Changes In Telephones

You can relax. Today I am not going to rant again about the evils of cell phones. Instead, I want to make some comments about pre cell phone days....you know...the civilized times in the history of humanity. Haha  It's because I was thinking the other day about how far the telephone technology has come in my own relatively short lifetime. Perhaps the automobile is the single greatest technological invention of man, and the computer the greatest of the late 20th century, but the telephone changes the way humans live and behave constantly every day. It's one of those always evolving (though in my view, devolving) technologies that is now the dominant device in the world.

It's my belief that today's cell phone technology has made the telephone an indispensable technology of the day. People used to love their cars. Now they love their phones, to the point of almost being emotionally tied to them. It wasn't that way when I was a boy. Telephones then were all land line rotary dial, heavy, black (to paraphrase Henry Ford's comment about the selection of car colors... you could get any color phone you wanted then as long as it was black) objects mostly located in a the home living room and largely ignored both day or night. People used a telephone then when they needed to, and charges for use were based on the number of calls. The phone had yet to become the socialization outlet it is today.

I even remember party lines. The person wanting to have a phone installed (people could not buy telephones at stores, they were always rented or sold by the phone companies) in his or her house had the option of having private line or the much less expensive party line. The party line could be interesting for kids like myself and my brother because we could listen in to other phone calls made on the same connection as our home line. When listening in I sometimes made a sound or short comment and then hung up in order to drive the calling parties crazy. We had a party line briefly when I was small boy, but as costs came down and technology improved  the party line concept quickly disappeared.

A big change in phones then  came when the cost of use suddenly dropped. Once the phone companies started charging a monthly bill rate, with unlimited calls allowed, the use of the phone became associated more with entertainment than necessity. Yep! That's when teenagers first started talking and talking and talking to each other by phone.  I remember a fad in our neighborhood at that time in which both my brother and I engaged. It was the fake/crank radio contest call. In those days when am radio was hugely popular,
 stations would give away prizes to listeners if they answered rather simple questions posed by the station DJ when he called listeners at random. Well, my brother and I sometimes deepened our voices and used to pretend to be DJ's, giving away prizes for correct answers. " For a new Whirlpool refrigerator, can you tell me who is buried in Grant's tomb?" We would ask that or some other idiotic question. Some we called truly thought we were calling from a radio station and may still be waiting for their prizes...  I gave away a lot of refrigerators until my mom found out and stopped contests by terminating my refrigerator business.

Prank calls were not the main use of the phone in those days. It was used more for appointments than anything else. The homeowner made doctors appointments, arranged appointments for service repairs on something in the house, contacted a preacher or school teacher etc.  Conversations tended to be brief and to the point. It was considered rude to talk too much while making a telephone call.  There was no such thing as the 911 call in those days, answering machines were not yet invented,  long distance calls outside the country was so expensive that option was rarely used, and many people in the neighborhood could not afford a telephone. They used the neighbor's instead. Uh..yelling out the window to summon a neighbor was the preferred method of communication. I still think that yelling out the window is more polite than today's loud chattering on cell phones.

I think that while the old rotary phone system was in use we still lived in the "good old days" of better manners and behavior, if much less reliable technology. The invention of the touch tone dial seemed to correlate with the beginning of the age of modernity. I notice that with every new technology humans drift a little farther from each other, seem to care less about each other. Anyway, it seemed a miracle that a person could push a button to make a call.  In the early 1960's, telephones were so much used that big phone company, Bell Telephone, could no longer continue to use the alpha-numeric codes for telephone  exchanges (I remember using numbers like Normandy 7610 or VE 7894). The telephone numbers switched to longer and to all numeric numbers. At the same time, transatlantic cables were being laid to accommodate the increased demand for intercontinental telephone communication. Long distance calls became normal and much cheaper when the Tel Star satellite was sent into space to replace the old cable wires that were laid underground.

But today I read that few people except me are using land line phones anymore. The old phone booth on the corner is gone, as cell phones have or are killing all other options for telephone use. In fact, cell phones can't be avoided anymore. They intrude on everyone's life by making a constant presence, even for dinosaurs like me who somehow think that life was both simpler and better when phones were a cruder technology and not a lifestyle. Make my  gravestone epitaph read- "He Never Owned A Cell Phone"