The Swiss PTT (Post, Telephone and Telegraph Enterprises) (, , ) was the postal, telegraph, and telephone agency of Switzerland, from 1928 to 1998. The PTT were the state authority for mail, telephone, telegraph and fax services in Switzerland and Liechtenstein between 1852 and January 1, 1998. The predecessor of the PTT was the Swiss Post, which was already founded in 1847 during the Sonderbund War. With the entry into force of the Swiss Federal Constitution in 1848, the post was placed under state supervision and transformed into the Federal Post. In the mid-1880s, the Federal Post turned to building a telephone network. In the 1920s, efforts were made to unite the then Post and Telegraph Directorates. These succeeded in 1928 with the founding of the PTT.
During the Second as well as the First World War, the PTT or the Swiss Post were intensively occupied with delivering internee mail. In the course of the European liberalization of telecommunications, the PTT were dissolved on January 1, 1998, and their tasks transferred to Swiss Post and Swisscom. While Swiss Post remained a government agency with a partial service monopoly (it was converted into a statutory Aktiengesellschaft in 2013), Swisscom became a competitor on a liberalised telecommunications market and is an Aktiengesellschaft of which the Confederation holds a majority of shares.
History Postal system in the Helvetic Republic In 1798, the Old Swiss Confederacy collapsed under the military and political pressure of France. The Helvetic Republic replaced the loose structure of the 13 cantons with their associated places as a centralized state from April 12, 1798. Following mercantilist logic, the postal system was to be controlled only by the centralized state. The first attempt to centralize the cantonal postal enterprises was not made by the Grand Council (today: National Council), but by the Directory in Aarau (government, today: Federal Council in Bern) with the Postal Service Clothing Regulation of May 5, 1798. The legal basis, the postal monopoly, only gained legal force from September 1, 1798, through the Grand Council and the Senate (today: Council of States). Organizationally, the Helvetic Post took shape with the law on the establishment of a "Regie Post Administration" and the setting of uniform postal rates from November 16, 1798. The local location of the postal central administration proved problematic. In 1798, no fixed seat of government for the Republic was decided. The capital was to rotate between Aarau, Lucerne, Basel, Zurich and Bern.
The centralization of the post provided for the creation of five postal districts. The first postal district was Basel. The second postal district Zurich included the regions Zurich, Baden, Aargau, Graubünden, Glarus, Waldstätten, Bellinzona and Lugano. St. Gallen with the cantons Säntis and Linth was the third postal district. The fourth postal district Schaffhausen, comprising the same canton, was followed by the fifth postal district Bern with the areas Bern, Oberland, Léman, Freiburg, Solothurn and Wallis. However, the Canton of Valais was briefly an independent republic from 1802 due to its separation from the Helvetic Republic.
As a result of internal unrest by federalist insurgents ("Stecklikrieg") in the summer of 1802, the Helvetic Republic was short-lived. General and First Consul Bonaparte – from 1804 Emperor Napoleon – intervened in 1802 and had the cantonal sovereignty restored through the Act of Mediation. During the Mediation act (1803–1815), the centralized state transformed into a loose confederation of 19 cantons (without Geneva, Valais, Neuchâtel, Bishopric of Basel and Biel). The central power was limited to a minimum, and a Landammann of Switzerland replaced the Directory of the Helvetic Republic. The representatives of the cantons decided at the reintroduced Diet in Fribourg in 1803, as a direct consequence, the dissolution of the central postal administration on September 10, 1803.
The Federal Treaty of August 7, 1815 replaced the Act of Mediation of 1803, but the regained cantonal postal sovereignty remained until the founding of the federal state.
From confederation to federal state
The Swiss Post was created after the Sonderbund War (1847) in the course of the founding of the Swiss federal state of 1848, whose constitution of September 12, 1848 came into force. The formerly 17 cantonal postal administrations and a central one were to be united under the roof of the Post and Construction Department (today: DETEC) under the supervision of the Swiss Federal Council according to the federal resolution of the federal councils of November 28, 1848. With the laws on the postal monopoly and postal organization of June 4, 1849, the Federal Post took shape. The takeover by the Confederation was set for January 1, 1849, but only took place on October 1, 1849, with the entry into force of the uniform tariff law. The Basel Benedikt La Roche-Stehelin held the office of General Director of the Federal Post. Political oversight lay with the St. Gallen Federal Councillor Wilhelm Matthias Naeff. From the 18 federal postal districts, eleven were created at that time. This division lasted until 1911 and was only slightly changed by the transfer of the Canton of Zug from the Zurich postal district to the Lucerne postal district. The district postal directorates replaced the cantonal postal directorates. The total staff one year after the establishment of the organization was 2,803 people.
With the first complete revision of the Federal Constitution of May 29, 1874, the Federal Assembly freed the Confederation from the obligation of financial postal monopoly compensation to the cantons. In addition, Article 36 of the Constitution received an addition regarding the telegraph system. From then on, not only the postal but also the telegraph system in the territory of the Confederation was purely a federal matter. The revenue of the "Post and Telegraph Administration" flowed into the federal treasury.
The founding of the Universal Postal Union with Switzerland as a founding member also fell in the year 1874.
Building loose telephone networks Pioneer in the field of telephony was the German Empire. The Swiss Telegraph Directorate, taking the Empire as a model, ordered the first telephone devices from the company Siemens & Halske in 1877. In December 1877, trial operations took place between Bern, Thun and Interlaken as well as in Bellinzona. The Telegraph Directorate did not yet grant private concessions despite requests, but in return allowed the cantonal Interior Department of the Canton of Vaud to connect the psychiatric clinic in Cery by telephone. The Swiss Federal Council subordinated the telephone system to the telegraph monopoly in 1878. This state monopolistic claim of the Telegraph Directorate was not uncontested. Thus, the telephone entrepreneur Wilhelm Ehrenberg filed a complaint with the Swiss Federal Assembly. Nevertheless, the federal councils adhered to the extended postal monopoly.
Initially, the International Bell Telephone Company was in discussion for the network expansion. Wilhelm Ehrenberg, in turn, submitted an application for the company Kuhn & Ehrenberg to build a central telephone station in Zurich, which made a name for itself with the telephone transmission of the federal singing festival in Zurich via a line to Basel. The "Central Telephone Station in Zurich" officially went into operation on October 2, 1880. However, the private Zurich telephone company remained an episode. In 1886, the Confederation took over the Zurich network. In the other Swiss cities, the Telegraph Directorate itself was responsible for building the telephone network. The Post and Railway Department of Federal Councillor Simeon Bavier granted permission for this in 1880. The number of subscribers was decisive for the expansion. "While in Basel the Telegraph Directorate itself went in search of participants," in the other cities the private commercial, industrial or banking associations helped in their own interest in the search for subscribers. Thus, loose telephone networks first emerged in the cities, then in larger municipalities, which were only gradually connected to each other.
First World War Swiss postal traffic with abroad was severely restricted by the outbreak of war in 1914. In particular, deliveries overseas could not be guaranteed, as the shipments fell victim to the submarine warfare several times. With Italy's entry into the war in 1915, the situation escalated further. Neutral Switzerland took over the delivery of internee mail during the First World War. The resulting additional financial expense was partially reimbursed to Switzerland by some states after the end of the war in 1918.
Explosively, on November 8, 1918, in the run-up to the Swiss general strike, telephone conversations between Robert Grimm and Ernst Nobs and Rosa Bloch (see source) were eavesdropped. Through telegram and telephone censorship, the PTT tried to interrupt the connection between the local strike committees and the general strike leadership. For example, Ticino remained communicatively isolated during the strike. In March 1919, the national strike trial against 21 members of the strike leadership then took place.
Interwar period and founding of the PTT
The interwar period brought great challenges for the Swiss Post. The Great Depression at the beginning of the 1930s led to a decline in postal traffic, whereupon the General Directorate took rationalization measures, which also included staff reductions. From 1920, the first steps were taken to organizationally combine the postal system with the telephone and telegraph system. In 1928, Reinhold Furrer was appointed the first General Director of the newly founded Swiss Post, Telephone and Telegraph Enterprises (PTT).
In 1939, the PTT General Directorate decided to use postal yellow for all purposes. The color had already been introduced in 1849, but letter boxes were painted dark green for a long time and post office signs red-white.
Second World War The outbreak of war in Europe in the first days of September 1939 also had far-reaching consequences for the Swiss Post, which was networked across Europe, on very different levels. First of all, the war meant a decline in civilian letter mail transport at home and abroad for the PTT. However, the statistics point to longer-term trends. Thus, letter and parcel post as well as newspaper traffic to Germany, but also to the other neighboring countries, slowly declined already in the 1930s. The takeover of power by the National Socialists in Germany had a particularly inhibiting influence on newspaper traffic, which was increasingly subject to censorship. In the decline of letter post, it can be assumed that the competition from the emerging telegram partially displaced letter post. In contrast to the declining trends of regular post, the area of field post grew enormously in numbers. New in the Second World War were the handling of internee mail as well as prisoner-of-war mail.
The staff in the administration increased continuously during the war years (see diagram). The proportion of women during this period was an average of 26.2%, falling from 30.8% (1944) to 27.9% (1945) at the end of the war. The total PTT staff only decreased between the years 1939 and 1941 from 21,809 via 21,252 to 21,216 people. At the end of 1945, the PTT employed 23,171 people compared to 21,809 in 1939. Calculated on the entire workforce, there were an average of 18 women per 100 employees (17.7%) in these years. The Swiss Post employed female employees mainly as non-civil servant telephone operators.
Postal traffic with Germany