The “Technical Time” of the Luxembourgish Telephone System: Reflections on the Transformative Power of Maintenance

Luxembourg’s telephone system struggled with a lack of capacity for subscriber lines and connections from its very early days in the 1880s. Drawing on a broad notion of maintenance, the paper argues that for about 110 years the postal administration tried to fix the capacity of the telephone network by introducing various new switching technologies. This approach for maintaining capacity gradually transformed the network from a system in which Luxembourg City served as the central hub – a pattern that the telephone system inherited from existing communication infrastructures like main roads, trains and the telegraph – to a less hierarchical network. The “technical time” of the telephone initially followed the “geographical time” that had been inscribed in these older networks, thereby perpetuating centuries-old hierarchies between core and periphery. It was only in the 1970s with the introduction of digital switching technology that a new chapter of communication technology was opened, offering equal access to the network for rural and smaller urban areas outside the capital.