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How I Learned About Telephones PDF Print E-mail

Telephones

     In the 1950’s and 1960’s telephones were not as taken for granted as they are today.  They were installed by, maintained by, and owned by THE TELEPHONE COMPANY.   People did not work on their own wiring, install extra phones, or make any connections to the wiring.  It was not allowed, and was, in fact, illegal to do so.  If you needed an extra phone in the house, you ordered it from the phone company.   Nevertheless, I was fascinated with the phone system, and with a little help from the chapter on phone-patches in the RADIO AMATUER’S HANDBOOK, I had brought an isolated phone-tap into my room.  It was connected to the audio input on my communications receiver, which I could use as an amplifier to monitor phone calls.  In essence, I had a wiretap on the home phone.  I usually used headphones so no one else in the house could hear my clandestine monitor. 

     One must be very careful when you monitor phone calls that you should not have been listening in on.  It was way too easy to make a comment during a conversation pertaining to information that you should know nothing about.  I nearly let my secret out on more than one occasion. 

     Listening was nice, but I really wanted to know more about how the phone system really worked.  I read what I could, but I wasn’t able to find a lot of useful information at the time.  After all, the Internet did not yet exist, and research took a lot of time and effort.  Imagine my thrill when took the cover off of the phone in our kitchen and found a schematic of the phone, and wiring notes on various line lengths and other wonderful information.  I soon was opening other phones and finding little bits of useful knowledge in each and every different style of phone.  So I knew how the customer end of the phone line worked, but not a lot more. 

     It wasn’t long until I made a working phone out of scavenged parts.  My biggest problem was the dial.  Not being able to come up with a dial, I used a telegraph key.  The awkward part of that was you had to dial backwards.  In other words, you would hold the key down, and release it rapidly for each number.   You would release it one time for a  “1”, four times for a “4” and so on.  The higher numbers were hardest.  It was difficult to get the timing right, and I often would get wrong numbers.    On more than one occasion the operator came on the line and said my dial was defective and wanted to know it I needed a phone repairman to fix it.  I said I must have slowed it down accidentally and I would be sure not to slow it down the next time. 

     In the spring of 1962 at the age of 15 I attended the Seattle World’s Fair.  It was there I saw my first speakerphone.  I think they were actually in use in some places before that, but they were not common, and I had never seen one before.  But with what I saw, and what I knew from playing around with phones, I decided I could make my own speakerphone.  So soon after getting home I hooked up some amplifiers, a microphone and a speaker and a real, working speakerphone. 

     At this time in my life, we lived about 13 miles from town, and were on a party line with 9 parties.  One problem with a party line is not being able to tell if the line is in use before picking up the phone.  It wasn’t long before I figured out how to listen to the line without having a phone “off the hook”.   This was a convenience that meant if you didn’t need the line immediately, you could check to make sure it was not in use before picking up the phone.  It also meant you could listen in on all the other calls on the line without anyone knowing you were doing it.  So sometimes for entertainment I would just leave my speaker-phone in the “monitor” mode and listen to all the stuff everyone else was talking about, including the long intimate calls between our neighbor’s 17 year old son and his girlfriend.  But, again, this always had the problem of knowing things I wasn’t supposed to know, and I was hard sometimes not to let something slip in a conversation that I really should not have any way of knowing. 

     July of this same year I attended summer church camp.  A day or so before I left there were problems with the phone line at the house.  This was not uncommon, since the entire line was 14 miles of open-wire from town.  Outages were fairly frequent, and in most cases, were cleared up within a day or so.  I was pretty confident I didn’t have anything hooked up that would cause the problem.  But, just in case, before leaving, I unplugged all my phone stuff in my room.  The line was still out, so I naturally assumed it was not a fault at our place. 

     Upon returning from camp, I get the bad news.  The phone company had found the problem with the line, and it turned out it was my clandestine wiring running under the house from the phone terminal to my room.  I had used cloth-covered bell wire to hook up to the phone terminal.   It ran through the crawl space under the house into my room.  The cloth insulation had become damp, causing what is known as a high-resistance short.  This in turn looked to the phone system like an off-hook phone, effectively keeping the line “busy”.  It wasn’t bad enough it was my stuff that knocked out the 9-party phone line for several days, but I was soon to learn I had an appointment with the phone company early the next week. 

     This was one of the longest weeks of my life.  I knew messing with the phone company was serious, and I was in some real trouble.  All kinds of things went through my head, but I showed up at the appointed time:  5:30 Tuesday evening.  Mr. McIntyre, the technician that had located the problem on our line, greeted me at the door.  I was scared to death, and the first thing he says to me is, “Hi, I’m glad you came down.  I’d like to show you how all of this works.”

       Mr. McIntyre spent what must have been about two hours giving the complete tour of the “back room” of the phone office.  All the racks of switching equipment, the test set up, the long-distance carrier transmitters, the whole office from end to end.  What he told me was he had looked at the things I’d been building in my room, and the things I’d had on the phone line, and figured I needed to know how the rest of the system worked.  After the whole tour and all the information I could absorb at one time, he sent me on my way with a word of advice, “Before you leave anything hooked up the phone line again, you call me.  I’ll put the line tester on it and we’ll make sure we won’t have to make another trouble-call to your house again.” 

     And that’s how I learned what really goes on when you pick up the phone.  I didn’t end up in jail or have to talk to the FBI or anything.  But I was a lot more careful with what I connected to the phone line.
 
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