The Technology of Telephones

Message to the younger generation: It’s been said a million times, but it’s true. Developments in technology have been revolutionary, even within my lifetime of a mere 63+ years.  I will describe some of it, to amuse you with how primitive we were, or to provide background for your historical novel, or to let you spot anachronisms in whatever passes for movies in the future.

I’ll start with telephones.  At first, at home, we didn’t have any. Of course, in the first house I lived in, we didn’t have plumbing, either; the pitcher pump and the outhouse sufficed.  Milly and Vake had their first telephone installed just before Sandy was born in November, 1949. It was a wall-hung model. As soon as they moved to Florence, they had to have a telephone for their West Lane Plumbing business, and it was a desktop model that sat on the counter between the dining area and the kitchen. It was connected to a “party line,” because that was all that was available. Perhaps five or so other customers were connected to the same line, and each one had a distinctive ring, like a long and a short, or three short tones. Phones had only one tone, a clanging of bells that you can choose to be your ringtone today if you like the historical feature.

To make a call, you picked up the handset and listened for a second. If you heard somebody else talking on the party line, you had to hang up and wait your turn. You could listen in on other people’s conversations if you wanted to; that was rude, and you tried to hang up as quietly as possible so they wouldn’t hear the click on the line, or else you hung up with a clunk of the handset to let them know that somebody else was waiting to use the phone.

If the line was free, you said “Number please,” and an operator would reply, “Operator.” Or was that dialogue the other way around? You recited the number you wanted, and the operator connected your call.  If you were calling outside the nearest city limits, you said “Long distance, please,” and there would be an extra charge for the call.

One of the parties on Vake and Milly’s line was a neighbor across the street, Woody Wallene. He was a log truck driver, and somebody rang his number every morning just before sunrise, to prompt him to go outside and fire up his logging truck and let it idle while he went back inside for breakfast.

Vake and Milly asked for a better line as soon as it was available, and eventually moved from 811W2, the five party line, to 306W, which was about a three party line, to 102 which was theirs exclusively. Milly speculated that numbers were assigned in part by who was an emergency service provider, because Vake the plumber was 102, one of the local doctors was 112, and the fire department 122 (or something like that). Vake and Milly were accustomed to getting urgent calls to the doctor in the middle of the night when a woman went into labor and her anxious husband misdialed the doctor.

Vake needed to call home one day to ask Milly to bring him some plumbing part out at the jobsite, so he placed a collect call. “Will you accept a collect call from Vake Sampson?” the operator asked. “I will if he smiles right,” Milly answered. The operator asked, “Sir, are you smiling?”

All of the telephone operators were women.  It was good employment with regular pay, and all were transferred or laid off and moved away when the phone system was automated. The Hinderlees and the Atkins family, among my classmates, moved away.

The first automated phones were dial phones:  to place a call, you stuck your finger in a numbered hole in a round dial, pulled the hole around to a stop, then released the dial. When it sprung back into place, you dialed your next number, until you completed the sequence you were calling.

There was a number you could call to learn the time of day, and there was another number you could dial to make your own phone ring. Sometimes when Milly was hanging laundry in the back yard at the 30^th Street house, the neighbor Mrs. Sheets would walk over for a long, long talk. Milly would give a surreptitious  sign to one of the kids, who would go inside and make the phone ring, then call out the back door “Telephone!” so Milly could extricate herself from visiting with the neighbor, and return to business.

Push-button phones came next, but a button still took at least ¼ second to register. One of my friends typed faster than that, and routinely had to slow down when she phoned out, so the phone could keep up with her speed.

After Milly and Vake build their house in Dune City, they still used just one phone, a wall-hung model in the entry hall.  They had to switch from dial-up to push button when the phone company would no longer support the older technology. But they resisted getting anything newer.  When Vake became increasingly mobility impaired, Sandy, Mark, Tina and I had an additional phone installed that had a cordless handset so Vake could talk from the living room without getting out of his easy chair; and the phone came with an answering machine. Milly didn’t like it. We were scarcely out of the house when she jerked the wires out of it. Don Reedal fixed it for them, but Milly complained that it was making a strange noise that wouldn’t quit, so she disabled it again. Later, when she broke her wrist, she couldn’t remember how she had done it, but she thought she might have been dashing for the telephone, as best she could dash with an artificial hip and her cane.

Cordless hand sets weren’t without their limitations: when my friends Larry Vaughn and Mickey LeRoy had their house burn down, they heard the shattering of glass when the fire exploded on their deck. Mickey grabbed the phone to call 9-1-1, but the cordless remote handset wouldn’t work.

 With the arrival of the computer age, many of us had to have an additional phone line wired into our houses so that we could operate our computers and have telephone service at the same time.  The cost of service kept going up and up and up, and bills would arrive from two different carriers, the local company and the long distance provider. “Long distance” from my house in Renton, WA was a farce. Seattle numbers were in the 206 exchange. In a big arc around Seattle were the 425 numbers. The rest of western WA was area 360, and eastern WA was 509.  However, some 425 numbers even at a short distance along the arc from my house, such as Renton to Bellevue, seven miles up the highway, were  long distance.

Today, our house is equipped with cordless remote handsets that come from Costco, four or six to a box.  We use Voice Over Internet Protocol, VOIP, so there is no such thing as a long distance charge. People like Brook are abandoning “land lines” all together unless they need them to run a security system.

Our first cell phones were the size of a brick, although not quite as heavy, and reception was spotty.  Today cell towers are everywhere, which we discovered when we drove across the desert in New Mexico and Arizona. We were running a radar detector, although I don’t know why: there was not a trooper in sight, and we were locked into cruise control and totally street legal anyway.  But every 10 miles, the radar detector picked up the signal from a cell tower standing on the tallest nearby hill top, like the early airplane beacons lighting the major air mail routes across the nation.

Today my cheap, simple model from Wal-Mart is miniaturized, takes messages, sends and receive text messages, and takes photographs. Eric’s “Blackberry” is considerably more sophisticated. He can use it to browse the internet, find a map, check the history behind a Washington, DC memorial whose plaque is missing, etc. I hope my reluctance to master a more sophisticated device isn’t the onset of dementia, as in my mother’s case! 
Eric Martin responds:
The first phone I remember was the rotary wall phone in the kitchen. The number was 634-3084, but the sticker in the middle of the dial said ME4-3084. After that our number was 634-0328. I remember those numbers because you had to - Today I have a hard time remembering my own phone number, or anyone else's, since all I have to do is start typing in a name & the corresponding number pops up on my phone & rather than dialing it, I just hit "send."