It’s no joke – Ericsson is 150 today
While large parts of the world celebrate April 1 as a day for pranks and jokes, Ericsson has a different reason to raise a celebratory smile. It is the date on which the company was founded. And this year marks a special anniversary – the sesquicentennial – 150 years in business.
Having worked for several years as an instrument maker and engineer, Lars Magnus Ericsson opened his L.M. Ericsson & Co. telegraph repair shop in the kitchen of an inner-city Stockholm courtyard on April 1, 1876. He was 30 years old. He initially worked alongside his partner Carl Johan Anderson and Gabriel Bildsten – an errand boy.
The first recorded customer was the Stockholm Fire Department, which paid SEK 2 for the repair of instruments. And 150 years later Ericsson is working with the Stockholm Fire Department again – through Ericsson’s role in the development of Sweden’s Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) mission-critical mobile network for the Swedish Civil Defence and Resilience Agency (MCF).
Just weeks before Lars Magnus opened his workshop – and thousands of miles away – Alexander Graham Bell was granted the first patent for the telephone. The two men’s work was soon to overlap with Lars Magnus Ericsson repairing early telephone models before moving on to create his own designs and products. The success created hundreds of jobs and prompted several location changes in the following years to meet the growing demand.
His innovation and creativity saw his inventions outperform rivals’ – with appealing design, affordability and a belief that communications was a basic human need.
Ericsson’s inventions were so popular and accessible that by the end of the 1800s Sweden had more phones per population than any other country – and Stockholm had more phones per population than any other city.
It established a legacy that continues in Ericsson to this day – changing the world through communications’ technology leadership. There have been downs as wells as ups, but Ericsson ingenuity and determination saw the company through the tougher times and demonstrate true leadership in fundamental areas such as the decision to develop mobile systems in the 1980s and subsequently driving various mobile standards.
Despite transforming network and switching operations over the decades, Ericsson continued to be best known publicly for most of the twentieth century for its consumer products – including the famous Ericofon (known affectionately as the Cobra) and several of the most popular early mobile phone models.
From telegraphy to telephones to exchange switching to mobile phones/connectivity to programmable networks, the Ericsson brand has been at the forefront of the communications industry for 150 years.
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