customers asking him to fix their phones when they broke down. He started improving on what they brought in, which often were phones from the American company Bell, even creating his own versions of the device. Fortunately for him, Alexander Graham Bell who had patent protection for his device almost everywhere else in the world, never protected his patent in Sweden.
The first Ericsson phones came in 1878. Shortly thereafter, Ericsson launched a wall-mounted telephone, unique in its design, and as Ericsson started selling across borders became known worldwide as the ”Swedish pattern”.
Bell did set up a network in Stockholm, though: The Stockholm Bell Telefonaktiebolag became the city’s first phone company. One of its earliest customers was Henrik Thore Cedergren, an engineer and businessman, who found what Bell charged a bit pricey. Cedergren started calculating what it would cost to run a competing network. In 1883, he founded Stockholms Allmänna Telefonaktiebolag (SAT) and turned to Ericsson for equipment.
With two competing telephone companies in Stockholm – SAT and Bell – subscribers reaped the benefits. The competition brought low charges and high technical standards, making Stockholm the world leader in telephone coverage by 1885.
Another pioneering phone city was Gävle, a two-hour train ride north of Stockholm. In 1881, the city established a telephone association and went looking for a supplier of telephone equipment for the network they wanted to build. In fierce competition, Ericsson’s telephones and switchboard beat out the Stockholm Bell Telefonaktiebolag.
This became the breakthrough on the network side that Ericsson needed, and many other cities followed Gävle’s example, both in Sweden and abroad.
By 1896, Lars Magnus Ericsson’s company had grown to 500 employees and had, since the start, produced over 100,000 telephones. Of which the major share went to export.
Operations outgrew the original, small workshop and in 1884, the company moved to Tulegatan 5 in Stockholm and to a five-story building in which Ericsson set up a much larger mechanical engineering shop. Lars Magnus, his wife Hilda (who archive records show ran the company alongside him) and their children lived on the first floor and had direct contact with the office and the shop.
Bonus: the skeleton
Lars Magnus Ericsson personally crafted one of the world's most distinctive and now highly sought-after standard telephones. This desk telephone built on a naked steel construction featuring two black-lacquered inductor magnets, intricately curved and twisted into a stand. The skeleton-like structure underwent testing as early as 1884.
The model achieved a breakthrough in 1892 when it was enhanced with a horizontal telephone handset placed on a hook. While the handset itself wasn’t an Ericsson invention, Ericsson swiftly became its foremost proponent. This model established the benchmark for all 20th-century variations of desk telephones with horizontal headsets.