Story Time - Comcast

Bell Telephone System - Just for fun

You don't call your out-of-townies enough. you should get in touch. Call them tonight. And, why aren't you calling them right now?

Donna Reed sure looks like she's having a ball, hearing a friend's voice and having the fun of sharing everyday news. "There's no need to hurry your call. the cost is small."

The next time you have to call an ambulance for your mom or dad because they heard what you pay monthly for your smartyphone bill, whip out this ad - best done on your smartyphone, just for the sake of irony. Then, enjoy their face while they have another grabber right there after seeing what they were paying for long distance in 1957... corrected for inflation, of course.

My mom used to love shaking her head at what they have the nerve to charge for a magazine "nowadays". The copy of LIFE that this was scanned from has a cover price of a quarter. Yeah, three bucks is more than a quarter, mom. What did you make per hour in 1957? Here. Let me get that for you. The average salary was about $3,600 per year. That's 2080 hours per year, which comes out to like $1.73 per hour. Roughly.

Assuming the CPI Inflation Calculator isn't completely off its nut, the price table from this Bell telephone ad would look like this, if you were paying these same rates in today's money:

So, your pocket computer wonderdevice, which probably costs you about $100 per month, allows you to talk to anybody in the country infinitely at no extra charge. While it is maddening that cellular carriers can be willing to try and charge you per text message, when the data burden on their network for a text message is almost unmeasurably small, in general, smart phones are pretty incredible. Also, ad no additional charge, you get a semi-functional robot voice that can look up nearly anything in the whole of the multiverse just by talking to it, and also a global co-pilot that can tell you how to get anywhere without asking for directions and possibly avoid getting involuntarily butt-sexed in the backwoods of Alabama because you spilled coffee on your hand drawn map.

I wonder: How many minutes of talk time would one hundred crisp, new,  modern dollars buy you back then? Well, $100 in current FutureBucks equals $11.79 in rusty old 1957 money. That would get you a little over three minutes of talk time from Miami to Pittsburgh with the Bell Telephone System.

CORRECTION! Thanks to Alert But Polite Reader Tim, it has been brought to our attention that I ran the math wrong. Derr! I'll let Tim explain...

"...when you say that is a little more than what 3 minutes on the phone with your steel magnate uncle before stepping out to the DuPont Plaza, you are using Futurebuck pricing with mid-50's money. You could talk to Uncle Walter for more than half an hour!"

Right you are, Tim! Thanks for keeping me honest, and for not being all snarky about it, which is more than one could typically say for me. Numbers are hard! Garr, my brain! Still, I'll leave the next paragraph as it was, because it's still a decent bit about the not-The-San-Diego-Chicken.

Wowzers. I don't know anybody in Pittburgh I want to talk to that badly... except maybe the Pittsburgh Pirates' mascot, the Pittsburgh Parrot. Could he explain to me in three minutes or less how his all-baby diet has been working for him? It may be worth $100 to hear him try. And, I could probably record the conversation on my smartyphone and post it on faceTube... OR, simply threaten to post the damning conversation and thereby extort $100 from the Pittsburgh Parrot, recouping my $100 loss for the phone call... and then I would then have a great story to tell people, gotten for free, effectively.

My mom would probably tell me that stories about talking to baby-eating mascots cost much less than free in her day.

Western Electric - Go ask White Alice.

Ever wonder what makes your cell phone work? Ever wonder how telephones ever worked at all, ever? Nope? Well, you're normal. If you're the curious type, observe this 1957 Western Electric ad that basically explains how telecommunications worked in the pre-satellite era.

This ad is from May, 1957. The first satellite, Sputnik, wasn't launched (by the Russians) until October of that year. Also, it would be a while after that before that new crazy sci-fi technology would be commercialzed for use by everyday numbskulls like us.

No, back in '57, there weren't satellites yet. So, if you were in Anchorage, Alaska, and you wanted to call your mom in Indiana or whatever, you would have had to take a drive to downtown Anchorage to make the call on The Telephone.

Enter, the White Alice project. It was a way to communicate over long distances by bouncing  radio signals off the troposphere. "WTF the troposphere?", you say? It's the lowest and thickest part of the atmosphere, consisting mostly of water vapor. Western Electric was commissioned by the Air Force to build huge antennas like the one in this ad. It may occur to you that it looks a little like the dish antennas on people's roofs, and that's because it's basically the same thing. See the tower in front of the dish? That's the bit that sends and receives the signal. The huge bowl thing is basically a reflector that focuses the signal into a rough beam shape as it reflects it, making it stronger and more directional.

"Why did the Air Force want these antennas so hard?" you say? Because this was 1957 and  it was the Cold War. With the feeble communications available in Alaska before White Alice, it seemed like a pretty good back door for The Russians come sneak in and invade the heck out of us, with maybe hours before anyone in Alaska could notice and warn the rest of the U.S. Long story short, you could get just about anything funded if you said "The Russians" in a spooky voice and wiggle your fingers around a little bit.

But now, we have privatized satellites making these huge antennas obsolete. The White Alice antennas began to fall out of use in the Seventies, and the last unit was decommissioned in 1985. Here's Louis C.K. explaining how spoiled and impatient we are with our ubiquitous pocket-sized satellite wondertechnology.

Here's a film from 1960 explaining what a geeky erection we had for the dawn of satellite communication. It sounded like sci-fi at the time, but now we have the nerve to be irritated when it doesn't send the minutiae of our daily lives around the globe, to no one in particular, at the exact moment we want it to. I look forward to being spoiled about 3D printing and wireless battery chargers.

As Robert, one of Evil's henchmen said in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits, "I can't wait for the new techno-lo-nological dawn!"

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Loving the new phone.

Joke #1 - Madge's new Bell telephone would make it so much easier to take care of day-to-day errands. Stalking her ex-husband, harassing the sewer department, and tracking the movements of her children, for example.

Joke #2 - "I'm sorry, mother, you'll have to speak up - I've hung up on you!"

Joke #3 - By simply unplugging her wonderful new Bell telephone, Madge could ensure that the young handsome repair man would visit her bedroom any day she needed him.

Joke #4 - "BEverly5 - 0811"...  "BEverly5 - 0811"... "I said BEV-ER-LEE FIVE OH EIGHT ELEVEN godammit!"

Joke #5 - Madge could hardly wait to have her new 'i-Phone installed. The technician was nearly done connecting the iBilicus Cord, which would snap into a socket in her skull and make all her thoughts and dreams the express property of Apple, Inc. She used these last exciting minutes to practice holding her i-Phone in the way that interfered with reception the least.

Joke #6 comes to us from Misterfancyhotballs_2. Thanks, Fancy! - How nice & weighty this phone is" thought Madge. And there's more than enough phone cord to tie him into the carpet she would have to remove- because of all the blood. Tonight indeed, she would: DIAL "M" FOR MURDER! Mwhahahaha!

My jokey doppleganger Fil grants unto us yon Joke #7. Thanks, Fil! - "my nu fone iz so kewlz!! i m texting u on it rite nowz!! OMG WTF LOL JK"

Anonymous (who is really Tommy Tutone, let's be honest) sent us joke #8. Thanks Thomas! - You've reached Jenny at 867-5309. Are you ready for a good time?

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.   -Mgmt.]

Western Electric Trimline Phone - Convergence of technologies.

"Technological convergence" is the combination of devices through a kind of evolution. The most notable of which is the modern cellular telephone. Behold the first (or at least a first) baby step: the Trimline phone, by Western Electric.

You can probably find a cranky person who'll tell you that phones have gotten too complicated, and that they try to be too many things. Your phone has basically become a pocket computer. Sometimes, my desktop PC goes a week without me powering it on, because I can do email, listen to music or podcasts, mess with the web and, if I get desperate, talk to another human being with it.

There are things that phones aren't very successful at yet. Mine doesn't hold my entire music collection, which requires a minimum of 80Gb. But, it can hold an admirable amount of music... certainly more than I, strictly speaking, need to have with me at a given moment. I look forward to carrying a phone in my pocket that can accomodate a 128Gb micro SD card. Those are the ones that are the size of your pinky nail and pose a realistic inhalation threat, should you be brave enough to prize it out of your phone with a set of tweezers. The cell phone is pretty amazing. It is known.

Check it out. "Decorator colors, including new rust and chocolate brown." Brown is making a hideous comeback, people. Keep your eyes peeled for metallic brown paint on new model cars. I think I saw a brown Ford Fusion the other day. My eyes still feel like they didn't wipe thoroughly.

Back in 1980, Western Electric Trimline phone had the (apparently) boast-worthy feature of combining the keypad with the handset. I dimly recall using one for the first time and thinking it was pretty spiffy. Back in '80, you could probably find someone crabby enough to complain that the Trimline was "too fancy" and that phones should be simple like in the olden times, when you had to dial on the base, or better still, you had to crank the crank on the base and shout for Mabel to connect you with the Sheriff, if you heard someone rooting around in your coal shed late at night. Incidentally, this phrase can, even now, be quite suggestive if you work your eyebrows the right way upon utterance.

So, yeah. It's all relative. Combining the two halves of the same device was noteworthy in 1980, just as combining too many communications devices can be a frustration to some people today. For my next feat, I will augur the controversially combined technologies of The Distant Future. Let us remember that those who forget the future are doomed to do it anyway. Let's not forget to not combine the following...

Telephone and Hover-Skis

Telephone and Oscillation Overthruster

Telephone and Microwave Vibrator

Telephone and Nanoblimp

Telephone and Interocitor

Telephone and Trans-Cranial Bore

Telephone and Nuclear Pipe Organ

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Picture-Phone - Finally!

Release the pigeons, people. The long-awaited Picture-Phone is here, so you can stop awaiting on it, all right? Behold, The Picture-Phone!

Sometimes, when we see these nutty old inventions in Popular Mechanics, they look as though they've been knocked together by an old man in a basement, because they were been knocked together by an old man in a basement. Not so, The Picture Phone. The hardware looks pretty finished because it was developed by Bell Labs. Soon, you could have one too. You only need to install a second phone line to handle the picture while the original line carries the phone call.

The refresh rate wasn't great. You got a new image every two seconds, which may be fine if you're just talking on the phone... maybe? Of course, by looking at the photos, you'd need to keep your face right in front of the camera, which isn't so handy, considering the camera's apparently narrow field of view. That'd be kind of a pain. Of course, Bell Labs would have tweaked the design to be less neck-twisting in time, IF it had caught on.

But what if you need to use the oscilloscope AND make a call?

Why didn't this catch on? Well, in 1956, all men wore suits around the house and women always looked like Betty Crocker, so they were always presentable. I've seen Leave It to Beaver, so I know this to be true. You wouldn't mind going on camera just to answer a call, back in '56. But, as standards of personal grooming slid downhill, dripped off a cliff, and oozed into a puddle at the mouth of a cultural sewer drain, the shirt-and-tie look kind of fell out of favor around the house. If everyone had a picture phone now, you'd be lucky to see someone wearing a trash bag on the other end of the line (depending on who you call). You've seen how people dress when they're shopping for a few gallons of mayonnaise at Wal-Mart? Imagine what they look like when they're "relaxing" at home. Now imagine the prospect of a career as a telemarketer. Not so glamorous, now, is it? be careful what you wish for.

Thankfully, the Picture-Phone had a switch allowing either user to turn off the camera at will. So, Bell Labs did have a certain amount of foresight. It's as if they could smell the winds of change in the air, and they could see the Swinging Sixties right around the corner - a time when people would be ordering some takeout in the middle of "freewheeling activities". You think Chatroulette was a freak show? If Picture-Phones became standardized, imagine being the poor kid at a pizza restaurant taking phone orders on a lonely Friday night in 1972. Imagine how different A. G. Bell's famous  quote may have been if Watson could SEE him while he said "I want you!" Thank heaven for little switches that turn things off.

My smarty-phone can do the see-n-say thing, but I've never used it. Have you? Maybe you've tried it once when you first got the phone, but do you use it all the time? Skype is great for meetings and video podcasts, but do you want to use it by default for all your calls? This Picture-Phone wasn't the last attempt to get people to look at each other while talking, and probably not the first. Has it been assumed by Science that everyone wants to look at each other while they talk? Why hasn't this idea caught on, especially when it's a hundred times better than the Picture-Phone and lives in your pocket all the time? I think it's because most of the time, you just want to communicate, not to "connect" with someone. There's sociology and psychology to consider when thinking about the Picture-Phone, and I think that's still being mostly ignored.

Also, if my phone is in video mode and you're using your phone like a normal phone, I don't want to stare at your earhole, even if you are wearing a suit..

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Reinventing the telephone.

Joke #1 - "...so, you get 2000 'AnyTime' minutes per month, at one dime every ten minutes, which comes to $200 per month. I'm sorry. I don't know about this 'data plan' you keep mentioning. Ready to sign?"

Joke #2 - "This new coin hopper plate is made from magnesium, which is twice the price of the steel unit, but does reduce the total weight by four ounces. This makes the phone more portable and reduces Catastrophic Pants Failure by nearly six percent."

Joke #3 - "I left a penny in here yesterday , Kent. Where is it? That tie looks like it cost a penny, Kent. Don't you think that's a little suspect... KENT?"

Joke #4 - "... and we'll have to redesign the entire coin mechanism, thanks to these new gigantic fifty dollar coins. Thank YOU, president Gingrich."

Joke #5 - "... And you lift the little door to shout a message to the recipient. Of course, the message becomes the sole property of Apple, along with the emotions that inspired the shouted message. And, they can never be copied or transferred, or repeated with the same phraseology in the same language, without the express written permission of Apple, Inc. Oh, the handset? That's for beating yourself if you think about wishing you could change your icons or something."

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Western Union - Broadband 1963 style.

When I pulled this ad from my inbox this morning, I had to stop reading, go get some coffee and read it again so I could do a spit take. Broadband in 1963. Double you, tee eff?

Sure, it probably cost a fortune, could only be justified by fairly rich businesses and the power of the local Western Union station was probably equivalent to the cable modem enjoyed by the average household today BUT... 1963?

I know, you're probably thinking that all computing in the sixties was accomplished by banging rocks together, and that transmitting data by wires was invented by Madonna in 1985. Actually sending data by wire was happening back in the 1800s. Doing it wirelessly was invented in 1924. When all of global trade happened by sea, there's a strong impetus to stay in touch with ships out in the middle of nowhere. So the biggest driver of wireless fax technology in the twenties was keeping track of the latest shipment of sock garters from London.

As we all know, and as we would all like to pretend isn't true, the one thing that forces advancements in data technology today is pornography. Here is a Western Union delivery boy circa 1911, ready to bring a basket of "frisky pictures" to the local preacher so that he could deny it belonged to him.

So, by 1963, business guys who were rich enough to have those little egg cups could transmit pictures, charts, stock data and stuff over the phone lines. Who knew? Well, the internet knew. It's just jarring to see the word "broadband" appearing in print as early as the sixties. I tried to find some numbers on what qualified as broadband back then, but couldn't find anything. Shazbot.

This ad also brags about WU's use of microwave transmission - probably via satellite. You know those news trucks you see driving around with the thing on top that looks like a gun turret? That's a microwave antenna. That's how your local news drone can report live from the scene of a fast-breaking newstragedy. The van transmits the video straight to an antenna on the roof of the TV studio, without the delays of shipping a video tape by a boy-powered bicycle network. The boy industry has never recovered.

This is all pretty impressive for 1963 - four years before George Harrison had the idea of singing through a leslie speaker. So what can we make fun of? Errr. The telephone looks like a styrofoam takeout container! And its yellow! What a bunch of jerks. Huh huh "Wups! My lunch is ringing! Take a message. I'm not hungry." Huh huh huh.

Phonograph Answering Machine - Saves phone messages forever.

Thomas Edison briefly mentioned the idea of using his phonograph to record telephone conversations in 1878 (according to this site, which doesn't cite any sources, but seems to be associated with Rutgers University, which isn't iron-clad proof of accuracy, but does lend some credibility). So, he nearly invented the answering machine. By 1953, magnetic tape technology was appearing in the consumer market. So, why were they still using phonographs to record phone messages?

Interestingly,  as early as 1926, AT&T had a problem with the idea of recording phone conversations on public phone lines for some reason. You could, however, record everything you wanted on a private line. Weird. In 1949, the FCC allowed the recording of audio on all AT&T lines and the telephone answering machine was born... sort of. Still being weird about things,  the FCC placed tight restrictions on what technology you could use to record audio from phone lines.

 That's great and all, but why a record and not tape, which could be erased? Maybe one of the FCC's rules about recording technology made tape a no-no? Maybe magnetic tape technology was still new and expensive? For whatever reason, this goofy thing was the only game in town in 1953.

The outgoing message was recorded on a small 4-inch record, while the incoming messages were recorded on a larger eight-inch blank disc. For those of you too young to understand, vinyl records cannot be erased and re-recorded without melting them down and pressing new blanks out of the recycled material. This is baffling to me. A tape machine has fewer moving parts (I'm pretty sure) and doesn't involve the delicate needle and tonearm. Most of all, you don't have to constantly buy new blank records.

The blank disc could store 140 messages, each limited to 23 seconds of record time. Just in case you forgot how records work, these messages were stored forever. Every wrong number, petty request and wise ass crank call were indelibly imprinted on vinyl for you to enjoy until the seas boil and the moon falls from the sky.

But it's not all baffling frustration here. There's amusement to be had. Look at the guy in the pictures. He's supposed to be a TV repair man, but he looks like a detective. I know he's supposed to be taking down the address of Mrs. Hopkins, but he could just as easily be getting an anonymous tip on a moider! "Hello. Dis is de-tec-a-tive Joe Bullet. If youse has a clue about da dioty moider what happened down at da gin joint the other night, leave a talking message on my phonograph and I'll come rough ya up, and find out what you  know, see?... ya no good bum."

It's also worth noting that in the article, they call the machine a "robot". technically, it's accurate, since the definition of a robot is any machine designed to do the work of a human. Still, this thing is as much of a robot as my garage door opener. I demand that, to be called a "robot", a thing must be able to move around under it's own power and possibly go berserk, with the option of the occasional killing spree, due to malfunction complicated by the incomprehensibility of human emotions.

For further reading on Thomas Edison, and why he was kind of a dick, we urge you to do a search on "Edison VS. Tesla" and their shared history. Among other things, Edison electrocuted an elephant, trying to win market dominance in the was of AC versus DC power. Spoiler: Tesla's AC power delivery system is now our standard and Edison's DC system is not.

Update: The Phil Are Go! research department has just found out that Edison did build a wax cylinder answering machine, but it could only be used to record "Mary Had a Little Lamb".

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