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On March 21, 1920, the Sandusky Register reported on an astonishing invention in which W. W. Macfarlane, traveling in a car (driven by a chauffeur), held a conversation with his wife back at the garage -500 yards down the road! The article is reprinted at Paleofuture. Link
On the one hand, it’s just a number. On the other hand, there is a history and a system behind phone numbers that you might not know about. Like, why did they start using numbers in the first place?
In the early days of phone service, you’d call the operator and ask to be patched through to a particular line. This system was first questioned in 1879 by Alexander Graham Bell’s friend, Dr. Moses Greeley Parker of Lowell, MA. The town was suffering from an epidemic of measles and the doctor quite sensibly suggested that if the town’s phone operators fell ill, replacement operators would struggle to run the system. Numbers instead of names was seen as a better solution which, as you all know, is the system we still use today.
You’ll also find out how they assign area codes, why 911 is the emergency number in the US, and more. Link -via Bits and Pieces
I recently read an NPR piece about the book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, in which researchers determined that the most universally annoying thing ever is listening to someone talk on a phone. When I came across this reprint on The Atlantic from Mark Twain in 1880, I realized that this has been the situation since the advent of telephonic communication.
I consider that a conversation by telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of this modern life. Yesterday I was writing a deep article on a sublime philosophical subject while such a conversation was going on in the room.
Read the rest at The Atlantic. Link
Image credit: Bettmann / Corbis
Before Robin Williams got his breakout role as Mork from Ork, he starred in this wonderful ad for Illinois Bell. Take a look: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Laughing Squid
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We all have cell phones (oops, sorry, "smart" phones) but did you ever notice that no one ever calls anymore?
Pamela Paul of The New York Times noticed how modern day communications is now shying away from the telephone:
It’s at the point where when the phone does ring — and it’s not my mom, dad, husband or baby sitter — my first thought is: “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” My second thought is: “Isn’t it weird to just call like that? Out of the blue? With no e-mailed warning?”
I don’t think it’s just me. Sure, teenagers gave up the phone call eons ago. But I’m a long way away from my teenage years, back when the key rite of passage was getting a phone in your bedroom or (cue Molly Ringwald gasp) a line of your own.
In the last five years, full-fledged adults have seemingly given up the telephone — land line, mobile, voice mail and all. According to Nielsen Media, even on cellphones, voice spending has been trending downward, with text spending expected to surpass it within three years.
“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.”
“I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’ ” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’ ”
For this Friday’s Museum of Possibilities, I risk ridicule by sharing my past attempts to create a hands-free phone. Working for nearly twenty years at a metropolitan newspaper, I watched reporters spend a half-hour conducting a phone interview with a telephone crammed between their upraised shoulder and neck. It was easy to see how neck strain could result. Yet reporters had a problem: They worked in a busy, noisy newsroom where they could not use a speakerphone lest they disturb other reporters and also violate the need for privacy. Moreover, they didn’t like to wear headsets because it made them look like secretaries and therefore uncool!
(Image credit: Flickr user jamelah)
In the humor section of most bookstores it is easy to find books depicting ludicrous inventions that were filed with the U.S. Patent Office. The books include meticulous patent drawings and descriptions, and are good for a laugh. Inventing is an earnest but often awkward process of trial and error. In my cartoon-inventing sideline, I walked a line between seriously attempting to solve a problem in an unusual, but plausible way, and intentionally creating concepts that were obviously wrong and foolish, like those found in those funny patents books.
Decades before there were cell phones, and wireless “earloop” headsets, I was trying to figure out the future of the hands-free phone. These panels are mostly from the 1980s and early 1990s. The final panel, showing ladies using a PDA-type wireless telephone, was a reasonably correct prediction of devices that came into common use a decade later. Yet so far, I have not seen any version of my High Collar Headset! Nor have I seen another of my ideas: a headset built into a woman’s wig.
Minnesotastan found a delightfully thorough post about alphanumeric phone numbers that were in use through the biggest part of the 20th century. Remember the Glenn Miller song “Pennsylvania 6-5000″? That was a phone number, using a system set up to help callers find and remember ever-longer strings of numbers as the newfangled “telephones” became popular.
The amount of letters at the start of the exchange-name which stood for the exchange’s ID-number, varied from country to country, and even from city to city within a country! The number of letters was usually the first two or first three in any given exchange-name. In the United Kingdom, three letters followed by four numbers (3L-4N) was the rule. So ‘Whitehall 1212? would be “WHItehall 1212?, or 944-1212.In the United States, by comparison, phone-numbers followed the 2L-5N (two letters, five numbers) rule. This meant that the first two letters of the exchange-name stood for numbers. Notable exceptions to this rule were cities of New York, Philidelphia, Boston and Chicago, which followed the British example of 3L-4N. This brought up exchange-names like ‘PENnsylvania’, ‘TREmont’ and ‘ELDorado’. Since the rest of the country did 2L-5N, this could create some understandable confusion to people who weren’t from the US. East Coast. Eventually, these cities conformed with the rest of the nation, altering their phone-numbers so that instead of the above, they had numbers like: ‘PEnnsylvania 65000? or ‘ELdorado 51234, to avoid confusion.
Incidentally, PEnnsylvania 65000 is STILL the phone number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, as it has been for over 90 years! Link -via TYWKIWDBI
…or to gobbledegook, depending on what your phone number is. The website “PhoneSpell” will convert strings of 3-16 numbers to their phone-dial-equivalent letter combinations.
The sequence 632867262, for example, can spell “Neatorama.” But it can also spell “Me-atop-Ana” or “Me-atop-boa” or “Me-bums-Ana” or any of several dozen other equally nonsensical phrases. The search engine can also reverse engineer a number for you after you enter a word or phrase.
Give it a try, and if your home/cell/work phone has a particularly apt alphabetical equivalent, feel free to enter the (non-numerical) result in the Comments section.
Telephone booth? What’s that? Oh, that’s where Superman changes into his costume! I can hear my kids puzzling over this now… but there are phone booths still surviving in the world. Some have quite a story behind them, as you’ll see in this list of ten, like this handy mobile pay phone on a boat in Uganda. Link -Thanks, Dave!
(Image source: The Payphone Project)
That is all. Happy Mother’s Day!
I know what you're thinking: What hold music isn't terrible? When I discovered the voice recorder app on my iPhone, I immediately started recording bad hold music whenever I was forced to wait for a real person to help me. Clearly, I spend a lot of my life on hold, as this short list represents only half the total I recorded over the course of the last year. What follows is the best, er, worst 11 of the lot. I've purposely kept the names of the companies who use these recordings out of the post to protect their anonymity.
After you've listened to them all, tell us in the comments which is your favorite (wait, or would that be least favorite?).
1. My call was "first in line" for, ohhhh, maybe about 20 minutes. That annoying synth string orchestra did me in by minute 2! A power drill is more pleasing to the ear.
Wednesday would have marked the 163rd birthday of Alexander Graham Bell, were he still alive. While his invention of the telephone has always been subject to controversy, there is no denying that the man was quite a genius. To celebrate the life of this great inventor, let’s take this opportunity to get to know Mr. Bell a little better.
At first, he was just Alexander Bell. When he turned ten though, he begged his parents to give him a middle name like they had given to each of his brothers. It wasn’t until his 11th birthday that the famous “Graham” was added to his name. His father chose the name in honor of a family friend, Alexander Graham, who had boarded with the family.
Of course, his family continued to just call him “Aleck” throughout his life. When he was married to his wife (seen with him in the above image) though, she insisted that he begin calling himself “Alec” and from that point on, he started signing his name as “Alec Bell.”
Alexander’s entire family was tied in with the fields of elocution and speech. His father and grandfather (both of whom were also named Alexander Bell) worked in the field before Alec was born, and his brother also started working in the science. Additionally, both his mother and wife were deaf, which gave him even more reason to be dedicated to easing systems of communication.
Even as a kid, Bell was fascinated with sound and he taught himself both ventriloquism and piano without any training.
He finished his first invention, a dehusking device for a flour mill, when he was only 12. When his best friend, Ben Herdman, told him about the laborious process of dehusking at his parent’s flour mill, Bell quickly threw together a machine that combined rotating paddles with nail brushes. The mill used the machine for years to come and the boy’s father was so impressed that he gave the two boys complete access to a workshop in the mill so they could continue to work on inventions.
When Bell entered the Royal High School, he was known for having bad grades and a history of absenteeism. He excelled at science, but remained indifferent to all other courses. Eventually, he dropped out at only 15 and then moved to London, where he lived with his grandfather, who was able to finally get Bell interested in learning.
It paid off too. Before he invented the phone, Bell was a teacher. He used his father’s teaching system to educate deaf students. One of his most famous students was Hellen Keller, who once said that Bell had dedicated his life to breaking through the “inhuman silence which separates and estranges.”
Later in his life, he earned a series of honorary degrees from quite a few colleges, including Harvard, Dartmouth, the University of Edinburg in Scotland, the University of Würzburg in Bavaria and more.
Bell’s first work with what would later result in the invention of the telephone started when he was hired, along with Elisha Gray, to help find a way to send multiple telegraph messages along the same line. A few years later, he approached the director of the Smithsonian Institute, Joseph Henry, for his advice on an apparatus that would enable the human voice to travel via telegraph. Bell said he was worried he didn’t have the right knowledge to do it though and Henry inspired him by merely replying, “get it!”
At the same time that Bell was working on his idea, the other man hired, on the telegraph project Elisha Gray (seen at left) had also been inspired to find a way to transmit speech through the telegraph. He filed a design for an acoustic telegraph that sent vocal transmissions through water the same day that Bell’s lawyer filed a patent for his telephone device.
Aleck hadn’t actually gotten his phone working before he filed his patent. Three days after he was issued the patent, he used a liquid transmitter –just like the one Gray had designed, to get the device to work. He only used the water design as part of an experiment and never used the liquid transmitter in his demonstrations or commercial products, but he is still, to this day, accused of stealing the phone from Gray.
A man that worked at the patent office later swore in an affidavit that he had shown Gray’s patent to Bell’s attorney in an effort to pay off part of the debt he owed him. He also claimed that he showed the patent to Bell a few days later and that he was given $100 in return. While Alexander admitted that he learned some of the technical details from Gray’s patent, he swore that he had never paid the patent office employee, Zenas Fisk Wilber, any money.
After Bell finished his work on the telephone, he offered to sell the patent for the device to Western Union for $100,000. The president of the company refused, claiming that the telephone was nothing more than a toy. Two years later, he changed his mind, saying he would consider it a bargain if he could buy the patent for $25 million. Of course, by that point, the Bell Telephone Company was not interested in selling the patent.
Throughout the years, the Bell company continued to make improvements on the telephone, even buying Edison’s carbon microphone in 1879. Unfortunately, quite a few inventors had started to work on improving the phone by this point and in only 18 years, the company had to fight over 600 lawsuits over legal rights to the patent. Fortunately, the fact that Alec had been working on sound and speech for his entire life gave him the credibility he needed to fight the lawsuits. Even so, the government moved to annul his patent on grounds of fraud and misrepresentation in 1887, but the Supreme Court ruled in the company’s favor and many other suits were dropped as a result.
Through this entire period, the Bell company never lost a case, but the strain put on Alexander from all these court appearances eventually cause him to resign from the company.
While his most famous invention was the phone, Bell continued to invent throughout his life. He worked on optical telecommunications, hydrofoil planes and aeronautics. In 1880, he created the photophone, which he considered to be his most important invention. This creation would allow sound to pass through a beam of light and was the first wireless phone technology ever created.
By the time he died, he had thirty patents. He had one patent for the phonograph, nine for transportation devices and two for selenium cells. He also invented a metal jacket that was supposed to help with breathing problems, a meter to detect hearing problems, a device to locate icebergs and more.
He invented the first metal detectors, which he used in an attempt to uncover the bullet in President Garfield’s body. Although it worked perfectly in lab tests, it could not help doctors find the bullet, but that was partially because the president was laying on a bed with a metal frame and metal springs that disturbed the instrument and the surgeons refused to move him to a new location.
While the telephone was Bell’s best known contribution to society, he considered his real work to be as a scientist and he refused to have a telephone in his study for fear it would intrude on his work.
At one point in his career, Bell and his team had considered the idea of pressing a magnetic field onto a record as a way to reproduce sound. While they couldn’t get their idea to work, this same concept was the basic idea behind tapes, hard discs, floppy discs and other media that were invented almost a century later.
Also impressive was Bell’s environmentally-friendly inventions that were developed long before anyone had ever considered the idea of global warming. He worried about the effects of methane gas on the environment and experimented with composting toilets and devices that would capture water from the atmosphere. In an interview shortly before his death, he even mentioned the idea of using solar panels to heat houses.
Alexander Graham Bell died in August of 1922. Every phone in North America was said to be silenced during his funeral in his honor.
Sources: AlexanderGrahamBell.org, Idea Finder, Biography.com, The Franklin Institute, American Heritage and Answers.com
Russell Neff has an ingenious homemade alarm system that costs him absolutely zero in monthly fees. You too can make one, if you only have a rotary phone …
He removed the receiver of his telephone and dialed all but one digit in his home telephone number. He then dialed the final digit, inserted a cork in the dial hole to keep the mechanism from returning and completing the connection.
Four strings were tied to the cork and strung at ankle level to different parts of the store.
At 2:15 a.m. Neff’s telephone roused him from a sound sleep. He lifted the receiver and heard noises, dressed and drove six blocks to a service station at Lexington and Larpenteur Avs., where he called police.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.
Marcy of The Glamorous Life Association blog took this photo of a clever "Telephone Answering Charges" at the bar/restaurant called Schillings in Atlanta: Link – via Miss Cellania
