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Chaos Lever examines emerging trends and new technology for the enterprise and beyond. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner examine the tech landscape through a skeptical lens based on over 40 combined years in the industry. Are we all doomed? Yes. Will the apocalypse be streamed on TikTok? Probably. Does Joni still love Chachi? Decidedly not.
[01:00:00.000]
Ned: When did we start doing this show? What is time?
[01:00:03.680]
Chris: 1936.
[01:00:05.440]
Ned: That sounds right.
[01:00:07.390]
Sarah: Yeah, okay. So you started at 36. That makes sense because I think I was born in 1898.
[01:00:13.180]
Ned: Well, you got Chris beat by a couple of years. That's the first time.
[01:00:17.490]
Chris: Time is a flat steampunk circle.
[01:00:28.960]
Ned: Hello, Alleged Human, and welcome to the Chaos Lover podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot. I'm a real human person who has progeny that I enjoy being around and definitely don't lock myself in a basement for several hours every day. With me is Chris, who is also here. Hi, Chris.
[01:00:49.020]
Chris: At a certain point, you're going to have to stop with lying to yourself and others. We all know that children lock you in the basement, and we all don't blame them. We all don't blame them.
[01:00:59.360]
Ned: I have a very sad story involving me being seven and being locked in the basement, but this is probably not the time or the place. Save that for the therapist. And besides which, we have a special guest. How about that? Sarah with an H, Autumn, is joining us. Hi, Sarah.
[01:01:18.030]
Sarah: Hey, Ned. Hey, Chris. How are you doing?
[01:01:20.810]
Chris: Good. Well.
[01:01:22.360]
Ned: Are you familiar with the Benfold 5 song, Zack and Sarah, or it might just be Benfolds.
[01:01:29.160]
Sarah: So I'm familiar I'm familiar with Ben Fultz, but I am not familiar with that particular song. Do I need to listen to it now?
[01:01:35.780]
Ned: I mean, we could just pause everything and listen to it.
[01:01:39.460]
Chris: I'm pretty sure it's on one of his solo albums, and it is, in fact, as the kids say, a banger.
[01:01:43.870]
Ned: It is a banger. Nice. It starts with, Sarah, without an H, was getting bored on a PV amp in 1984. I remembered your name has an H, and then I had that song playing in my head for several days.
[01:01:58.650]
Sarah: That's perfect. Also, I I don't play a PV, but if I maybe I need to convert to not an H and buy a PV so I can be cool like that song.
[01:02:07.730]
Ned: I don't want you to be bored.
[01:02:09.410]
Sarah: That's very true.
[01:02:12.780]
Ned: So we're here to talk about Ben Folds for the next hour or so. So I hope everybody has prepared appropriately.
[01:02:19.820]
Chris: This is great. Everyone remembers all the names of the albums, I'm sure. There's the one named after that German.
[01:02:26.060]
Ned: Reinhold Meshner?
[01:02:27.260]
Chris: God bless you. Thank you.
[01:02:29.610]
Ned: No, The topic today is Plane Old Telephone Service, a. K. A. Pots, which is stop, backwards, and also tops, anagramed, as well as spot and ops.
[01:02:42.690]
Chris: Stop me, someone-Let's go with stop.
[01:02:44.950]
Ned: Yeah. Okay, good. It was in there. It was right in front of me. The inspiration for this episode was actually a previous episode we did talking about technology symbols and phrases that have lost their original meaning, or at least the source no longer matters. The good old telephone actually featured heavily, from phrases like ringing someone up to hanging up to dialing a number, and of course, the phone icon on my handset, which My daughter absolutely does not understand. A phone to her is a rectangular slab that she can play games on and listen to music, and maybe, possibly make a call, but no, probably not. But there is a rich history of telephone and telephone service that I am completely unqualified to tell, so we brought on an expert. Sarah, welcome again. Who are you? What do you do?
[01:03:38.960]
Sarah: Gosh, so my name is Sarah Autumn. I have a real job, quote, unquote. But the thing I spend the most time doing is I'm a volunteer at the Connections Museum in Seattle, and I am essentially the chief engineer of all of our big telephone switching systems. I've been doing that for about 10 years now. Wow.
[01:04:06.040]
Chris: Is it just a general purpose telephony museum? Is there a specific thing that you try to do, or is it just Anything you can get your hands on, you will put into the museum, make operable, and possibly connect to Linux.
[01:04:20.970]
Sarah: Okay, so yes. If you know and love any hoarders or pack rats in your life, there's definitely a strong current of in the museum, and there's a lot of overlap between telephony and other associated weird hobbies. But our museum has surprisingly few telephones, fewer than you'd think for a museum that is a telephone museum. We mostly specialize in what's behind the curtain, so to speak, what would be in those big telephone central offices and things like that, though we have a little bit of everything.
[01:05:03.800]
Ned: The phone systems have long been a bit of a mystery to me. One of my early jobs, I ended up punching down lines for the internal phone system at the office I was working in, and a much older gentleman explained to me what the wires did and what they were for, and then gave me access to the PBX, where I typed in very cryptic commands into a green screen that did things. It never really lost that element of magic.
[01:05:35.630]
Chris: Magic, mystery, terrifying, connection of things that shouldn't work together but somehow do.
[01:05:44.400]
Sarah: Tin can, that's There's always been a huge element of mystery behind the phones, mostly because Ma Bell really kept the curtain mostly closed. They would say something about blah, blah, blah. There's many operators here connected to your calls or many men working on these machines. But for the most part, the general public never really understood it. There was never a window into that procedure or that system that's going on behind the curtain.
[01:06:24.100]
Ned: I found it much more closed off than some of the other technologies I was working on at the time, like servers and operating systems and things like that. Those seemed to have solid guides that were helpful and just a better UI in general. Everything in the phone system seemed very esoteric and designed by someone who actively hated normal people.
[01:06:47.210]
Sarah: Oh, my goodness. Yes. Sometimes I feel like when I'm working with certain systems, I feel like they're trying to hurt me. We can get into it, but a lot of that weird esoteric language and these insane design choices, you can trace that all the way back to a decision that someone made 50 or 100 years ago or to some language that was really common in the phone system 50 or 100 years ago that just means nothing to us today. It's legacy compatibility all the way down.
[01:07:30.290]
Ned: Interesting. So going back to that, those early days of the telephone service, when people were first starting to get it in their houses, can you describe what was involved when I picked up the phone to call someone back in, I don't know, like 1910 or something? What was happening from when I picked up the phone or the receiver to call somebody through connecting that call to somebody else?
[01:07:55.320]
Sarah: So in the first days of the telephone, you likely had what's called magneto There would be on your wall, you had a big wooden telephone that looked like a miniature coffin, almost. You had the mouthpiece projecting out in front of you at eye level or slightly below. Then you had a handset that you'd pick up and put to your ear. When you did that, you actually had to turn a crank on the side of your phone. That crank is what actually signaled the operator that you were requesting service. Then the operator, when she saw that signal, she would plug in a cord and ask, Number, please. Then you would tell her the number, or hopefully the number of the person you wanted to speak to. Sometimes you just tell her the name. Then the operator, perhaps in tandem with other operators, depending on who you were calling, would plug in a series of cords and then establish a connection to the other party. They would ring their phone for you, so the operator would actually ring the telephone. Then when the other party picked up, the operators would remove themselves from the call, and then you and the other person could talk.
[01:09:14.760]
Ned: Did they always remove themselves from the call?
[01:09:17.020]
Sarah: They did not. In big cities, yes, mostly because they were too busy and they were too closely supervised to I don't get into anything like that. But it was pretty common for operators in smaller towns who didn't have much to do. It was pretty common for them to get in on all the latest gossip.
[01:09:44.020]
Chris: When the systems first started, do you know, from a historical perspective, was this the expectation that everyone was going to have a phone at some point, or was it always when it was originally created, was it supposed to be just for a very narrow scope of people?
[01:10:00.820]
Sarah: Alexander Graham Bell, who was arguably one of the inventors of the telephone, he said later on that he imagined one in every home. But just like most new things, like most emerging technologies, that was absolutely not the case at first. We have VR technologies that exist, but certainly not everybody has a vision pro or whatever. It took quite a while before there was actual democratization of this service. The first people to get telephone service were doctors, lawyers, businesses like butchers or cobblers, stuff like that. This was primarily so that they could call each other. But your mom and your dad and your brother didn't have phones for quite a while. I even had a very good friend of mine who grew up in the farming community south of Seattle in the 1920s, and his family didn't have a phone or electricity until at least the '30s, if not later. So it took a long time.
[01:11:21.500]
Chris: Right. And that's an interesting point, too, Ned alluded to earlier. When this started rolling out, how did they decide what the numbers How did you reach somebody? I think everybody knows the most famous old-timey phone number on Earth is also from a Ben Fold song. It's Pennsylvania 65000. What's that about?
[01:11:41.420]
Sarah: Okay, so there's two questions here, and we can unpack both of them. The first one is, where did phone numbers even come from? The second question is, what is Pennsylvania 6, 5,000? Because, yeah, that was a real number. Up until a few years ago, I think it still It worked. The first half is, okay, where did phone numbers come from anyway? At the very beginning, we really didn't use phone numbers at all because if you only had 20 to 50 subscribers in your entire town, there's no need to use numbers because you'd call the operator and say, Get me a doctor, and the operator would connect you to the Jack for the doctor. But as As the number of subscribers started to grow and as phone service spread out into larger suburbs and even larger cities like New York and Chicago and stuff, the number of subscribers began to be such that if you called the operator and ask for the doctor, the operator would say, Which one? It became understood that we now had to start just numbering our subscribers and assigning numbers to everybody. The operator had a bunch of jacks in her switchboard in front of her, and each of those jacks had a number next to it.
[01:13:07.660]
Sarah: If you picked up the phone and asked for number 92, the operator would just plug your cord into 92, and that made everything much, much easier.
[01:13:19.620]
Ned: That implies that they would have to start distributing phonebooks, though, because you wouldn't have memorized everybody's number and who it mapped to.
[01:13:27.830]
Sarah: Yes, but surprisingly, they started distributing phonebooks right away. They just didn't have numbers in them.
[01:13:35.130]
Ned: You know who has service or who's a subscriber.
[01:13:39.060]
Sarah: Exactly. In some towns, Seattle was one of them, you had two competing telephone companies. Each telephone company would hand out a book of their subscribers.
[01:13:52.820]
Ned: Could you not call someone who is using the other service?
[01:13:56.800]
Sarah: Exactly. So sometimes if If you were a business and you wanted to maximize the number of people who could solicit services from you, you had to have two telephones, one from each of the telephone companies.
[01:14:12.520]
Ned: Oh, wow. That's wild. That's like if I was on Verizon and you're on T-Mobile and I'm not able to call you because we're on two different phones.
[01:14:20.380]
Chris: Exactly. Well, that's probably still true because the other person has T-Mobile.
[01:14:28.120]
Ned: That's all right. They're not a sponsor. It's I think.
[01:14:32.080]
Chris: This is the part where things get complicated, right? Because things start to have to scale. You go from... We talked about this with the history of the Internet episode where there used to be a list that you could just download all of the websites, and then very quickly it became impossible to do that. You had to get some type of a formalized system to figure out what they were, and you had to be able to have millions of people online. The system for the telephone, it sounds like it went through that same, it's called a growth?
[01:15:06.280]
Sarah: Yeah, incredibly much. The same type of scaling we found on the internet in the early days, That was absolutely present in the telephone system from the late 1800s to the middle of the 20th century. When Bell invented the phone, he didn't ever think about how to connect more than two of them. That was not interesting to him. He invented the phone and then went to fly kites. It was left to the telephone companies to figure out, Okay, if we're going to make use of this invention, how are we going to connect five telephones together, 50 telephones, 500, and so on? The naive thing The next thing to do is say, Okay, just run a wire between everyone's house and everyone else's house. But the more you think about it, you realize it doesn't scale well at all. That's why they came up with the idea of central offices or telephone exchanges where all the wires would go there, and then someone working in the exchange would be responsible for plugging in the different cords. But then there's another layer of scaling when you get to a city like New York, where you have hundreds of telephone exchanges in just one city.
[01:16:38.360]
Sarah: How do you connect all of those exchanges together in a way where someone in lower Manhattan can call someone in Queens or someone in Newark? It just becomes a mind boggling problem. Besides the just purely technical aspects of that, One of the problems was, how do we assign numbers to everybody? This gets out to the question that Chris was asking earlier about the Pennsylvania 6, 5,000. What does that even mean? In the earliest days of phone numbers, you just had a number. Your phone number, Ned, might be two. Chris, your phone number might be 12, and my phone number might be 1 because I'm so cool. But if you have more than one exchange in a city, you have exchange A with all of their phone subscribers, in exchange B with all of their phone subscribers, how does someone call from A to B? Well, if I'm in exchange A and I wish to call exchange B, I have to say, I would like the number 5 in exchange B, and that operator would have to make a connection over something called a trunk line to exchange B. Well, the telephone company eventually got creative with this, and the exchanges started getting names.
[01:18:14.220]
Sarah: The names were often locally important landmarks or local names of streets that the exchange was on. In New York, you got exchange exchange names like Pennsylvania, Cordland, Exeter, Waverly, Juniper, whatever. Then if I wanted to call somewhere across town, I would say, I want Waverly 62841, and that exchange name became the identifier.
[01:18:51.720]
Ned: We're still in the period where this is all being done by humans. You'd pick up the phone and you would say who you want to connect to. It's not like you were trying to dial this in through a rotary or something like that, right?
[01:19:03.800]
Sarah: Right, exactly. There were exchange names that were still connected. This was back in the human operator days.
[01:19:14.730]
Ned: That didn't work once we wanted to move to dialing, though. It wasn't even dialing first. It was the rotary phones, right?
[01:19:22.440]
Sarah: Well, this goes back to the whole words thing. The word dialing particularly refers to the rotary phone with the thing that you spin with your index finger.
[01:19:36.170]
Ned: We'll provide a graphic for everybody who was born after 1992.
[01:19:41.550]
Sarah: Yes, exactly. Because they had no idea. Right. This was a problem. There were two competing systems that were introducing dials at different times. There were a bunch of false starts and a bunch of things that worked, but not really. If you ask me, if you want me to, I can go into them all in detail. But for the sake of our story right now, the dial that became the standard telephone dial was introduced by AT&T in roughly 1916-ish time frame. The big advantage to their dial, the big invention The other thing that changed the game, was that they put letters in the holes of their dials next to the numbers. If you look at a picture of an old telephone, you'll see each hole in the dial has a number starting at 1, going all the way up through 9, and ending at 0. Then the holes 2 through 9 each have a few letters in them. What those letters allowed people to do was dial the exchange a strange name. Like Pennsylvania 6, 5,000, they would stick their finger in the hole that had the letter P in it and dial that. Then the letter E hole for Pennsylvania 6.
[01:21:18.980]
Sarah: At&t was so proud of that because now people don't have to remember these long seven-digit numbers. They can just remember a name and then some numbers.
[01:21:29.280]
Ned: Right. And that followed us up to the modern day where phone numbers still sometimes have words in them that translate to numbers, especially if you're trying to get a catchy one for your business. If you're an insurance company, it could be like, I fell, or something.
[01:21:45.150]
Chris: The 1-800 mattress?
[01:21:47.590]
Ned: Yeah, exactly.
[01:21:49.120]
Sarah: That was the one I was thinking of. Yeah, the 1-800 mattress is burned into my brain from TV as a kid.
[01:21:56.170]
Chris: You leave off the last S for savings.
[01:21:58.440]
Sarah: Oh, my God.
[01:22:00.520]
Ned: Thank you for that. Okay, so I remember when I was a kid, there was an older restaurant in the center of town, and its sign still had, I guess, the original exchange name on there? Because it was a few letters, Dash, and then the four-digit number for them because I guess the sign was just that old. At what point did we start abandoning having letters in the exchange?
[01:22:30.060]
Sarah: It wasn't an overnight change, and it took place at different times in different parts of the country. But certainly in the big East Coast cities, around the mid In the 1960s, the phone company was very, very much pushing to abandon exchange names because they were running out of them. With With the numbers that are present in the dial of your telephone, you can only make so many unique names. Because to the telephone switching equipment, it doesn't see the name, it just sees a number. If I dial the Parkway Exchange, that's PA, and that's 7-2. That's what it actually translates to as far as the exchange equipment. Well, Parkway, Parkview, Parkland, and Randolph all use the same number, 7-2. So I can only ultimately use one of those names. On the other hand, there are certain numbers that it becomes very difficult to find a name that makes sense, like 9-8. Because 9 is W, X, Y, I think. I don't remember without looking at the dial. But it's very hard. It's hard to find names that begin with those letters, so it removes a whole bunch of possible exchange numbers that I could possibly have.
[01:24:13.660]
Ned: Okay. I remember it was probably when I was a teenager, we started having to dial 10 digits instead of just seven.
[01:24:24.870]
Chris: All the time.
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Ned: All the time. Before that, it would make an assumption you were in a particular the area code, and you only had to include the area code when you were dialing out. When did area codes become a thing?
[01:24:39.180]
Sarah: So the very first area codes were used by customers in Anglewood, New Jersey, in 1951. Although operators had been doing it for much longer than that. But the first customer dialed area codes, specifically in the town of Anglewood, and That was because AT&T installed a special long distance switching machine in Anglewood that allowed those customers to dial their long distance calls directly.
[01:25:14.610]
Ned: Prior to that, if you wanted to call long distance, you would just dial the operator and say, I want a place to call long distance?
[01:25:21.600]
Sarah: Absolutely. Even after that, for everywhere but Anglewood, you still had to do that. But by about 1958, direct long distance dialing had been introduced for just about everyone in the continental US. That's when really 99% of people didn't have to go through operators anymore.
[01:25:44.750]
Ned: Okay. So if I'm thinking about the structure of the phone system, and correct me where I get this wrong, but I've got the individual phones at everybody's houses that are connected via a line directly to a central office. And then those central offices are connected to each other locally via trunk lines.
[01:26:06.440]
Sarah: Exactly right. Yep.
[01:26:07.930]
Ned: And then is there one big, giant central office that connects to the next big one in a different area code, or is it a little more loozy-goozy than that?
[01:26:18.940]
Sarah: No, you're right. They're, think of it like a little pyramid, where all of the little tiny local central offices are at the bottom. And then as you get up the layers of the food pyramid or the telephone pyramid, the central offices get bigger and bigger and bigger. Your call is going to start at your little tiny town office, and then it's going to progress up the network as high as it needs to go to get across the country to your destination. It won't necessarily go to the top of the pyramid. It'll only do that if there's no other path. But But it climbs the pyramid as high as it needs to, makes its way to the destination city, and then climbs back down on the other side.
[01:27:10.280]
Ned: Now, talking about those central offices, the reason that I reached out to have you on the show is because I watched a ton of your YouTube videos where you walked through these different machines that were in the central offices over time. Can you describe the evolution of those systems from the early the earliest mechanical ones up to something a little more modern?
[01:27:34.880]
Sarah: Yeah, so there are a lot, but I will try to keep it... I'll try to keep it entertaining here. So the very first successful No, wait, we got to go back. I have to talk about the steel ball model train phones. There were a lot of false starts, okay?
[01:27:54.100]
Ned: Oh, yeah. Okay.
[01:27:55.430]
Sarah: There were so many. There was one system that I don't know if it was ever built, but it used these steel balls and different rails with opening and closing interchanges. Then when the customer would dial, the ball would be diverted to a different set of rails, and it would just go down this whole little model train roller coaster thing until the ball ended up at the call party. Then an elevator would bring it back to the top. Ned, there were so many insane phone systems. If that sounds unhinged to you, it completely Yeah, he is. A little bit. Awesome. But sorry, the first successful electromechanical telephone system was invented by this undertaker in Kansas called Alma Strauger. There's a bunch of old wives tales about why he did this, and we have not been able to independently verify that any of them are true. But in any case, he took some metal pins, like little tiny nails, a round hat box, and he figured out this way where if he could use a ratchet mechanism to rotate these pins around, you could make different connections to different people by rotating this cylinder thing around with pins projecting out from it.
[01:29:22.190]
Sarah: This was a half baked idea, but he sold the idea to this company called the Automatic Electric Company, and they developed it into a workable system, which is now known as the Strouger or step-by-step system. It involves these wipes moving across rows of contacts as the customer physically dials their telephone. Basically, your dial is responsible for physically moving these wipes up and around these contacts. You could YouTube and you could see videos of these things in motion. They're quite loud and very fun to watch.
[01:30:03.140]
Ned: Yeah. And they're 100% mechanical. There was no computer really involved in this because computers didn't exist yet.
[01:30:11.220]
Sarah: Absolutely. 100% mechanical and 100% controlled by your dial. There was no brain working behind the scenes. My favorite system was called the Panel Switch, and it was introduced by AT&T in New York and Omaha, Nebraska, in the early '20s. This one was the first one to have a brain, where when you pick up your phone, you're assigned to your very own CPU. Of course, It wasn't called that in the '20s, but you get it assigned to your very own CPU, and you dial into this thing, and it remembers what you dial. Then it looks up the number you dialed in a big mechanical database. Then this CPU then drives these rods up and down over these great big frames to build a connection for your call. Then once it's built the connection, the CPU thing drops off and then goes to handle the next caller. That's the machine that I enjoy working on the most in the Connections Museum, and it's the only one of its kind left in the entire world. It's very much a proto-computer.
[01:31:28.980]
Chris: What were we looking What are you looking at in terms of machine reliability? It sounds like there's a lot of moving parts and really precise small motions to go from one channel to another.
[01:31:41.120]
Sarah: Absolutely. You got it. It's an insane amount of tiny, precise mechanical motion. But one of the things that was really important to the phone company, probably because money was involved, was reliability. Even in these old, cantankerous, massive, incredibly intricate machines, everything was provided in multiple. There was never a single point of failure. That means that you could lose an entire bay of equipment. Sure, you might have a little bit less redundancy for a little while, but calls will still go through. Customers will still pick up their phone and get dial tone. This was a very, very... How do I say this? This was a thing of pride for AT&T was their reliability. It was really amazingly fantastic, especially given the complexity and intric of these mechanical devices.
[01:32:53.070]
Ned: Wow. If folks haven't watched the YouTube videos, it's fascinating to watch how these things actually connected a call. We're running a little short on time, but there is one other big area that I wanted to ask you about, and that is the weird sounds that phone systems make. I don't know if you're familiar with the story of the Cisco phone system hold music?
[01:33:16.080]
Sarah: Oh, my God, it's burned into my brain.
[01:33:18.400]
Ned: Yeah. I definitely spent two hours on hold with, I forget which support company it was when I was working in tech. And so I was just listening to that over and over and over. I think it's called Opus or something. If people aren't familiar with that, go check out the This American Life episode about it. It's fascinating. But there's a bunch of other sounds that phones make that aren't that, which is the ringing sound, the busy sound, all kinds of... Where do those Where did the sounds come from?
[01:33:48.070]
Sarah: Back in the days of operators, way early on, you didn't really need to have that many sounds because the operator would tell you what was going on. She would say, The number is busy now, or, I'm ringing for But as machines started to enter the picture, and even in the later days of operators, there needed to be some way to communicate to the customer what was going on with their phone call. They put these machines in the central offices, and those machines were responsible for generating the current to ring the bells in the actual and then also transmit back a ringtone to the calling party, so they knew, and then, of course, dial tone, busy, and everything else. These machines were super, super cool. It almost looks like a lathe is the best way I can describe it. This big spinning thing with a motor on one end and a long shaft and all along this shaft are different bits that are all spinning at different angles and different different speeds. We have a YouTube video about them. We have several. Actually, you should check it out. But these old ringing machines, as they were called, produced very distinctive and unique sounds.
[01:35:15.000]
Sarah: And they all sounded a bit different just because of the different speeds and different outfits on all of them, I guess. It was much more interesting than the sounds we have now, which no matter where you call in the US, it all sounds the same, right?
[01:35:33.160]
Ned: Right. So your phone system actually had character. If I was calling somebody and I then went to a different city and called somebody, I might hear slightly different sounds or at least tones of those sounds based off of the ringing machine that I was connected to?
[01:35:49.230]
Sarah: Oh, 100%, because every little private branch exchange or PBX or company that you called, or if you went down to Georgia, the phone system would sound way different than if you were in New York City or Nebraska or San Francisco or whatever.
[01:36:06.480]
Ned: I have to wonder what ringing systems they had over in Europe because their ringing sound is so wildly different than the US ringing sound. I don't know if that was always true or if that was something that happens after these ringing machines were retired.
[01:36:24.720]
Sarah: I've been to Germany, I've been to the UK, and I've their old ringing machines. I know they have the... In a lot of places, they have the double ring, right? It's like...
[01:36:38.720]
Ned: Yeah.
[01:36:39.560]
Sarah: Okay, that's like the traditional UK ring. They also had spinning machines, but their spinning machines generated the sound a little bit differently than our spinning machines did here in the good old US of A.
[01:36:57.910]
Ned: So the design choices of the spinning machines that were made back in the, I don't know what, 1930s?
[01:37:05.870]
Sarah: Yeah, and earlier.
[01:37:07.590]
Ned: And earlier? That is with us all the way to today because we mock up those ringing sounds when you call somebody.
[01:37:15.620]
Sarah: Right. And I think to me, the first time I even saw one of those machines, it blew my mind. Because from a modern perspective where we just have computers that can generate any tone you want anytime with ease, you look at one of these enormous lathe-like spinning machines, and my first thought is, Why does this have to exist? It's beautiful, but surely there's a better and easier way to do this. But it turns out that in 1920, when this particular machine I'm talking about came around, there really wasn't a Because before computers, before really even vacuum tubes, we were just at the very, very beginning of vacuum tubes. How are you going to generate a wiggly wave? Well, I guess spin something really fast and see what happens. To your point, those sounds or evolutions of those sounds exist all the way through the history of the telephone network and all the way today. The sounds did change over time, but the cadences are still the same. The busy sound you hear, it's still the same, the rate of interruption, whatever.
[01:38:46.320]
Ned: All right, last question. What is your favorite story or fact from the museum?
[01:38:55.610]
Sarah: Oh, my God. All right, hang on. I'm going to have to think about that for just a second. You can I'll cut this part out. Because there are just so many. It's like you're given the ocean and told, Hey, so pick a fish.
[01:39:18.500]
Ned: We won't hold you to this. If you change your mind later, that's okay.
[01:39:23.080]
Sarah: Okay. I would have to make this quick. I went all the way from Seattle to Connecticut to get these incredibly rare items for one of our switching systems. Last ones in the world, couldn't believe they existed. When I brought them back to Seattle, it was incumbent upon me to rebuild them and reintegrate them into our switching system. But unfortunately, the original telephone company had just taken a hacksaw to these things and ripped out all sorts of parts left and right. While I had the equipment, I still had to do a bunch of TLC to replace these original parts. Anyway, I go to our storage unit and I find one of these spare parts. We have one left. I'm so lucky because this is 100% necessary to get this beautiful piece of equipment working. I put it in, wire it all up, start the thing up, and it blows a fuse. Oh, my God. Okay. I take the part out, get the thing working again. Fuse is fine. I put this little box thing back in that I got. Blows a fuse. I spent, I'm not kidding you, two months troubleshooting this stupid thing to the point of ripping out hundreds of wires and rerunning hundreds of individual wires, trying to figure out why this thing, this specific thing, was blowing a fuse.
[01:40:51.180]
Sarah: Finally, I went to talk to one of the old guys, my friend Les, who's sadly no longer with us, and I miss him dearly. But he said, What's wrong? I told him this long, long, long story, exhaustive troubleshooting that I had done. Les just looks at the floor and thinks for a minute and he goes, Well, did you use the extra washer? I look at him like, What do you mean the extra washer? He's like, Yeah, well, when you put in those 280 type relays, you always got to use an extra washer. I said, Les, I used the mounting hardware that came in the box, the screw and the washer. He's like, No, throw that away. Let me get you an extra washer. He goes and finds me this extra washer from his junk drawer, and I put the thing back together, and it works beautifully. My 98-year-old friend who's been doing this for 40 years or 50 years, it took him to tell me that I needed to use an extra washer that had not come in the original packaging with this part.
[01:42:07.000]
Chris: Not all of the wisdom makes it into the manual.
[01:42:09.990]
Ned: Wow. Just an extra washer. That's what did it. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for being a guest today. This was fantastic. I think we could pepper you with questions for the next six hours, but I think you're somewhere nice, and you probably want to get back to that. So I think we'll just leave it there.
[01:42:27.680]
Sarah: That sounds great. We're going to go see a volcano I know.
[01:42:30.980]
Ned: All right. Don't throw Joe in. He's all right. He's a good guy. And yeah, thank you once again for being on the show. We'll include links to the YouTube channel and the museum. Is there anything else you'd like to mention to listeners for them to check out?
[01:42:48.490]
Sarah: No, that's it. Thanks, Ned. Thanks, Chris. It's been a pleasure.
[01:42:51.740]
Ned: Hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go sit on the couch, pull out an old rotary phone, and try to dial Pennsylvania 65000. You've earned it. Big thanks again to Sarah Autumn for joining us on Chaos Lever. If you have a suggestion for a guest, we are totally up for it. You can go to our LinkedIn page or go to chaoslever. Com and leave a message. And you can also find show notes, blog posts, and general Tom Fuhlry there. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us.
[01:43:25.600]
Sarah: Ta-ta for now.
[01:43:36.830]
Chris: Ahoy, hoy.