Yeah, I know it's kind of an on-this-day job but I've been busy. The world's first commercial telephone exchange was installed 130 years ago in Hamilton, Ontario.

And the hotline between the United States and the USSR, known as the "red telephone", was established following an agreement on 20 June 1963. The events of the Cuban Missile Crisis had made it clear that reliable, direct communications between the two nuclear powers was a necessity.

However, the line wasn't actually a telephone to begin with, but a network of teleprinters - the phones were installed in the 1970s. One one occasion, Jimmy Carter rang to ask Leonid Brezhnev if it was true that the USSR was readying troops for an invasion on the Afghan border in 1979.

"Really? I hadn't heard. Let me ask the defence minister," Brezhnev said. He then pretended to ask his defence minister before finally replying: "The minister here says no such thing is going on."

Sly.