Think about texting with O8 (can’t call it T9 now can we)
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I have to press the weird button, then another one just like it because no, I don’t want to add the guy selling a couch on Craigslist to my contacts.
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The first samba song ever recorded in Brazil was called Pelo Telefone (roughly “via the telephone”), released exactly a hundred years ago.*
#####Not exactly exactly. Supposedly recorded November 1916, launched 20th January, 1917.*
######**Hence, truly exactly if you’re reading this two days after it’s written. Greetings from the near past, you handsome time traveler you.
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My nephews have only seen a land line at my parents’ house, and my parents no longer have a land line. My nephews are confused by the concept of land lines.
When I was growing up in the 80s, rotary phones were rare but still used in places. My reaction to rotary phones was like my nephews’ reaction to land lines.
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I don’t know what to think about Morse Code. It’s similar to a Huffman code, but predates Huffman codes by about 70 years, so that’s kinda cool, but why did they have someone entering the dots and dashes manually? I would have thought that someone would hook a keyboard up to a telegraph way sooner than they did.
This is incredibly useful information. I’ll do what I can to get the word out. Sarah, can you connect me to Mount Pilot?
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We have an object like this in our dining room. It was my grandfather’s.
Friends of ours were over for dinner with their 9-year-old daughter. “What’s that?” she asked. “What do you think it is?” I countered, because that’s the sort of annoying grownup I am. She inspected it carefully, front and back.
“It’s got light bulbs inside,” she said in a puzzled voice. She’s a bright kid, though. After a couple of guesses she identified it correctly as a radio
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Such keyboards existed by mid-20th century, but earlier ones were strictly mechanical devices, and I suspect that one that could form the code for every character as an electrical signal would be horrendously complicated. Possibly you could have an arrangement like the dialer on a rotary phone for each key, where the key actuates an arm that brushes a series of contacts as it returns, sending the sequence of pulses for that character.
Problems:
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creating an electromechanical machine to understand morse and type out characters would be much more difficult than building a sending machine. (There is now software that will do that.)
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The record for understanding (“copying”) morse is 75 wpm, a record that has stood since 1939. More typically a good operator might copy 35-40 wpm. A human operator can adjust his or her speed to the skill level of the receiver. The keying rate of the keyboard would have to be limited to something that would accommodate even trainees, slowing everyone down, or be adjustable.
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A good typist could easily type faster than such a keyboard could respond, possibly jamming keys.
There are plenty of videos on YouTube showing contests between morse operators and texters, with varying results. Basically a fast morse operator can still beat a texter, but smart phones with proper keyboards have narrowed the gap.
I wonder how long the “beepedy-beep-beep” sound effect, signifying wireless communication in older movies, will mean anything to viewers.
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I’ve worked out a system that uses tapes on the sending and receiving ends, but it’s not easy getting the system to not jam, especially when reading the tape. It may be more trouble than it’s worth. However, a human can still decode the receiving tape if all else fails.
I text very slowly, and I blame autocorrect and Swype. Whenever I try to type a word that autocorrect doesn’t recognize (could be something not in English, could be a word like “cracks” that autocorrect somehow doesn’t pick up on), my phone will autocorrect to something else that isn’t even close. Sometimes it autocorrects to an email address, even the email address of a dead person. Permanently disabling autocorrect seems to be the only solution. I wish there was only a way to make the phone language-agnostic without having to go into layers upon layers of settings and change the language, then go back through the settings and change it back.
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I LOVE rotary phones.
I love the sound they make.
I love that there is a direct connection between the sounds you hear while dialing and the stepping of relays somewhere down the line. Thinking about this as a child was my first introduction the concepts of networks. Touchtone is so much more mysterious.
I also love the fact that they were built like tanks.
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ActionAbe: I’ve wondered about that. The term “dial” seems to be hanging on (in the US anyway), perhaps because the word is short and lots of people understand it whether or not they’ve ever seen a dial phone. “Press” has taken its place when referring to single digits on automated call systems: “For account info press ‘1’”. Some systems use “touch.” “Call” seems a handy generic replacement for “dial.”. I hear this all the time in commercials. “Hang up” seems still to be going strong, maybe because there isn’t another short, punchy way to say “end the call.”
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As proven by the one on my desk, which was in use from 1959 until 2015. Looks just like the one in your picture!
I keep meaning to rig up a VOIP adapter for it, but haven’t gotten a round tuit. It’s on the list with the hat stretcher and finishing up the mower motors…
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You can’t really slam the phone on someone anymore like you could in the old days, where the other person hears a loud slam and you hear the same thing, plus the actual physical bell ringing. Pushing a button on your screen has nowhere near the same satisfaction. It makes thwipping shut a flip phone seem cathartic by comparison.
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I think because it’s one word rather than two and seems to have genericized in meaning. I’ve heard of people “dialing” a number into their calculator. I think for people “dial” means to push into a keypad. Ten years from now there’ll be a whole thing on Mental Floss about it.
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People here refer to running SSH or VPN clients over the Internet as “dialing in” to work. And report any problems as “I can’t dial in”.
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Yes. I remember when I first had my cellular phone and was on a call dealing with annoying customer service. I wanted to slam the phone down at the end, but realized I could only push the “End” button. I threw the phone across the room. I only ended up hurting myself.
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This reminded me that there’s only a relatively small group that knows the old modem noises. 
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I was on the phone with my mom, who has a land line. She asked my niece, who is three, would you like to talk to your aunt? She looked for a picture on the phone and decided against it. It was pretty hilarious, apparently.
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Yes I’m fully aware of the telegraph. What I meant is it seems funny that we’ve gone from hearing a real voice back to wetern union technology.
I guess I didn’t make my point clear.
If voice calls had never been invented until recently, to me it would seem like a far more impressive technology than texting.
Switching from voice, where we actually hear another’s real voice, to texting seems backwards, technology wise, to me.
People would be saying “Holy shit I can actually hear you!”
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Yeah, but you still needed to use Pony Express if you wanted to send someone a dick pic.
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