I had just turned 9 years old when I made my way to the front of my 4th-grade class, nervous with anticipation, and approached an intimidating machine on a display table before two dozen classmates. Another student — I don’t remember which one — stood at a companion instrument a yard away.
I reached out and lifted a heavy, black, barbell-shaped chunk of plastic and held it to the side of my face. It was just like the telephone handset on our wall phone in the kitchen at home, except this type sat on the tabletop. The base of the unit had a round plastic disk with numbered holes around the outside edge. Our telephone at home had no such disk.
A short gray electrical cord connected the handset to the stationary portion of the instrument.
As the earpiece reach my left ear, an ominous, insistent buzzing sound presented itself.
With my right-hand forefinger, I awkwardly began to manipulate the disk on the face of the unit that remained atop the table. Five times I used the half-inch diameter holes to push the wheel-like object around the perimeter of the circle it prescribed, then removed my finger and let some internal spring pull it back to the starting place.
The set of 5 single-digit numbers began with “2.” I suppose the digits had been printed on a piece of paper lying on the table next to the instrument, but I do not recall that feature.
As I moved the disk for the first number — the “2” — the buzzing sound stopped. As each successive rotation was accomplished, there were tiny electrical clicks audible from the earpiece I held.
After the 5 had been entered, a second of silence elapsed, and then suddenly a jarring bell sounded from an identical black telephone instrument before the student on the other table. He grabbed the matching handpiece from that machine, held it to his ear and mouth, and, as instructed, uttered the single word, “Hello?”
A call is born
It was, I believe, 1963. Dial telephone service had just come to Anthony, Kansas. It was a great and scary honor for members of the 4th-grade class at Washington Grade School to be trained in its use.
The telephone Central Office in Anthony — although it was decades before I understood the significance of the exchange prefix system — had been named “Viking.” On the rotary telephone dial, ”V” was associated with the numeral 8, and “I” with 4. The prefix assigned by the telephone company was “842,” thus “Viking-2.”
In the infancy of dial service, self-dialed calls were limited to the local exchange and could therefore be accomplished by excluding the first two digits of the prefix. This made for 5-digit dialing within the exchange.
It was disconcerting and quite intimidating to hear a mechanical dial tone rather than a scratchy, abstract human female voice asking, “Number, please?” when lifting the handset. It was one of the first incidents in my young life which illustrated the necessity of taking personal responsibility. If I did not dial the number, there was no one to help.
All of us in class wrote down our assigned home telephone numbers and feverishly committed them to memory. As children will, we also readily memorized the numbers of close friends.
We amazed our parents that we could remember such things without looking them up in the thin telephone book provided to each house.
It’s a party (line)!
Notwithstanding the advance in technology, my family”s rural home, a mile from town, was on a party line. Apparently the economics of the monthly telephone bill did not justify the equipment required for a dedicated single line — an actual, physical line consisting of a pair of thin, insulated wires suspended from poles — to each farmhouse.
The standard build-out was that each party line served a maximum of 8 houses.
We each had our own number, but we shared a common line. Each telephone number had a distinctive ring associated, such as “single long,” or “long-short”, or “long-short-short,” so that everyone could distinguish the incoming call directed to their own residence.
This meant no conversation was private, in that any house could answer any call on the party line. Out of respect, almost no one eavesdropped.
A footnote from phone company lore: Telephone installers had incentives to persuade customers to subscribe to more expensive dedicated lines. Some creative technicians did so by identifying gossipy neighbors who had a reputation for eavesdropping, and then moving that perpetrator’s line assignment around among various party lines.
It didn’t take long for other customers to acknowledge the social annoyance and step up to the private line.
If there was already a call in progress, a resident intending to make a new call would lift the handset, only to join an existing conversation. Most would then, embarrassed, immediately hang up. But not always.
Like the gossiper, you could bring yourself up to speed on juicy local information by listening unobtrusively.
Party line success
In this way, a young Frank Hamer in rural Texas launched his law enforcement career in about 1905. During a thunderstorm, he overheard the Sheriff ordering a deputy to apprehend a criminal. Hamer, realizing the weather would delay the deputy’s response, and also persuaded by the sizable reward offered for the arrest, took it upon himself to respond.
Without telling either the Sheriff or the deputy, young Frank took up his shotgun, traveled to the house in question and apprehended the criminal. He took the miscreant to town, handed him over and collected the reward.
On the strength of this auspicious start, Hamer joined the Texas Rangers, made a long career in law enforcement, and eventually gained national fame in 1934 as the officer who took down Bonnie and Clyde.
I wish I could remember where I read that. Probably in American Rifleman or some other gun magazine.
As with most inventions of the American industrial revolution of the 19th century, the telephone changed the world. Western Union refused to purchase a patent from a young Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 because Bell’s new-fangled telephone was a mere toy: It was limited to a single voice conversation without printing a record. The contemporary printing telegraph was much preferred. The physical record it produced was admissible as evidence for legal disputes as well as stock transactions.
We are headed we know not where
Today’s rise of technology in the 21st century is a tidal wave of change. Between the internet, satellite communication, super computing and artificial intelligence, we have no idea where this will end. Neither do the scammers.
In about 1990 there was a comedy with Alec Baldwin; I don’t the recall which movie it was. While not the main point of the show, there was a scene where Baldwin’s character is driving his BMW in a major city. His teenage son sits in the front seat with him. As the car rounds a corner, we see that both dad and son are speaking on cell phones (those heavy bricks of the day, 9” tall, with stubby antennas). They are both on calls, in separate conversations, while driving across town.
It is of course an outrageous, laugh-out-loud scene, highlighting in a comical way the decadent wealth of a BMW-owning family that has not one but two cell phones, one of which is under the control of a teenager.
That was 35 years ago, and we have come a ways since then.
We can object to the march of technology, but, in the haunting words of Captain Picard’s Borg enemies, “Resistance is futile.”
Embrace the future
In 1992 I upgraded our home desktop computer to a 386 processor. When the Pentium came out a year later I made a clear, thoughtful decision: Our family will permanently remain on the Intel 386 processor platform. All we needed was Windows 3.1, new that year, to support Excel, Word and email. The 386 performed well in all those areas.
That was a quite rational position. I abandoned it barely a year later.
Today, I can’t even water my lawn without a wireless wi-fi router in the loop. (Well… I could, but it would take all day, dragging hoses and sprinkler heads, and I suspect it would use more water.)
Our motivation to embrace change comes down to a limited set of elements:
Will it make money?
Will it save me money?
Will it enhance my prestige?
Will it save time for other things?
Will it help me preserve my health?
Does it promote a moral cause I believe in?
Will it accomplish goals that are important to me?
Embrace the progress.
You don’t like technology? Get over it. And get with the program.
When the early Christian apostles carried their message, they traveled on roads built by the Roman government and in ships built by commercial trade. When we conduct our business today, we do so using technology that we did not create to accomplish tasks that our forbears would not have understood.
The next act
The next 20 years will, I expect, look vastly different than the previous 20. If you plan to keep up with it, you might want to take steps to keep up with it.
Health, wealth and legacy are everyone’s driving forces. Whether you are 25, 55 or 75, those priorities are relevant and perhaps cruel.
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