Berlin is still torn between the use of electric street lights and gas street lights. Despite public opposition, the city of Berlin will remove a portion of the cities remaining 44,000 gas streetlamps, replacing them instead with electric lamps (“Gaslicht”).
Eventually customers no longer had to deal with telephone exchange operators. "The German Post Office had begun introducing its national direct dialing system in 1952, and this network became completely automated in 1972" (Weiher 141).
Electricity had many other uses besides just to power public transportation. In the last two decade of the nineteenth century, the German electrical industry was divided among a variety of companies besides just Siemens. Among the top competitors was Emil Rathenau; he created the German Edison Company in 1883, later renamed to Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) (Weiher 41). But more companies alone would not propel the market. "The electric industry faced a special problem: it had to create a demand for products that used the new technology" (Feldenkirchen 113). New or improved applications for electricity were constantly being introduced at Trade Fairs. From telegraphs to telephones and light bulbs to lit streets, the developing applications of electricity spawned other markets such as telecommunications and electric lighting.
Electric street lights were exhibited in the city during the Berlin Fair Trade in 1879. The city got its first electric street lights in 1882; Siemens had originally installed the lights in Leipziger Strasse and Potsdamer Platz, but by 1888 the lights were being installed in the famous Unter den Linden (Weiher 41). Werner von Siemens did have fears about the success of electric lighting. “Siemens himself, however, believed at first that electric lighting would never take the place of gaslight (41). It did not take long until the man responsible for the successful development of the incandescent light bulb, Thomas Alva Edison, approved of Berlin's electric lights. "He considered Berlin to be the best lighted town (electronically) on the continent" (Weightman 76).
Siemens patented its own telephone in 1877, and in the same year the company unveiled its electric tram (1881), the city of Berlin got its first telephone exchange (Weiher 38). The telephone—both as an innovation and an annoyance—spread throughout the German capital. Lilly, in The Glimmer Palace, had to deal with the telephone operator on behalf of the Countess, to seize all calls, except ones of immediate importance (Colin 114). But the fictional Countess’ attitude towards the telephone was similar to the views that real Berliners had for the new communication device. German philosopher and author Walter Benjamin explained the angry conversations that his father would get in with the exchange operator over frustrating calls; “At that time, the telephone still hung—an outcast settled carelessly between the dirty-linen hamper and the gasometer—in the corner of the back hallway, where its ringing served to multiply the terrors of the Berlin household” (Benjamin 49).
Besides just wired telephones, the Siemens company also developed special glass amplifying tubes. "These became the basis for the very versatile screened grid tube to be used both in long-distance telephony and radio telephony and hence for the radio broadcasting systems of the future" (Weiher 69). The German Democratic Republic constructed an enormous broadcasting tower—the Fernsehturm—in central Berlin as a mark of German innovation ("Berlin"). Today the tower is still piercing into the sky of the German capital.
