Telephones

In my 56 years on this planet, I have seen an amazing evolution. I am talking about the telephone. I moved to a small farm in central Illinois when I was about seven years old after my mother remarried. Our old farmhouse had one crank phone to connect us to the rest of the world. There was no dial, no touch-tone buttons, just a black hand set that sat on a black case with a hand crank on the side.

Our phone was on a “party line.” A party line was a circuit that included the phones of at least five other homes in our area. Other circuits connected more homes and all these circuits were tied into a Central Office located in our small town of Martinton, Illinois. The Central Office is where the operator connected the calls to outside lines. I learned that this part of Illinois was among the last in the country to operate with crank phones on party lines with a local central office. The rest of the world was dialing their numbers on private lines.

If you needed to make a call, you had to pick up the handset and turn the crank in a clockwise motion for several turns. Eventually the operator would come on the line and ask for your number. The operator would then dial the number and connect the call. Now to receive a call, you had to listen for the length and number of rings on your phone. Our house was five short rings. When we heard our signature ring, we picked up the handset and took the call. Now one of the problems was that at least five other houses on our party line would also hear our ring on their phones as well. They could pick up their phones and listen in to our calls.

There was proper phone etiquette when using a party line. Officially, customers were not to listen in to other calls, but from time to time, everyone did it, even the town’s operator. Before ringing the operator, you were to listen first to see if anyone was on the line. If someone was on the line and you had an emergency, the other parties were to get off and yield to your call. Finally, you were expected to watch your language while using the phone. This last one got my father into trouble one day. The operator asked my dad to come into town for a meeting at the Central Office. It seems that two, elderly, maiden sisters on our party line overheard my dad swearing on line and had lodged a complaint. My father reminded the operator about the rule of not listening in to other people’s calls and in no uncertain terms was he ever to be summoned to the Central Office again. That was the last time.

The Central Office was located in the home of the operator so he and his family took turns manning the switchboard and placing calls. Occasionally, an operator was busy or not around and this led to hard feelings when people needed to place a call. If the operator and his family went on vacation or would be away from home, they had to train a replacement or get someone from the Central Phone Company (later called Centel) to come to their house and take over the operation.

Somewhere in the mid 1960’s our phone system finally entered the twentieth century. We got dial phones. We no longer had to listen for the five short rings to pick up our calls, but we were still on a party line. We would still have to listen on line before dialing our number, but no one else on our party line could hear our ring. We had arrived.

I went to work for Motorola just as the cell phone allowed people around the world to go wireless. We could take our phones with us. We could make calls anywhere there were cell towers to connect us. At first, they were the size of bricks, but eventually they shrunk to the size of our palms and fit in purses and pockets. After cell phones were equipped with cameras, pictures, voice and text could travel the world. With the advent of Apple’s I-Phone, we now have access to the internet and unlimited information. GPS on newer phones can now track our comings and goings and tell us how to get from point A to point B. Simply amazing!

What is even more amazing is that despite all of our advancements in science and technology... we are still using crank telephones when it comes to world peace, dealing with poverty and saving our planet and its dwindling resources.

FOOD for THOUGHT...