# Before the telephone, how did you get someone's attention if you needed them quickly? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 21, 2025, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/before-the-telephone-how-did-you-get-someones-attention-if-you-needed-them-quickly/1019945 "2025-06-21T18:42:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 33
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2025, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/before-the-telephone-how-did-you-get-someones-attention-if-you-needed-them-quickly/1019945/33 "2025-06-22T02:08:05Z")
> [@Melbourne](#): > > By the way, because of this thread, I’ve just looked at the internet. It appears that the assertion that London had deliveries “12 times a day” is an AI invention from the observation that the city (offices) had early and late deliveries – 12 hour-a-day coverage. That twelve figure looked high to me also, altho widely quoted. Here is a pretty good cite IMHO- [https://www.postalmuseum.org/blog/health-pandemics-and-the-victorian-post-office/](https://www.postalmuseum.org/blog/health-pandemics-and-the-victorian-post-office/) _With up to eight deliveries a day in London, the postman was someone with whom members of the public, particularly the middle classes, came into contact on a regular basis. The question of whether sickness can be contracted as a result of contact with these vital ‘key’ workers of nineteenth-century Britain was, therefore, a pressing one for the Post Office._ And of course the Square Mile was different than Metro London. > [@vbob](#): > > Numerous contemporary writings mention letters arriving in ‘the morning post’ or ‘the evening post’ which makes me think twice-daily was the norm. In other parts of London that makes sense. But if you were in the Square Mile, things moved very fast indeed during business hours. Maybe even hourly, sure at the height of the Postal service. We have covered this before- > [@How often did the Royal Mail deliver during the Victorian Era?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-often-did-the-royal-mail-deliver-during-the-victorian-era/348109/18): > > “They” being the well-off, yes. Your average working man would hardly ever write one. The population of greater London in 1900 was over 6 million, which would be the County of London plus the City of London. But the City of London alone only had about 30,000 people living in it at the time. I don’t know the area covered by the hourly post service mentioned about but I guarantee it would not be the whole city. It would be the City plus the more affluent suburbs around it, I’ll guess something … --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/before-the-telephone-how-did-you-get-someones-attention-if-you-needed-them-quickly/1019945)._