Exhibition Talking North – Landline telephone in Lapland is open for visitors 19.9.2025–31.5.2026 in Arktikum Science Centre. The opening of the exhibition will be celebrated as part of the programme of an international seminar on telecommunications.

Over the past few decades, phones have moved from
telephone desks to different rooms in the house and eventually to people’s
pockets. The miracle machine was first used in Lapland just six years after its
invention, when an expedition brought the device to the municipality of Sodankylä in
central part of Lapland.

Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A.
Watson built a telephone device in 1876. In November of the same year, the
Suomalainen Wirallinen Lehti newspaper wrote that sending words to the other side of
the world with a telegraph is strange in itself, “but the biggest
miracle of all miracles is the electric telegraph that
talks”. 

The construction of an actual
telephone network began later in the southern parts of Lapland. In the 1970s,
Lapland still had homes without a telephone. Although advances in electronic
communications reached Lapland with a delay, the region also served as a testing
ground for new technologies. The landline era started to wane in the 1990s, when the
focus gradually shifted from speaking on the phone to a more comprehensive transfer
of digital data.

The exhibition shows how the need for the
telephone was justified at different times and how northern conditions influenced
the development of telecommunications.

The exhibition is part of
the
Telecommunications infrastructure, time, community, and the Arctic environment
project funded by the Kone Foundation. The aim of the research project is
to understand how the specific characteristics of the Arctic environment affect the
telecommunications infrastructure and how the telecommunications infrastructure
shapes the northern environment, communities and landscape.

Most
of the photos displayed in the exhibition are from the photo collection campaign
organised in the project.