The men said good bye with much shaking of hands and with great smiles and congratulatory exclamations. On the wall in the hallway they had mounted a wooden box with a black wire hanging out from the bottom and at the other end of that wire there was a black thing that looked like the free end of a very large recorder and it hung in a metal fork that was attached to the side of the box. Under that fork there was a small hand crank. On top of the box there were two silver bells, just like the ones on top of the big alarm clock on Pips' night table. There even was that hammer visible between the two bells, again exactly like on the alarm clock.
Mims explained to us that this new thing was the telephone we had heard so much talk about at the dinner table and now we had our own. She went right on to demonstrate its use: with the left hand she lifted that black thing off the hook and pressed it to her ear and with the right hand she gave a few quick cranks to that handle on the side of the box. The bells on top rang shrilly.
Then, nothing happened. Again, she gave a few quick cranks, and after two or three more cycles like these her eyes suddenly opened wide and she talked into a round hole in the front of the wooden box with a black mat over it. And a smile came over her face and she adjusted the black bakelite thing on her ear and we heard half a conversation, each section of her part responded to by a squawking sound issuing from the ear piece in her left hand. We later learned that she had talked to a lady sitting in an office in town in front of a switchboard and had learned from her all the names of the neighbors who also had a telephone installed and if we wanted to, we could talk to each one of them perhaps even to several of them at the same time, without having to walk over to their houses or waiting to meet them on market day. All we had to do is call Mabel at the switchboard by ringing the bell and she would "plug us right through". It got better than that: if Mims need to talk to someone who was not home, Mabel would plug into each and every phone within her reach until she found Mims party. You should see what such a switchboard looked like: and it is the same technology that IBM used decades and decades later for the programming panels of their early commercial computers.
Mabel is the lady in the center. She got promoted to this bigger setup as the local telephone network grew. In her beginning, she had just one of those boards to work and her file was a little box an the desk next to her right elbow.
Later, in school, we learned about the principles that make a phone work. The teacher also demonstrated a practical application that we could try ourselves and when we got home that day we asked Mims to save us an empty can. We cut the bottom out and stretched a piece of parchment over it, holding it around the can with a tight rubber band and then wetted the parchment and set it in the open window in our bedroom to dry. My friend Walter had been doing the same thing and next day after school we strung a string from his window to ours across the street. The war was still going on and there was no problem about stringing strings across roads because there was no traffic and the string was higher than people walking there. And nobody wore any top hats anymore.
With this arrangement we had our own telephone from Walter's room to ours. When we saw him talking into his can we would hold ours near our ears and we could hear Walter talk. Not clearly, but talk, nevertheless. When we switched our can in front of our mouths, Walter would put his to his ear.
Then we moved to the city and there we had a phone that was much smaller than that wooden box out in the country. It had a round disk on it and holes in the disk and behind each hole, fixed to the phone box, were the numbers 1 through 0 and in a cradle on top of the phone was a combined ear-and mouth piece, somewhat heavy, but still movable within the reach of the wire with which it was attached to the phone box. Now you did not have to stand facing the wall and talk into that black hole in the front of that wooden box anymore. We could dial the phone we wanted to reach and needed no Mabel to connect us to our party. Of course, if the party did not pick up their end of the line, all we would get is ring-rinnnnng, ring-rinnnng. Ad infinitum.
Things moved rapidly upwards in unrestrained fashion until, one evening, Pips gathered us around the table and explained to us the telephone bill. He showed us all the short and the long calls we had made to our friends across town after we had sat next to them in school and had played with them for hours after school and he suggested that after all that time together and with the prospects of getting more of the same the next day it was not clearly understood why we had to spend all this additional time on the phone, where each minute cost! So, we learned to economize phone conversation, and rationalize conversation overall.
Things continued to swing upward continually. There were phones in booths all over town where you could make calls anytime you wanted if you had the small change ready; the phones got better so you could clearly hear and understand what was being said at the other end of your line. If you needed to look up a number, there were thick telephone books that listed every phone number anywhere in the country. There we some problems also, like connections would be dropped or you could listen to the conversation of strangers whose line was crossing yours but there were no real problems getting a phone connection. Vandalism that caused these public phone booths to disappear was not yet known.
Then came a period of political changes and to show how much the welfare of the country was at the heart of the popular representatives the congress of one country where this technology was being held in an absolute leadership position invoked a law guaranteing businesses an environment of fair competition and under this law they forced the largest phone company to split up into smaller pieces and to sell these smaller pieces off to the highest bidder. There shall be no monopoly, they cried. It is bad for competition!
Re-imagine the situation in the early days of rail roads: every railroad company protected his tracks like the apple of his eyes, their exupmeunt was not allowed over to the competitor's line, often even the rail gages were different and rolling equipment was physically not capable of running on the competitor's track. This kind of conditions was our telecommunication reduced to after congress had pushed their will through the courts.
Observation of the progress in communication technology became an exercise in frustration. New technology was still developed in that same country where they enforced littleness, but the greatness coming out from the engineers' desks and their laboratories was exported to foreign countries and it took years to find fertile ground for it back home. Just one current example: back some 25 to 30 years ago cell phones could exchange information with each other or with machines, just by typing brief code and being pointed at each other by their owners. You could point your phone at a soda machine and get a soda, the cost being billed via your phone subscription. You could walk by the post office and pick up stamps for your letters the same way: type a code, point and click, &ct. This is 'emerging' technology in your neighborhood only now. Apple is experimenting with this via Apple Pay, but the range is limited in things you can buy with your phone and places where you can do it. We got to be careful with this, you know, this is so brand new and who knows what can come of it? It has been practiced in Europe, and, probably, in China and in India and in Australia and Japan for just some 30 years, but the air here - we just don't know. Cellphones themselves, back then: we visited Germany and found most everybody carrying their phone in the pocket. And they could not understand that we found these little things so marvelous. We came back and it took another few years before our president called us all together at the company where I worked, dramatically pulled his cell phone out of his pocked, explained what it was and declared that we all would get one issued and he said authoritatively: "and you will use your phone in lieu of the phones in your motel when you travel. Sometimes," he said, "you might have a weak signal but you will drive just two to five miles and have the signal to make your call". "Anywhere in the United States" he added. I took my new phone and went on a trip to Joplin, Missouri and I needed to make a phone call and there was no signal. I reasoned that perhaps a larger city would have better coverage, hopped into my rental car and drove towards Tulsa, OK. Every two or three miles along the Interstate Highway I pulled over to confirm that there still was no signal. Then I came to the State border and a sign that read "Last Exit before Toll" and I decided that my president could not have meant it that insistently and drove home, made my phone calls from the comfort of my motel room.
So we stick stick to what we know and that, today, is hard wire technology and cell phone technology. The phones have gotten better and bigger and we can now not only talk and listen, we can play games and buy things via our credit cards and get all kinds of information via the web; we can take pictures and send and receive e-mails and text messages. But:
My carrier has put out a map that promises cell phone signal to cover my house and even my pasture down to the wood line. But don't depend on this map. There is no signal here. You got to go out to find it! Last year I could sneak behind a neighbor's barn and there, at the corner, facing the prevailing wind, I could sometimes pick up a couple of bars. This year I have not tried. The neighbor passed away and his heir, or heiress, does not appear to like catering to the needs of her new neighborhood. So I drive to the nearest town if I need to call, some 10 miles for the benefit of five bars.
In between, for the last two years, after complaining to my carrier about selling me a service that does not exist and compelling me to keep that service for years based on a legally enforcable contract, they gave me a technological marvel that can pick up a telephone signal which does not really exist in this area and translate it into actual human talk. For two years it worked like the proverbial charm. This year it went 'off line'. There is a conflict between the cellphone carrier and the owner of the landlines here. The owner of the landlines has bought a monopoly *) on wired telecommunication and there is no understanding **) between them and my cellphone carrier. The wonderful gismo that let me use my phone last year does not work anymore. One suggestion is to replace it at a high cost with no guarantee that the thing will then work again. And so on.
Yesterday, I noticed that my landline also went dead: not even a ring tone. I drove to town and saw the telephone crew working on the road side and figured that somebody had taken down a pole during the night and after the new pole is up things return to normal. This morning - still no ring tone! I drove to town to call my telephone company on the competitor's cell phone signal and was promised that they would trace the problem and have it fixed not any later than by six o'clock tonight! That's service. But the first question I was asked when I connected with them and after I had given them assurances that I was who I claimed I am: "do you have an alternate number to call 911, if you need to?" Of course I had not - contemplate the implications, if you will. I received a call confirming that my line was functional again by about 9:00 o'clock. 1-1/2 hours to trace the problem and fix it: a component located at 'the central office' in my line had failed and they had replaced it. No cost to me! Imagine.
So, that is the state of telecommunication technology today: great and accomplished, but unstable to a degree that it is scary to think about how dependent we are on it. If you live in one of our great cities, I sure your only thought is that I should quit my griping.
*) For thoughts on 'monopoly' see above, 9th paragraph.
**) for an analog situation, see the thoughts about early railroads in the 10th paragraph.
Mims explained to us that this new thing was the telephone we had heard so much talk about at the dinner table and now we had our own. She went right on to demonstrate its use: with the left hand she lifted that black thing off the hook and pressed it to her ear and with the right hand she gave a few quick cranks to that handle on the side of the box. The bells on top rang shrilly.
Then, nothing happened. Again, she gave a few quick cranks, and after two or three more cycles like these her eyes suddenly opened wide and she talked into a round hole in the front of the wooden box with a black mat over it. And a smile came over her face and she adjusted the black bakelite thing on her ear and we heard half a conversation, each section of her part responded to by a squawking sound issuing from the ear piece in her left hand. We later learned that she had talked to a lady sitting in an office in town in front of a switchboard and had learned from her all the names of the neighbors who also had a telephone installed and if we wanted to, we could talk to each one of them perhaps even to several of them at the same time, without having to walk over to their houses or waiting to meet them on market day. All we had to do is call Mabel at the switchboard by ringing the bell and she would "plug us right through". It got better than that: if Mims need to talk to someone who was not home, Mabel would plug into each and every phone within her reach until she found Mims party. You should see what such a switchboard looked like: and it is the same technology that IBM used decades and decades later for the programming panels of their early commercial computers.
Later, in school, we learned about the principles that make a phone work. The teacher also demonstrated a practical application that we could try ourselves and when we got home that day we asked Mims to save us an empty can. We cut the bottom out and stretched a piece of parchment over it, holding it around the can with a tight rubber band and then wetted the parchment and set it in the open window in our bedroom to dry. My friend Walter had been doing the same thing and next day after school we strung a string from his window to ours across the street. The war was still going on and there was no problem about stringing strings across roads because there was no traffic and the string was higher than people walking there. And nobody wore any top hats anymore.
With this arrangement we had our own telephone from Walter's room to ours. When we saw him talking into his can we would hold ours near our ears and we could hear Walter talk. Not clearly, but talk, nevertheless. When we switched our can in front of our mouths, Walter would put his to his ear.
Then we moved to the city and there we had a phone that was much smaller than that wooden box out in the country. It had a round disk on it and holes in the disk and behind each hole, fixed to the phone box, were the numbers 1 through 0 and in a cradle on top of the phone was a combined ear-and mouth piece, somewhat heavy, but still movable within the reach of the wire with which it was attached to the phone box. Now you did not have to stand facing the wall and talk into that black hole in the front of that wooden box anymore. We could dial the phone we wanted to reach and needed no Mabel to connect us to our party. Of course, if the party did not pick up their end of the line, all we would get is ring-rinnnnng, ring-rinnnng. Ad infinitum.
Things moved rapidly upwards in unrestrained fashion until, one evening, Pips gathered us around the table and explained to us the telephone bill. He showed us all the short and the long calls we had made to our friends across town after we had sat next to them in school and had played with them for hours after school and he suggested that after all that time together and with the prospects of getting more of the same the next day it was not clearly understood why we had to spend all this additional time on the phone, where each minute cost! So, we learned to economize phone conversation, and rationalize conversation overall.
Things continued to swing upward continually. There were phones in booths all over town where you could make calls anytime you wanted if you had the small change ready; the phones got better so you could clearly hear and understand what was being said at the other end of your line. If you needed to look up a number, there were thick telephone books that listed every phone number anywhere in the country. There we some problems also, like connections would be dropped or you could listen to the conversation of strangers whose line was crossing yours but there were no real problems getting a phone connection. Vandalism that caused these public phone booths to disappear was not yet known.
Then came a period of political changes and to show how much the welfare of the country was at the heart of the popular representatives the congress of one country where this technology was being held in an absolute leadership position invoked a law guaranteing businesses an environment of fair competition and under this law they forced the largest phone company to split up into smaller pieces and to sell these smaller pieces off to the highest bidder. There shall be no monopoly, they cried. It is bad for competition!
Re-imagine the situation in the early days of rail roads: every railroad company protected his tracks like the apple of his eyes, their exupmeunt was not allowed over to the competitor's line, often even the rail gages were different and rolling equipment was physically not capable of running on the competitor's track. This kind of conditions was our telecommunication reduced to after congress had pushed their will through the courts.
Observation of the progress in communication technology became an exercise in frustration. New technology was still developed in that same country where they enforced littleness, but the greatness coming out from the engineers' desks and their laboratories was exported to foreign countries and it took years to find fertile ground for it back home. Just one current example: back some 25 to 30 years ago cell phones could exchange information with each other or with machines, just by typing brief code and being pointed at each other by their owners. You could point your phone at a soda machine and get a soda, the cost being billed via your phone subscription. You could walk by the post office and pick up stamps for your letters the same way: type a code, point and click, &ct. This is 'emerging' technology in your neighborhood only now. Apple is experimenting with this via Apple Pay, but the range is limited in things you can buy with your phone and places where you can do it. We got to be careful with this, you know, this is so brand new and who knows what can come of it? It has been practiced in Europe, and, probably, in China and in India and in Australia and Japan for just some 30 years, but the air here - we just don't know. Cellphones themselves, back then: we visited Germany and found most everybody carrying their phone in the pocket. And they could not understand that we found these little things so marvelous. We came back and it took another few years before our president called us all together at the company where I worked, dramatically pulled his cell phone out of his pocked, explained what it was and declared that we all would get one issued and he said authoritatively: "and you will use your phone in lieu of the phones in your motel when you travel. Sometimes," he said, "you might have a weak signal but you will drive just two to five miles and have the signal to make your call". "Anywhere in the United States" he added. I took my new phone and went on a trip to Joplin, Missouri and I needed to make a phone call and there was no signal. I reasoned that perhaps a larger city would have better coverage, hopped into my rental car and drove towards Tulsa, OK. Every two or three miles along the Interstate Highway I pulled over to confirm that there still was no signal. Then I came to the State border and a sign that read "Last Exit before Toll" and I decided that my president could not have meant it that insistently and drove home, made my phone calls from the comfort of my motel room.
So we stick stick to what we know and that, today, is hard wire technology and cell phone technology. The phones have gotten better and bigger and we can now not only talk and listen, we can play games and buy things via our credit cards and get all kinds of information via the web; we can take pictures and send and receive e-mails and text messages. But:
My carrier has put out a map that promises cell phone signal to cover my house and even my pasture down to the wood line. But don't depend on this map. There is no signal here. You got to go out to find it! Last year I could sneak behind a neighbor's barn and there, at the corner, facing the prevailing wind, I could sometimes pick up a couple of bars. This year I have not tried. The neighbor passed away and his heir, or heiress, does not appear to like catering to the needs of her new neighborhood. So I drive to the nearest town if I need to call, some 10 miles for the benefit of five bars.
In between, for the last two years, after complaining to my carrier about selling me a service that does not exist and compelling me to keep that service for years based on a legally enforcable contract, they gave me a technological marvel that can pick up a telephone signal which does not really exist in this area and translate it into actual human talk. For two years it worked like the proverbial charm. This year it went 'off line'. There is a conflict between the cellphone carrier and the owner of the landlines here. The owner of the landlines has bought a monopoly *) on wired telecommunication and there is no understanding **) between them and my cellphone carrier. The wonderful gismo that let me use my phone last year does not work anymore. One suggestion is to replace it at a high cost with no guarantee that the thing will then work again. And so on.
Yesterday, I noticed that my landline also went dead: not even a ring tone. I drove to town and saw the telephone crew working on the road side and figured that somebody had taken down a pole during the night and after the new pole is up things return to normal. This morning - still no ring tone! I drove to town to call my telephone company on the competitor's cell phone signal and was promised that they would trace the problem and have it fixed not any later than by six o'clock tonight! That's service. But the first question I was asked when I connected with them and after I had given them assurances that I was who I claimed I am: "do you have an alternate number to call 911, if you need to?" Of course I had not - contemplate the implications, if you will. I received a call confirming that my line was functional again by about 9:00 o'clock. 1-1/2 hours to trace the problem and fix it: a component located at 'the central office' in my line had failed and they had replaced it. No cost to me! Imagine.
So, that is the state of telecommunication technology today: great and accomplished, but unstable to a degree that it is scary to think about how dependent we are on it. If you live in one of our great cities, I sure your only thought is that I should quit my griping.
*) For thoughts on 'monopoly' see above, 9th paragraph.
**) for an analog situation, see the thoughts about early railroads in the 10th paragraph.
Fascinating stuff! Thanks for sharing... both the personal reminiscences and the present-day musings. The power we hold in the palms of our hands today is indeed a marvel and a wonder is it not... at least on those days that it actually works!
ReplyDelete