Obama’s whopper about Rutherford B. Hayes and the telephone

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-whopper-about-ru...

> So, rather than “not looking forwards,” as Obama put it, Hayes quickly embraced the new technology.

> Besides historians, Obama’s staff also could have checked with the White House Historical Association, which recounts Hayes’s interest in the telephone in a classroom lesson for children in grades 4-8.

http://www.whitehousehistory.org/whha_classroom/classroom_4-8-presidentspeak....

> In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-1881) spoke on the telephone to the instrument’s inventor, Alexander Graham Bell. Two years later, Hayes had his own telephone in the White House. But the invention was so new that very few homes or offices in Washington had phones, so Hayes had few people to talk to. In fact, the president’s telephone number was "1."

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