Days of Yore: Telephones

Once upon a time, telephones only had one function, and they could not be taken everywhere. I realize this may be surprising to some people today. Years ago, people called others by picking up the receiver on the candlestick phone (so called because the phone was shaped rather like a candlestick). There was often no way to dial a person's number on the actual phone, so when the caller picked up the receiver and put it to their ear, the voice of the operator on the other side asked who they would like to call. The caller then spoke into the mouthpiece attached to the main body of the phone and asked them to connect them to the person they were calling. The operator would then connect them.

Businessman using a candlestick phone
1913

Telephone Operator at her switchboard
everettovrk on Adobe Stock

That was before my time, but there were some remnants. By the time I came around, people generally used the rotary phone. The numbers were arranged in a circle, with a hole over each number. You would put your finger in the hole for the first digit, dial it around, wait for the dial to go back into place, then repeat the process until you had dialed the whole number. (They still call it dialing, even though it isn't generally literal dialing any more.)

Rotary Phone
(This one is fancier than the
ones we generally used)
Photo by Himanshu Ranpara on Unsplash

I remember when we got touchtone phones. I thought they were cool! We didn't have to turn the dial and then wait for it to scroll back. We could just push buttons for the numbers. Dialing was faster!

Though I am told there weren't as many issues with party line in the '80s in the US, we had it in the Philippines, and I know it was a thing in previous decades in the US. With fewer phones in the world and only so many slots in the operator's switchboard, several houses were on the same connection. The individual phone number only went to one house, but sometimes we would pick up the phone and hear a conversation in progress at other houses. We had to hang up as quietly as possible so as not to disrupt the conversation, and wait for them to be done before making our call. Sometimes it took several times checking before they were done. (In an emergency, you could ask them to call each other back later, but that was generally considered rude, so I don't recall ever doing that.) It was a bit annoying at times. We also sometimes had to be careful what we said over the phone, in case someone at a different house happened to be listening in.

By the '90s, we still had a phone operator, but their role had changed considerably. By this time, they didn't just answer when you picked up the phone. If you wanted the operator, you had to dial "0". I generally called the operator when I wanted to find someone's phone number, particularly if they weren't in our city, and maybe weren't in our phone book.

Speaking of phone books, the phone company would deliver heavy brick-like phone books to our house annually. Most of the book had thin white pages with a long list of names and phone numbers, arranged alphabetically. It worked pretty well, unless several people had the same name. Good luck if you needed to call John Smith! The end of the book, the pages were yellow, and were thus called the yellow pages (I know, super imaginative name). They had phone numbers for businesses, and also included more information on the businesses, such as addresses and sometimes logos. Radio and TV commercials for USWest Dex phone books advertised that they were "The one that gets used." A choir in the ads sang, "Used! Used! This one gets used! This is the one that we use!" (or something like that) to the tune of the Anvil Chorus from Verdi's Il Trovatore.

As phones continued to advance, they introduced the wireless phone. This was very cool, as we didn't have to stay in one place due to the phone cord. I was jealous of people who had one. (One time I was talking to my friend Dan on the phone on April Fools Day and told him that we had one, following it up with "April Fools!" It was among my more lame April Fools jokes.)

When I was in high school in the mid-'90s, one of my friends in our choir had a new kind of phone that he carried with him. It was called a cellular telephone. The fact that he had one told me that he must be rich.

As cell phones became more popular, we started talking about cell phones and landlines to differentiate between cell phones and the old-school ones connected to the wall.

There were several phone companies. American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) went way back to 1885, way before my time. (In fact, some of my ancestors hadn't even immigrated to the US yet at that time.) There was USWest, which later became Qwest, which later merged with CenturyLink, which is now part of Lumen Technologies. When I got my first cell phone in 2000, I went to the VoiceStream kiosk in the middle of Northgate Mall (see my previous Days of Yore post about shopping). VoiceStream would later be purchased by T-Mobile. Bell Atlantic (named for Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone) and GTE merged into Verizon in 2000. T-Mobile acquired Sprint a few years ago. There were others.

Cell phones started out pretty large, about the size of your average brick. Nokia phones were known for being indestructible. Eventually, the Android came out. Previous to that, my only association with Androids was in Star Trek. (They were also called Droids, which I associated with Star Wars.) Somewhere around that time, Apple introduced the iPhone. Having never been a big Apple fan, I opted for Android, but people I know with iPhones love them. As smartphones started to eclipse "dumb phones", they got smaller. Then they started getting larger, as apps on the phones gave the option of watching shows, taking pictures, playing games, and more. Many "dumb phones" could take pictures. I remember taking pictures on my old flip phones. Some "dumb phones" also had the option of playing games. Smartphones, however, opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Read all of my Days of Yore posts so far and you'll see many of the ways I use mine. My grandpa was amazed at all the ways I used my telephone, when he just used his to call people.

Image by Sakurambo, Public Domain

Cell phones also gave the option of texting. They had the same arrangement of buttons as the touchtone phones, and the letters on them allowed for writing texts to people. At first texting was rather labor intensive. To type an A, you just needed to press 2. To type a C, you had to press 2 three times. To type an S, you had to press 7 four times. One of my last "dumb phones" had a nifty keyboard that you could pull out. That made texting easier. With the advent of smartphones, they had keyboards built in. That made texting considerably easier, though smartphones still prove to be not so smart when they decide their predictive text and autocorrect make much more sense than what you explicitly typed. 

Shockingly, I don't use the old style of phone any more. I use my cell phone! I sometimes even use it to call people. I have a candlestick phone that works (it is a bit more modern than the traditional ones, in that it has touchtone buttons arranged like a rotary phone), but it's mainly a decoration now. I bought it as a prop for a play. For a long time we used it in case our power went out and our other phones that depend on electricity didn't work. We don't even have a landline any more.