Telecommunications History

By: Narain Gehani

* Preface (.pdf file)

Book Review: Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel by Narain Gehani

What happened to Bell Labs? This book answers that question. Narain Gehani thinks Bell Labs can continue but only by quickly changing culture and direction.

Throughout his book Gehani provides fresh and important information. We get a rare look into Bell Labs' life, the tremendous freedom to pursue independent, high quality research. Even more so than academia, where tenure provides a backstop, publish or perish was a constant watch phrase. Do your research, whatever that may be, but make sure the scientific community recognizes it and accepts it. Published papers, not profit, was the expectation. As the emphasis changes to helping Lucent's business units the Labs cannot retain its old character, indeed, the old Labs is probably gone forever. Glory can come back to Bell Labs but it will probably be in a different way, helping Lucent first, then society at large. Reinventing itself may prove the Labs most difficult project, still, it may surprise us, as its discoveries and inventions have surprised us for more than seventy five years. Let's hope.

DETAILS

Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel, chronicles Narain Gehani's twenty three years at Bell Laboratories. It is a welcome and needed addition to telephone history. Gehani started work in 1978, when the Labs was fully subsidized and owned by AT&T. He left in 2001, after the Lab switched parent companies, split apart many times, and researchers reduced two-thirds.

AT&T's telephone monopoly generously funded Bell Labs from its 1925 creation until the Bell System's 1984 divestiture. Each customer's bill sent something to the Labs; slightly higher rates subsidizing research and development. This excellent arrangement lasted nearly sixty years, Bell Labs contributing mightily to building the world's best telephone system. After 1984 AT&T no longer had guaranteed revenue; Bell Labs withered as its parent wandered and floundered financially. Lucent's recent control has not helped.

Chapter 1, I Have A Job For Life!, summarizes Gehani's Labs' career, Laboratory accomplishments, its history, and the desire researchers felt to work there. Chapter 2, The Crown Jewel, describes the Labs' confusing ownership, spin-offs, and name changes. Gehani details relations and history between the Labs and Lucent, Bellcore, Telecordia, NCR, Avaya, and Agere. After explaining the Labs external structure, he lays out its internal structure in Chapter 3, Life at Murray Hill. We learn how researchers, managers, and development people get along. Chapter 4, Looking For Dung But Finding Gold reveals how often pure research leads to important discoveries.

Gehani's writing turns from Old Labs to New, as Lucent ownership and funding demanded change from pure to applied research. In Chapter 5, Do We Work For The Same Company?, corporate culture differences between Lab researchers and Lucent business people block cooperating. Chapter 6, What Are You Doing For Us?, finds researchers struggling to pioneer science while producing relevant work for Lucent. Chapter 7, Bell Labs Goes West, details the well intended but doomed expansion into Silicon Valley. Chapter 8, Maps On Us, describes a successful web development project between Labs researchers and Lucent business units. It points to a collaborative direction the Labs may have to take. Chapter 9, Most Fantastic Place! recaps Bell Labs bygone university like atmosphere and the changes needed to transform the Labs into something quite different: a market oriented research institution.

Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel by Narain Gehani, Silicon Press, 2003, 258 pages, hardcover, ISBN 0-929306-27-9. Consecutively numbered, descriptive endnotes. Good index. No photographs. Minor, first edition layout problems. Easily read type with plenty of white space. Recommended .

Author's Background

From the editorial review:

"Narain Gehani, a world-renowned expert in Web technologies, software, and databases is the author of many computer books including best selling books on UNIX typesetting and C. Narain was at Bell Labs for twenty three years from 1978 to 2001 where his last position was that of Research Vice President, Communications Software Research.

Narain got his PhD in computer science from Cornell University in 1975. He taught computer science for 3 years at SUNY/Buffalo and then joined Bell Labs in 1978. He has served on numerous program conference committees and was an ACM National Lecturer for several years. Narain has co-authored several pioneering software systems including the Ode object database, Concurrent C/C++ parallel programming language, and the Stair9 Web-based customer care system. Narain holds several patents, and has published many papers in computer science.

The book is available from Silicon Press (http:/www.silicon-pres.com), Amazon (http:www.amazon.com).

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Numbering eras in the United States for the Bell System

* First telephone numbers are just names
* Depending on exchange size, two, three or four digit numbers assigned to subscribers,
* Two letter prefix codes assigned to four digit numbers (Circa 1928 to 1958)
* In larger cities three letter prefix codes assigned to four digit numbers (Post WWII)
* Seven digit, all number dialing begins phase in. (1958)
* Nearly all of North American telephone network converted to all number dialing (1985?)
* Some party lines remain, with single digits like Rodeo Creek Number 8

Was it all a mistake? In January, 1958, Wichita Falls, Texas was the first American city to put in true number calling, that is, seven numerical digits without letters or names. Although it took more than fifteen years to implement throughout the Bell System, ANC, or all number calling, would finally replace the system of letters and numbers begun forty years before at the advent of automatic dial.

AT&T's operating companies started installing dial telephones in the mid to late 1920s. Customers could now dial numbers themselves, instead of having an operator place them as before. Rather than use all digits to indicate a telephone number, AT&T hit upon a hybrid system of letters and numbers. Instead of a number like 351-1017, the Bell System referred to it by a name like ELgin 1-1017, ELliot 1-1017, or ELmwood 1-1017. Something like that. The two letters and a number indicated a customer's switching office or exchange, the last four digits the actual customer's number. But why use letters?

The Bell System thought abbreviations would prevent misdialing, a mnemonic device to help callers unaccustomed to using dial telephones. AT&T's William G. Blauvelt designed a dial with the letters and numbers we use today, one without a Q or Z, one without letters for the digits 1 and 0. The assumption was, therefore, that customers could dial four or five numbers correctly but not six or seven. And that somehow they needed letters as well.

I've never understood, though, why PEnsylvania 6-5000 should be easier to remember or dial than 436-5000. Yet for forty years the most bizarre exchange names flooded the country and the entire telephone system was based on this riot of numbers and letters. It's with some satisfaction I note that AT&T's Joel and Schindler, in A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Switching Technology (1925 -- 1975), in discussing the Texas trial above, state contritely that "later human-factors studies showed there was no need for letters in the dialing sequence." Whoops! They went on to say that people in 1958 were now used to dialing, quite unlike forty years before. Four decades of practice were needed before people could dial another two or three digits? Perhaps. But I doubt it.

The site for all things exchange names: http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html

Officially recommended exchange names: http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Recommended.html

Without doing a complete research project on this I'd say the Bell System followed the lead of many Independents who were using numbered and lettered dials before AT&T. Bell's regional operating companies may have assumed that letters and numbers were necessary because they were being used, not because they were actually needed. Tradition or sloth set in afterwards and made exchange numbers accepted, unquestioned practice.

The first telephone numbers weren't numbers, they were names. The name of your company or you as an individual. That was too confusing to build a telephone system on since many people in a town might share the same name. Starting in 1879, then, scarcely three years after the telephone was invented, the switch to assigning a customer a number began, with a four digit code being typical. Calls were not dialed by the customer, indeed, there were no dial telephones yet. All calls were connected manually by an operator at a switchboard. But dial telephones would come along.

Let's look at how telephone numbers have been arranged recently, before we look at the numbered and letter scheme of old. Four digit codes allowed 9,999 possible telephone numbers. Plenty for a small town but hardly enough for a big city. What to do? For every block of 9,999 telephone numbers you assign a two or three digit code ahead of it, to designate the telephone switch, just as the four digit code identifies the subscriber. We call the two and then three digit code the prefix or exchange number.

So, if my number was 1017 in one part of town my prefix might be 203, hence 203-1017. Another customer having the same number in another part of town would get another prefix number, say, 481, for 481-1017. The numbers 1 and 0 aren't used for prefixes since so many other things are keyed into those digits. Like dialing 1 before placing a long distance call and dialing 0 before connecting to an operator.

Telephone History
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Letter Prefixes or EXchange Names/ Mobile Telephone Prefixes/ London Exchange Names in 1916

Numbering eras in the United States for the Bell System

* First telephone numbers are just names
* Depending on exchange size, two, three or four digit numbers assigned to subscribers,
* Two letter prefix codes assigned to four digit numbers (Circa 1928 to 1958)
* In larger cities three letter prefix codes assigned to four digit numbers (Post WWII)
* Seven digit, all number dialing begins phase in. (1958)
* Nearly all of North American telephone network converted to all number dialing (1985?)
* Some party lines remain, with single digits like Rodeo Creek Number 8

Was it all a mistake? In January, 1958, Wichita Falls, Texas was the first American city to put in true number calling, that is, seven numerical digits without letters or names. Although it took more than fifteen years to implement throughout the Bell System, ANC, or all number calling, would finally replace the system of letters and numbers begun forty years before at the advent of automatic dial.

AT&T's operating companies started installing dial telephones in the mid to late 1920s. Customers could now dial numbers themselves, instead of having an operator place them as before. Rather than use all digits to indicate a telephone number, AT&T hit upon a hybrid system of letters and numbers. Instead of a number like 351-1017, the Bell System referred to it by a name like ELgin 1-1017, ELliot 1-1017, or ELmwood 1-1017. Something like that. The two letters and a number indicated a customer's switching office or exchange, the last four digits the actual customer's number. But why use letters?

The Bell System thought abbreviations would prevent misdialing, a mnemonic device to help callers unaccustomed to using dial telephones. AT&T's William G. Blauvelt designed a dial with the letters and numbers we use today, one without a Q or Z, one without letters for the digits 1 and 0. The assumption was, therefore, that customers could dial four or five numbers correctly but not six or seven. And that somehow they needed letters as well.

I've never understood, though, why PEnsylvania 6-5000 should be easier to remember or dial than 436-5000. Yet for forty years the most bizarre exchange names flooded the country and the entire telephone system was based on this riot of numbers and letters. It's with some satisfaction I note that AT&T's Joel and Schindler, in A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: Switching Technology (1925 -- 1975), in discussing the Texas trial above, state contritely that "later human-factors studies showed there was no need for letters in the dialing sequence." Whoops! They went on to say that people in 1958 were now used to dialing, quite unlike forty years before. Four decades of practice were needed before people could dial another two or three digits? Perhaps. But I doubt it.

The site for all things exchange names: http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html

Officially recommended exchange names: http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Recommended.html

Without doing a complete research project on this I'd say the Bell System followed the lead of many Independents who were using numbered and lettered dials before AT&T. Bell's regional operating companies may have assumed that letters and numbers were necessary because they were being used, not because they were actually needed. Tradition or sloth set in afterwards and made exchange numbers accepted, unquestioned practice.

The first telephone numbers weren't numbers, they were names. The name of your company or you as an individual. That was too confusing to build a telephone system on since many people in a town might share the same name. Starting in 1879, then, scarcely three years after the telephone was invented, the switch to assigning a customer a number began, with a four digit code being typical. Calls were not dialed by the customer, indeed, there were no dial telephones yet. All calls were connected manually by an operator at a switchboard. But dial telephones would come along.

Let's look at how telephone numbers have been arranged recently, before we look at the numbered and letter scheme of old. Four digit codes allowed 9,999 possible telephone numbers. Plenty for a small town but hardly enough for a big city. What to do? For every block of 9,999 telephone numbers you assign a two or three digit code ahead of it, to designate the telephone switch, just as the four digit code identifies the subscriber. We call the two and then three digit code the prefix or exchange number.

So, if my number was 1017 in one part of town my prefix might be 203, hence 203-1017. Another customer having the same number in another part of town would get another prefix number, say, 481, for 481-1017. The numbers 1 and 0 aren't used for prefixes since so many other things are keyed into those digits. Like dialing 1 before placing a long distance call and dialing 0 before connecting to an operator.

picture of a telephone dial

We then have eight digits which can't be more than three digits long. That means 512 possible office or prefix codes. Which works out to roughly slightly more than five million possible telephone numbers. That's a good system but the one the Bell System settled on for decades was quite limiting. Let's look at that.

As I said before, the Bell System first designated prefixes with letters, not numbers. In the beginning these two letter abbreviations described the area the switch building or central office was located in. Like ELm for an Elm street locale or FRanklin for an exchange on Franklin street. But this sensical method didn't last long as the few central office codes ran out. The problem was there were only so many easily pronounced names, ones where the first two letters of the word wouldn't be confused with other letters. Exchanges were later named for landmarks, famous families, city neighborhoods, and so on. After World War II some two letter prefixes had a number added on to them to extend their usefulness. Something like PLaza1-1017. That gave more prefix possibilities.

People eventually knew exchange names belonged to certain parts of the city and made associations and assumptions based on your telephone number. Did you live in downtown San Francisco? Or were you out by Golden Gate Park? Or near the Marina? Your telephone number gave a clue. All number dialing wiped out all these names and the memories that went them, much angst ensued, and countless editorials mourned their loss. Witness this lament from New York City:

"You could learn about a fella by knowing his exchange. A MOnument fella was up near 100th Street and West End Avenue. You could picture him coming downtown on the IRT, strolling first to 96th and Broadway for the newspapers, passing the Riviera and Riverside movie theaters (both gone). The ATwater girl was an East Side girl, a taxi-hailing girl, on her way to her job at Benton and Bowles. A CIrcle fella was a midtown fella, entering his CIrcle-7 Carnegie-area office with a sandwich from the Stage Deli. And what about a SPring-7 girl, twirling the ends of her long brown hair as she lay on her bed talking to you on te phone? A Greenwich Village girl. A 777 girl is nothing. She is invisible. She is without irony, seldom listens to music."

Jonathan Schwartz, New York Magazine, December 21 -- 28, 1987, as reproduced in Once Upon a Telephone: An Illustrated Social History, (1994) Stern and Gwathmey, New York. Harcourt Brace and Company. p.47

As I mentioned at the top of this page, in 1958 The Bell System began phasing out exchange name dialing or letter prefixes. As Stern and Gwathmey put it, "the WAlnuts, LOcusts, SPruces and MAgnolias were just so much dead wood." As of 1977, nearly two decades later, only 74% of Bell System lines were ANC or all number calling, it would take years more to complete the job, removing a system which was never needed in the first place.

Could you tell me in what year only a 3 digit number was used?

If you want to date something by a telephone number you should contact the history museum nearest the area your interested in. Or look in a local library for old phone books or newspapers with ads that contain telephone numbers. It's really the only way to determine an approximate date, given how every telephone company phased exchange names in and then out.

And please note: I know I sound harsh on exchange names; when I see letters and numbers together my eyes glaze over and I can't focus on what's being communicated. But many people did find them useful in remembering a telephone number and millions still feel sad at their passing; I do not mean to devalue anyone's nostalgia or emotions. Tom Farley

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Britain had some wonderful sounding exchange names: BR, Brixton; HS, Hammersmith; MA, Mayfair; P, Paddington, and so on. The table and information on the left is from the ultimate Strowger site: http://www.seg.co.uk/telecomm/automat2.htm. Strowgers and their kin were early automatic telephone switches. The chart on the right is from Laidlaw and Grinstead's article The Telephone Service of Large Cities, with Special Reference to London, presented before the Institution of Electrical Engineers in London on May 15, 1919. Printed later in the IEE Journal, Volume 57. (1919)

The Telephone Name EXchange Project by Robert Crowe (click here to go there)

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Editor's note. This page discusses early mobile telephone prefixes. If in fact they existed. The chart Geoff refers is linked to below, a Bell System list of approved prefix numbers and names:

Hi Tom-

Yes, that chart appears to be correct. http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Recommended.html

As you know, until IMTS came around, mobile numbers had no direct dialing capability and only 5 digit numbers, so a mobile number was always prefixed by its home channel, thus:

JL 5-5575 or YK 4-3378

To reach a mobile phone, you had to dial the operator and then ask for the mobile operator in the city of registry of the mobile phone. Then you had to ask the mobile operator to ring the mobile, by telling her the mobile number, such as " JL 5-5575 , city of registry Los Angeles." A few years before Pac Tel switched over to IMTS, they were telling people to start using the area code rather than the city of registry. So they were expecting you to ask for "Area Code 213, JL 5-5575." The mobile terminalwould out-pulse 5 digits, i.e. 5 5575. Theoretically that could ring more than one phone, if a foreign mobile with the same number were in that area. In other words, an Alabama mobile with JL 5-5575 would also ring as there was no way to identify the city of registry with a 5 digit system. IMTS, as you know, was a 7 digit system. The IMTS phone was programmed with the area code then the last 4 digits. The prefix was not part of the ANI string. In other words, my mobile number of (408) 679-5575 was programmed into my mobile as 408-5575. As a hacker, I had a devil of a time figuring that out when I was experimenting. Even when I signed up for service, Pac Tel never said a thing about it.

There were 11 channels, as identified on the channel buttons of your Livermore attache phone. Each would originally have been a mobile # prefix. I see 57 is the numeric equivalent of channel prefix JR, but also JS and JP. Looking at the chart, I see 97 is also reserved, and would represent channels YR or YS or YP. The VHF channels start with a J or a Y so you would also need to reserve prefixes 55 and 95.

But I don't see any point in ever having reserved those exchange prefixes for mobiles, since there was no way they could ever have been dialed direct in an MTS manual system. You always had to ask for a mobile operator, and then say the channel, rather than the prefix. I think the reservation of those exchange prefixes was part of an early idea that someday they would have direct land to mobile dialing even in MTS phone systems, which never happened.

On another more arcane subject, those decoder gear wheels in the earliest mobile phones were not capable of using certain number combinations by reason of mathematics, and there was a whole list of numbers to be avoided for various reasons, mainly because the wheel did not revert to the resting position as soon as it detected a mismatch, as the transistorized selectors did. It only reverted to rest when the digits from the phone company transmitter ceased and a mismatch occurred. Thus, if you picked the wrong number to use, the phone could ring when someone else was dialed. That must have been very confusing. In other words, there were some numbers which added up to the same number of ratchets of the wheel such that the bell would ring. Also, the number selected couldn't add up to a total larger than a certain figure. This limited the available number pool.

Regards,

Geoff

The Telephone Name EXchange Project by Robert Crowe (click here to go there)

IMTS or Improved Mobile Telephone History Links below:

MOTOROLA EARLY LAND MOBILE EQUIPMENT INDEX, 1938-1946

http://www.mbay.net/~wb6nvh/Motadata.htm

Geoff is an ardent mobile radio enthusiast, please visit his site soon.

More IMTS madness? Of course. Take a look at a company newsletter describing the 1982 cutover in Pac Bell land:

Page One / Page Two / Page Three / Page Four

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What technological change has affected the telephone most? And what cultural change has made the most impact?

High strength plastic has probably made the most change to the telephone instrument. For the telephone system as a whole, the vacuum tube and then the transistor made the most change. Cultural? Perhaps the demand for privacy, an insistence for single line service after World War II. The telephone can be a true, personal communicating device only when we are not sharing that line with someone else.

Party lines for non-business subscribers were the rule before World War II, not the exception. In cities and country, most people shared a line with two to ten to twenty people. You could talk only five minutes or so before someone else wanted to make a call. And anyone on the party line could pick up their receiver and listen in to your conversation. I think single line service, which took until the early 1970s to become nearly universal, has allowed the telephone to fully develop into what we know it today, a way to make personal and business calls in a relaxed, comfortable manner. That we don't think about single line service as enabling the telephone is a good thing. You see, it's only when technology becomes secondary, when we no longer notice it, does it become truly liberating.

Mind Your Own Business -- Hank Williams Sr. -- 1949

Oh, the woman on our party line's the nosiest thing
She picks up her receiver when she knows it's my ring
Why don't you mind your own business
(Mind your own business)
Well, if you mind your business, then you won't be mindin' mine.

Hank

Digital times, private lives are breaking up party lines, by Rick Hampson

Copyright USA Today Information Network Oct 23, 2000

Abstract: Although party lines are thought of as a staple of rural life, in fact some big cities had quite a few. In the 1920s, they made up fewer than 10% of the phones in Detroit but more than 60% in Minneapolis and Oakland. The 1959 movie Pillow Talk, in which Doris Day silently and indignantly listened in as Rock Hudson wooed other women, was set in New York City. But that was a fantasy; by 1930, neither New York City nor Washington, D.C., had a single party line.

You could try to shame eavesdroppers into hanging up -- I've got more to tell you, Elsie, but someone's on the line -- and wait for the sound of a quiet, guilty "click." Or two people on the same line might arrange to pick up at the same time -- say, 2:11 p.m. -- and not alert eavesdroppers with rings. But mostly, [Eleanor Arnold] says, "you just didn't say too much on the phone. I still, to this day, have the feeling that if it's private, you don't talk about it on the phone."

From Brightlightsfilm.com:

In Pillow Talk, New York still reigns supreme. To let us know that the film is about S-E-X, it opens with Doris pulling a stocking on a long, elegant leg. She lives alone in a fabulous New York apartment on Park Avenue. Rock lives in an adjoining building. The basic gag of the film is that they share a "party line," which means that poor Doris can hardly get a word in edgewise, thanks to all the "last night was wonderful, when can I see you again" calls that bad-boy Rock gets from his multitudinous girlfriends. Doris accuses Rock of being a sex maniac, while he patronizingly expresses sympathy for her situation: "The only thing sadder than a woman who lives alone is one who thinks she's happy that way."

In olden times, people didn't have individual phone lines. However, the idea that this would still be the case in 1959 on Park Avenue is the second least believable detail from Pillow Talk.

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/24/pillowtalk1.html (external link)

Digital times, private lives are breaking up party lines, by Rick Hampson

Full Article: About 5,000 of 167 million access lines in the nation remain hooked up to more than one household, but 90% of those party lines are telephonic ghost towns.

The Nation

Maybe you remember when eavesdropping was as easy as picking up the phone; when, instead of urging us to "reach out and touch someone," the telephone company warned not to talk too long; when you counted long and short rings to know a call was for you.

Maybe you remember the party line, once this country's most common, most affordable and most frustrating form of telephone service.

But the party's almost over. Party lines have disappeared from some states and been outlawed in others. In Mississippi, once served largely by party lines, Bell South says it has two left: one with four homes on it, one with two homes. And this summer, the last few hundred Bell Atlantic party lines in Pennsylvania were converted to private service.

Party lines are telephone lines shared by more than one household. No one knows exactly how many remain in the nation, but there are very few true ones -- perhaps 5,000 out of 167 million access lines. No telephone company offers new party-line service, and existing party lines are gradually being converted to single party lines.

Although they are slightly cheaper than private lines, most party lines can't handle digital signals and don't allow users to have services such as caller identification, speed dialing and call waiting.

'The telephone habit'

Homer Benedict, 100, had a party line until a few weeks ago at his home in South Kortright, N.Y. To get Lifeline service, which allows people to summon help by pressing a button they carry around with them, he had to get his first private line.

For years, he shared the telephone line with the woman next door. When he was working in his yard, she would pick up on his ring and summon him inside to take the call. After her death a few years ago, their line became a party line in name only.

In fact, about 90% of what phone companies call multiparty lines are really telephonic ghost towns. They're old party lines that over the years have lost all but one party -- a single household still billed at a party-line rate for what amounts to a private line, and thus might pay a dollar or two less a month.

When John Holdsworth and his wife moved recently into his grandparents' old house in Rindge, N.H., he found that the place technically still has a party line, "but we were the only party on it."

At 70, however, Holdsworth can recall when that same line had several households, and the only way his grandparents could tell a call was for them was to listen for their three short rings. Before making a call, they had to pick up the receiver and make sure no one was already on the line. And while they were talking, there was nothing to stop one of the other parties on the line from picking up and listening in.

Today, when one home might have six phone lines, it's hard to imagine six homes on one line. But 70 years ago, most people had party lines. In the Bell System, 36% of residential customers were on two-party lines, and 27% were on four-party lines.

In the late 19th century, the Bell System had used the cheaper (and less profitable) lines to get more Americans hooked on what company executives called "the telephone habit."

The ultimate goal was to move customers on to more expensive private lines. Accordingly, "the object of this (multiparty) service will not be accomplished unless the service is unsatisfactory," Bell chief engineer Joseph Davis said in 1899. "It therefore requires that enough subscribers be placed on a line to make them dissatisfied and desirous of a better service."

Although party lines are thought of as a staple of rural life, in fact some big cities had quite a few. In the 1920s, they made up fewer than 10% of the phones in Detroit but more than 60% in Minneapolis and Oakland. The 1959 movie Pillow Talk, in which Doris Day silently and indignantly listened in as Rock Hudson wooed other women, was set in New York City. But that was a fantasy; by 1930, neither New York City nor Washington, D.C., had a single party line.

Nosiness and neighborliness

In the Midwest, however, half the residential lines were party lines. On the farm, the phone, even with as many as a dozen families on a line, made life easier. You could summon the doctor, learn farm prices, contact a neighbor down the road. A special "line ring" -- such as nine short rings -- invited everyone to get on the line to warn of trouble or spread good news. Merchants could buy ads via line calls to announce sales and prices.

When a blizzard stranded families in rural Kansas, each family on a party line lifted the receiver and entertained each other with jokes, poems, piano playing or "whatever they could do," says Robin Sherck, director of the Museum of Independent Telephony in Abilene, Kan.

"Back then," she adds, "the telephone was such a wonderful new thing that people didn't mind sharing a line."

However, the bane of the party line was what some called "rubbering" -- eavesdropping. In the days before radio and television, your neighbor's conversation might be your entertainment.

Claiborn Crain, a government public relations man in Washington, grew up on a farm outside Amarillo, Texas, in the 1950s. His family's ring was three longs and a short, "but everybody on the line'd pick up," he recalls. "They wanted the gossip."

A woman who recently visited the Museum of Independent Telephony recalled attending a 4-H meeting at the home of another family on the same party line -- a family she was sure, but couldn't prove, had been eavesdropping. During the meeting, the phone rang her family's ring, but one boy jumped up and headed straight for the phone -- until he froze and looked back sheepishly. "I'd caught him," she laughed.

Sometimes you could judge, from the strength of the signal, how many people were listening in. Sometimes you could hear them.

"My mother-in-law breathed heavily," says Eleanor Arnold of Rushville, Ind., who had a party line until 1969 -- her first 21 years of marriage. "You could always hear her."

Ruth Irwin, who grew up in Mississippi, was on her party line one day describing a ball game when a male voice suddenly cut in: "No, that wasn't the way it was!"

You could try to shame eavesdroppers into hanging up -- I've got more to tell you, Elsie, but someone's on the line -- and wait for the sound of a quiet, guilty "click." Or two people on the same line might arrange to pick up at the same time -- say, 2:11 p.m. -- and not alert eavesdroppers with rings. But mostly, Arnold says, "you just didn't say too much on the phone. I still, to this day, have the feeling that if it's private, you don't talk about it on the phone."

And you didn't talk too long, a point driven home by phone company literature on telephone etiquette. "You'd say, 'We've been on long enough, someone else might be needin' the line,' " Arnold says. "I still get that feeling, too, if I've been talking for a while."

Though the lines lacked privacy, they helped build a sense of community. If several calls in succession to the same number sparked worries that something was wrong, others would pick up and listen in to find out whether there was anything they could do to help.

"It wasn't really nosiness, it was neighborliness," Helen Musselman of Hamilton County, Ind., told an oral history interviewer in the 1980s. Now, she said, "it's cold. . . . You don't know what your next-door neighbor is doing."

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Tom:

The photo caption in your telephone history series is, despite it coming directly out of a book, incorrect. The large electronic tube is not the single "500 kilowatt valve." It was one of FIFTY-FOUR ten kilowatt tubes operable in parallel to form the transmitter at Hillmorton, near Rugby, in England. When I finish this note, I'll try to find the web link to a local web page from there that has some of the description of the site. That plant exists today and is still on the air, its 8 towers of 800 odd feet being visible for miles around.

The giant transmitter is actually ten radio amplifiers of 100 kilowatts input, 54 kilowatts output each. That, if used together, is called by some one million Watts, based on input; by others, 500 kilowatts or 540 kilowatts based on output. In fact, other than for initial testing, all ten amplifiers were never tied together. Nine of them are used in parallel, excited from a source of the Very Low Frequency of 16.7 kilohertz. with the callsign GBR - which might stand for Great Britain Radio or Great Britain Rugby, or some ways in England say, "Great Bloody Radio."

The original purpose of GBR was to be able to send a telegraphic message to anywhere in the old British Empire at any day or time. It evolved into marine radio use, and since the Cold War, has been used to transmit telegraph to England's nuclear submarines, in the same way the US Navy has several VLF stations for the US subs. The tenth 100 kw in/54 kw out amplifier was the bit used for that first transatlantic radiotelephone link in 1927. It was excited at 60 kilohertz with a single sideband speech exciter to work with its AT&T mate in the States. The AT&T reciever ultimately wound up at Houlton, Maine (which was used in later years as AT&T's Telstar satellite station site), and the Deal Beach transmitter on 55 kilohertz was ultimately replaced with one at RCA's huge transmtting plant at Rocky Point, Long Island. The callsign for the British end was GBT, obviously for Great Britain Telephone or such. Speaking of the first transatlantic radio-telephone link, let me mention a few things.

Despite the Bell Laboratories Record account, Deal Beach, New Jersey was merely a Labs testing place, for things like the WWI trials to Europe and such. The actual 55 kHz SSB transmitter for that 1927 London-NY radio link was in the RCA transmitter plant at Rocky Point, way out on the tip of Long Island, 150 miles east of the NYC metro area.

AT&T contracted out the construction and operation of the Rocky Point transmitter throughout its entire life, which was from 1927 until around 1970.

Similarly, I've just received info from some local people in Maine whose knowledge that RCA built a LF receiving station in Maine in WWI (which is probably where Harold Beverage got his start) leads to the likelihood that RCA also built AT&T's receiving station at nearby Houlton, Maine.

In other words the entire US end of the fabled 1927 first transatlantic telephone link was probably built for AT&T by RCA! (After all, AT&T owned 25% of RCA in its early years!). But back to somewhat modern times, at least for a few paragraphs :-)

When HF (shortwave) radio came into practical use, the VLF link was primarily used as the "backup." Even when the first submarine telephone cable was laid across the Atlantic in 1957, the several shortwave links were retired, but the Rugby-Rocky Point pair were actually kept on the air (but idle) as the final backup - actually in case of nuclear attack that would potentially make render both cables and shortwave useless. It wasn't till there were several cables and satellites in use that the 60 kHz/55 kHz link was retired. In England, the 60 kHz operation's callsign was changed to MSF, and it became England's standard time and frequency reference transmitter, which it is to this day. Over the years, the 1927 transmitters have certainly been replaced, but the British Post Office maintains a security cloak over what the GBR transmitter is today. They have told that the MSF transmitter has been replaced a couple of times, and we can certainly expect similar change has been made to GBR. Here's the web page, which isn't that well written, for GBR.

http://62.32.51.17:8033/Radio_masts/ (external link, now having problems)

There's a whole lot more to the early days of telecommunications. I have written a number of vignettes of the monsters of early radio, which I call "Jurassic Telecommunications." By and large, like the dinosaurs, it grew from cricket chirps into beasts of 100 or even 300 kilowatts, and the final bit were a few megawatt monsters like GBR.

One of the more interesting ones is the French megawatt spark monster that Blackjack Pershing ordered in WWI, at a Bordeaux location called Croix d'Hins. It was intended as a backup link across the Atlantic in case the Germans cut the transatlantic telegraph cables. Its callsign was merely LY and operated on VLF of 12.7 kHz. It didn't last long after the war, because when radio began to develop, it was found to cause so much interference that it had to be abandoned! Here's a page about it:

http://www.u-e-f.net/uef-histoire/croixhins.htm (external link, now dead)

There's a LOT of French history with further links at:

http://www.u-e-f.net/uef-histoire/index.htm (external link, now dead)

And, here are a couple of links about a third monster, Alexanderson's Alternator, of which one plant is still maintained at Grimeton, Sweden, callsign SAQ on 17.2 kHz:

http://www.telemuseum.se/historia/alex/1.html

http://www.telemuseum.se/grimeton/defaulte.html

(Both liinks now dead)

There were (and indeed, still are) many "footprints of the dinosaurs" of radio among us. Just last month, I was in Florida finding the concrete tower base of the first - ever AM broadcast "directional antenna" in the world. I hope you find all this interesting. I add to the database as I can. You can see some of it in the Archives section of: http://www.oldradio.com (external link)

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Poor old AM sure took its hits, Tom. But there's a lot afoot these days, First off, the consolidation of ownership has in its way changed many stations from local issue-orientation to regional broadcasters. And, the way telecommunications has become a commodity, we find those regional owners having a set of studios in which programs for a dozen or more stations are generated, I've just been in Tampa, to find a studio center of Clear Channel, one of the largest owners, running nine studios with programs for a dozen stations in and around Tampa and Florida's West Coast, for example.

More recently, on an auto trip from here to Dallas via Atlanta, I noticed several AM's which individually could not cover the Atlanta metroplex, but which carried the same program all day. One pair was even on adjacent channels, 1060 and 1070, so it took but a flick of the dial to continue to hear their program when driving across the entire city, as I did.

And, there's the newly emergent matter of IBOC- In-Band On-Channel digital AM stereo transmission. As with most technologies, there's a American way that's incompatible with the European "world standard" way, but if you heard the results of either, you'd be amazed. There's a website somewhere that I stumbled on that plays audio from both ways, and the digital result is nothing short of amazing! One of the demos is a movement from a full orchestra classical piece, played on a shortwave broadcast station, The analog sample is full of all the noises, fades and distortions of shortwave radio, while the digital rendition is crystal clear the whole time.

Will that save AM? Will satellite-delivered radio kill both AM and FM? Who knows? All I can say is I'm not scrapping my old Hallicrafters just yet. If nothing else, it may become a museum piece! If you'd like to see more about me, see my (out of date) personal website: http://members.fortunecity.com/donkimberlin/ (external link)

"My interest in telecommunications spans the earliest forms of electric telegraphy in 16th century Spain up to the early 20th century.
Author at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, USA

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It's accepted that in 1901 Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal, the letter "S", three clicks, tapped out in Morse code. Don Kimberlin now questions that accomplishment in a well written and researched article, "Investigating Radio's Roots: What Did Marconi Hear? The World's Most Heralded Radio Failure." The article is in .pdf form:
http://www.oldradio.com/archives/jurassic/marconi2.pdf (external link)

Or, if you want the .pdf file from this site click here (internal link)

There's do doubt Marconi's team transmitted a single "S" from Poldhu in Cornwall, near Land's End. But did Marconi actually receive it? Or did he and the sole witness to the event hear something else? Something they mistook for the signal? I've written many times how difficult it is to determine radio firsts; Marconi's claim now proves equally hard to establish. Time to rewrite the history books. Again.

Update. In response to my question to Don, How could an experienced operator like Marconi confuse telegraph dashes for lightning produced static?, Kimberlin responds:

Tom:

How did Marconi might mistake lightning for his desired signals? The key lies in the sound he wanted to hear.

Perhaps I didn't speak enough to the point of the way they had tuned the Poldhu spark transmiter. At the time, their financial strain was such that in order to minimize stress on the Poldhu transmitter, they had reduced the duty cycle of the spark to such a short period that each "key down" on the transmitter produced only a very short "click" of transmission, not the "buzz" we are accustomed to expect from a Type B emission. That way, heating and possible damange while producing maximum power at Poldhu was reduced.

Certainly, Marconi had heard lighting before, but here he was expecting merely a train of 3 clicks in an earphone. They could as easily have come from a natural source as from his transmitter.

I think what is key here is to have some understanding of just how much more favorable a south-north equatorial transmission path is than an east-west one. I may be more sensitive that difference than most people who are not HF propagation specialists, merely because I worked in AT&T's HF radio plant at Fort Lauderdale, FL -- a place that ran largely north-south paths in the equatorial region. It meant we could run commerciallly suitable links most any day of most any part of the solar cycle - high or low - while the AT&T plants at New York and San Francisco often had days of downtime, particularly in lows of the solar cycle.

And, December 12, 1901 was the lowest of low -- a day of absolutely zero sunspots.

Since writing the article, it has crossed my mind there could have been a minor geomagnetic storm, which would be highly unlikely, and I can't rule out one of the annual meteor showers, and I intend to correspond with an expert or two on those. I rather expect their opinion will be neither of those as a cause on 12/12/1901.

March 4, 2004

Tom. Don here again. I have a reader questioning my Marconi article. Let me make a few more comments. People can download the original article in by clicking here. (internal link) Here's what I wrote to that reader:

Thanks for all the complimentary words about my thesis on Marconi. I think it still stands, for these points if not more:

1.) Marconi (and others for more than a century now) with vastly improved technology have never been able to reproduce the experiment. It's a canon rule of The Scientific Method that you must be able to reproduce the experiment for it to stand as accomplished. Think of the more recent "cold fusion" claims that can't be confirmed as an example.

None of that is meant to detract from Marconi and his determination to open a transatlantic (and indeed, if you know about the beginnings of Bolinas, CA) transpacific telegraph business. He proved that by working for four more years, investing huge amounts of money, in which he multiplied his transmitter power by orders of magnitude, lengthened his antennas out to miles and found he had to reduce his frequency right down to 30 kHz or so to establish reliable transoceanic links. Marconi was no piker!

2.) I'm quite familiar with your theory about recognizing the "swing" of an individual telegrapher, having myself worked with the last of the telegraphers in AT&T, TRT, ITT and Western Union's submarine cable system. These people would sit and tap out messages to their comrades wherever they were -- even if it was on a wooden desktop.

In the AT&T locations, we actually had old clickety-clack telegraph sounders, and I could read some of the messages myself. Unfortunately, in that 1901 effort, Fleming was not sending Morse "S" for Marconi to hear, nor even strings of "S." He was sending simply 3 dots at scheduled times. What's more, Alexander Fleming was not a telegrapher. He was a physicist, He had not previously been a regular message telegrapher with Marconi.

3.) The "S" letters we speak of were not a part of message traffic streaming along. It was merely occasional transmissions of 3 dots on a schedule of a few minutes on, then wait a half hour, then a few minutes on and such. And, as you noted, with the short duty cycle they had set on the Poldhu transmitter (fearing they might burn it out), each dot merely sounded like a click. And, I'm sure you have heard static that sounded simply like a "click." That static can propagate around the globe like any RF signal, particularly if it's at HF. And, whatever "key" they had a Poldhu would likely have been a very clunky 1900 style model.

So, here's an added bit to my attempt at slicing this Gordian knot:

a.) Today's antenna analyzers have satisfied themselves that Marconi's Poldhu antenna was a very effective 850 kHz low-pass filter. In other words, no HF got launched from Poldhu on 12/12/1901 when the sunspot count was zero. (BTW, the lowest day of the century!)

b.) Marconi himself reports having at first tried receiving for a couple of days with an antenna tuning arrangement, which was a filter of some sort -likely low-pass.

c.) When he bypassed the tuner, he heard the sort of "signals" he sought, and said that was Poldhu.

d.) But, in removing the filter, he also opened up his receiver to HF, where natural static, in particular from due south of Newfoundland in Amazonian Brazil, one of the earth's three most active lightning sources could skip in to him.

Since nobody knew what "skip" was, nobody at the time would have even thought that Marconi might have heard something else. In fact, the whole notion about "Marconi did it on skip" came from an early 1902 remark by Arthur Kennelly (half of the Kennelly-Heaviside team), who said that barring any other explanation, Marconi might have done it by reflections off some newly discovered ionospheric layers.

In those early days of radio, nobody had means to measure things ionospheric with any accuracy, everyone accepted Kennelly's theory -- and has accepted it without testing since!

I hope that gives you a fair explanation of why I believe Marconi fooled himself, and we have been fooling ourselves since then. As I said, we still owe just about everything we do with radio to Marconi's pioneering, even if he did fool himself.

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Tom Farley back again, writing here. IT&T tried being the world-wide equivalent to AT&T. In some ways they succeeded. Little exists about IT&T on the web but you'll find many good books about them in any large library. They had two eras, the first, founding and development, led by the Behn brothers, and the second, a rebirth and expansion, led by Harold Geneen. How did they start?

In 1925 Western Electric sold its overseas manufacturing plants to a small company with a big name and even bigger ideas: International Telephone and Telegraph. A controversial decision within the Bell System. AT&T sold factories in 11 countries, fearing a United States anti-trust lawsuit. Western kept one foreign company: Canadian Northern Electric, holding it until 1957. AT&T would not return officially to the international market until 1977.

ITT's owners, the curious, conspiratorial Behn brothers, Sosthenes and Hernand, bought Western Electric International for 30 million dollars and renamed it International Standard Electric. Their purchase, backed by J.P. Morgan's bank, included Western's large British manufacturer, renamed Standard Telephones and Cable. The Behns agreed not to compete in America against Western Electric, and to be the export agent for AT&T products abroad. AT&T agreed in return not to compete internationally against the Behns. Now equipped with a large manufacturing arm, IT&T spread across the globe, buying and influencing telephone companies (and their governments) on nearly every continent.

IT&T reorganized and moved into new industries in the late1950s after Sosthenes Behn died. Harold Geneen, an obsessive and ruthless man, at times criminal, took charge. Don Kimberlin relates,

"Harold Geneen's arrival put accountants clearly in charge. During my own time there, the engineers were still reeling from the way in which Geneen trashed all their technology heritage, both figuratively and literally. If it didn't make money in the current accounting cycle, it wasn't worth having around."

"I have my own perfect example, having been the project engineer who found a revolutionary way to improve telegraphy on the then worldwide Telex network. My technique was highly successful, and increased the capacity of an analog voice channel from at first 24 TTY's, then 46, then 92, and ultimately 184 as the serial data modems that supported it increased in capacity from 2400 to 4800 and then 9600 bps."

"That project impressed Park Avenue enough that they featured that 'ITT World's First' on the cover of the annual report....then forgot about it. Geneen was the sort who'd say, 'OK, so what did you do for me this year?' He wouldn't invest in people whose creativity didn't match the accounting cycle. I left ITT to utlimately work for a developer who had me take the new technology to Africa and the Mid-East."

"In that regard, we had to solve a number of marketing problems. One of them was Saddam Hussein, who wanted our Time Division Multiplexing technique because we'd proved and sold it to the Saudis. However, Iraq had alrady embargoed American goods."

"Cable and Wireless stepped into the transaction to broker it and sanitize the deal. At the time, it was interesting because the Iraqis actually came to us, even visiting our company and factory run by American Jews, but then they backed off to have C&W make the purchase and install the goods. No small part of it was the Arab embargo on components from 'corporate supporters of Zionism.' That included most of our semiconductor suppliers -- Fairchild, Motorola and such. The Iraqis sent people from their embassy to our plant, negotiating the price and having us paint out all offending parts ID's in the product, the drawings and the parts lists, to make a special product for them. They paid dearly for us to make our products acceptable to their inspectors -- and C&W benefited from the increased cash flow in the deal."

privateline.comm reader Ron McKinney had a personal encounter with Geenen: "In the winter of 1971, I was an out of work carpenter. Granite Construction Company was building a sewage treatment plant in Homestead, FL. Having previously worked for the company in San Francisco, I drove out to the site, but learned that they had all of the carpenters they needed. So I picked up the Miami Herald and spotted an ad placed by the manager of the Key Biscayne Hotel and Tennis Club. I was hired to remodel a suite of rooms for the owner, Harold Geneen. It wasn't uncommon to see numerous Secret Service agents around the place, as President Richard M. Nixon and his friend Beebe Rebozo were frequent guests. At the time, Nixon's home on Key Biscayne was being remodeled. You may recall that this was a time when Nixon's aides, were busy covering up the Administration's connection with the Plumbers' break-in at the Watergate and their other illegal activities, such as wire tapping Nixon's 'enemies.'"

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Yes, I am interested in "spark," and I even heard one on the job once in 1962. I had only been working for AT&T for about 6 months, in their HF station at Ft. Lauderdale, FL, where we had the HF ship station WOM (the shore end of "The Love Boats." A number of our technical operators had been ship radio officers and were real whizzes on the Morse key - and I mean the American Morse used on our order wire to the transmitter plant, or the International Morse used on the radio (which we were licensed for to use in calling and setting up links). One day, one of them called me over and said, "Listen, that's a sparker!" It must have been a Poulsen arc, as it sounded rather musical and was transmitting up around 8 mHz with a fairly narrow bandwidth.

I later learned that some US Navy ships of WWI and a bit later still carried a Poulsen arc (made by Federal at San Francisco, FYI) as a backup. Apparently someone was just testing it.

For example, there is, near you, history of the Federal Radiotelegraph Company of San Francisco, at which a young Stanford student went to Denmark and got himself the US license for Valdimer Poulsen's megnetically-quenched arc, which he ultimately sold to the US (and other friendly) navies. That culminated in building four monstrous one megawatt arc converters for a gigantic 12 kHz link between the US Navy at Arlington, VA and the shore of Bordeaux in France. It had been ordered by "Blackjack" Pershing as a fallback to the transatlantic cables in WWI, fearing the Germans would cut the cables across the Atlantic.

It turned out the war ended before the French station was completed, and the French then, out of a sort of honor we no longer seem to have, purchased it as a means of appreciation for saving them from the Germans. That was all well and good, but when the French tried to use it, they found the beast generated harmonics of 12.7 kHz that interfered with all the other nascent forms of radio that were emergining in France by 1920 -- so it had to be abandoned. Today, the tower bases are still there, and there's a small local group who try to keep the memory alive. You can see their website at:

http://www.u-e-f.net/uef-histoire/croixhins.htm

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As to the long-standing AM vs FM debate, Barry and I have the distinct advantage of a close liaison with a radio consulting engineer who does understand the math, and he has provided us with copies of the earlier Carson papers. When we get into discussion about this, his read is that one is a half-full cup while the other is a half-empty cup. In other words, when you optimize each, they are so close, it's hard to find a difference.

Let me give you an example I can explain: When I was a product manager for modems at Paradyne Corporation, we were pushing the limit of commercial viablity for voiceband modems. Our designers chose phase-modulated modems, while our arch-rivals, Codex, chose what was the university-professor; math-on-the-blackboard textbook favorite, vestigial sideband AM modems (which is what the Bell Labs engineers were big on, too).

I had to come up with some advertising for our salesmen to sell with. So, I asked our designer what it was about. Tom Armstrong (that was really his name!) told me, "VSB has a textbook advantage of 1/2 dB in signal-to-noise requirement over PM. But, none of its proponents took the time to find out how long it takes a VSB modem to regain sync and get into operation when there is a noise hit. That is so much longer that, over time, a PM modem gets much more data through. We think that data throughput is what our customers want, not theoretical perfection."

Hey, I just paraphrased Tom's words, and we devastated the competition! And, addressing some of your remarks, yes, early FM was quite complex compared to AM and SSB, which would be less expensive to manufacture. But, there's a key point in the AM vs.FM story that gets lost: The others really wanted Armstrong's FM but they didn't want to pay him patent license fees. (I dearly wish I hadn't let the Armstrong patent license document that hung on the wall at WTSP-FM next to the FCC license get lost!) Armstrong's patent was limited. He defined FM as a high-fidelity radio transmission method, and said it required a modulation index exceeding 1.0 to get the 60 dB S/N that made it "hi-fi." Bell Labs dearly needed FM to make its microwave systems work. They limited their modulation index to less than 1.0, and invented "phase modulation" for the world -- and themselves to be patent license free! Sarnoff went a bit futher. He waited for Armstong to commit suicide, then let RCA loose on FM for both TV audio and radio broadcasting. So, you see, usable systems can be made of both AM, FM and even "substandard" PM, if you just optimize the system they work in.

I am constantly amazed at how few people understand the concept of a "noise floor," and how, because we badger authorities like the FCC to allow more and more stations, we have raised the noise floor. Just a week ago, I happened to be at a convention of broadcasters in Charlotte, where two were amazing themselves about how a new AM station on the California coast, operating in the new expanded AM band above 1600 kHz, said they had listeners in Hawaii. Well, duh - first off, 5,000 micromho saltwater for a path, and then nobody else on the channel to create interference! What do you expect? And, how long before there is someone else on their channel, anyway?

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Depending upon whether your company had originated from Western Union or from a later radio "upstart" like Marconi, your batteries might have either their negative or their positive terminals connected to ground. It's all part of the Great Debate about whether electrical Mother Earth has a negative or a positive tendency, and the effort to reduce cathodic erosion of grounding terminals in the plant. And that reflected into whether, on polar telegraph circuits, marking current was postive or negative. At ITT in NY, when we got circuits in from Western Union or WUI, their
marking current was always positive, and we'd have to match them, because they would not change!

When we got circuits in from RCA, they'd always be negative mark, and we'd have to match them, because they would not change! At ITT, we liked negative mark, but we'd adapt to the others, just to get business done. I can't imagine what must have gone on when the two of them tried to interconnect!

At any rate, you could see the historical heritage of Western Union and RCA in each of these. And what was our heritage that made ITT so accommodating?

Remember Postal Telegraph? That manually-run, scrambling around outfit owned by ITT that gave Western Union such fits pre-WWII that Western went to the FCC to sue ITT out of the domestic telegraph business? See, the story all fits together!

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"Now, for good or evil, comes the Walkie-Talkie for civilians. Just radio, 'Bring home an extra lamb chop,' or, "I want to report a strange man -' You can keep quiet, if you wish - but you probably won't."

From "Phone Me By Air" The Saturday Evening Post, 1945

This vision of a talkative wireless future appeared a half century ago; it foresaw the hand-held devices we use today and revealed the important link between military and civilian communications. The war effort developed portable radios, units no longer restricted to a car, truck, or tank. Unlike in previous wars, the foot soldier could now carry a radio with him, communicating with headquarters, squad leaders, or other soldiers while moving about. The personal radio had arrived and it has never left.

Before World War II most radio transmitters and receivers were big, bulky, and extremely heavy. Each piece could weigh 15 kilograms or more. They were so heavy that equipment collectors call these old radios 'boat anchors.' The first step to make a radio truly portable was to reduce size and weight. The Galvin Manufacturing Company, now Motorola, combined a receiver and transmitter into a single hand-held unit. They called it the Handie-Talkie. Weighing 2.3-kg, the Handie-Talkie had a range of 1.6 to 4.8 kilometers. This miniature marvel used five small vacuum tubes and put out one third of a watt. Motorola made 130,000 hand held units between 1941 and 1945. The SCR-536 was typical. Pulling out the antenna turned the radio on, pushing the antenna back in turned it off. While the 1943 Handie-Talkie somewhat resembles a large radio-telephone of today, it was Motorola's backpack model, the Walkie-Talkie, that heralded a new era in personal, portable communications.

The SCR-536. Walkie talkie photograph originally from here: http://www.gordon.army.mil/museum/AMC/talk.htm (link now dead)

The biggest change in radio from previous wars was personal communications, but the most significant wartime accomplishment for portability itself was frequency modulation or F.M. Reducing radio size was essential, but the transistor would be invented in a few years, making all electronics smaller. F.M. instead was the key development and many modern two-way radios and older cellular telephones use this technology today. As did Motorola's 1943 Walkie-Talkie. Known as the SCR-300, it weighed almost 16 kg. and had an average range of 16 to 32 km. It used 18 fragile glass tubes. Motorola chief scientist Daniel E. Noble designed it for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which in turn deployed it to the different divisions of the armed forces. These early Handie-Talkies used conventional A.M. or amplitude modulation technology because F.M. was newer and field radios had not used it before. But, delayed as it was for hand-held radios during the War, larger F.M. sets were rushed into production and used throughout the U.S. military, a great many installed in tanks. Why F.M.?

Frequency modulation, whereby the carrier wave is varied not by strength, as in A.M., but in proportion or frequency to the amplitude of the information signal.

Interference from other radio signals, man-made electrical noise, and atmospheric disturbances, plague A.M. radios, problems amplitude modulation transmitters use high power to overcome. F.M radios use less power to transmit since they're not affected by this interference. That means lower power to operate which means longer battery life. Transmissions sound cleaner and arrives without static. F.M. also has a capture effect, whereby the receiver locks on to the strongest signal it picks up, eliminating fading and competing radio signals. After the war the military continued working with F.M. for Handie-Talkies, producing the F.M. based PRC-6 in 1950, now considered the first truly successful hand-held military radio. But I am getting ahead of our story.

Amateur radio operator circa 1950. Technical radio knowledge and Morse code ability required for operator license. Beer served on platter and tie wearing required for style. Click here for a bigger picture.

In 1945 World War II ended and American civilian radio and telephone development resumed. After showing the utility of personal communications on the battlefield, Handie-Talkies and Walkie-Talkies could now be developed for civillian use. Before World War II Americans could not talk freely over the radio. You needed a federally issued amateur radio license first, based upon passing a test, which required technical knowledge and a proficiency in Morse code. With these impediments only dedicated enthusiasts pursued radio. After the war the United States re-thought civilian communication. Why not designate frequencies for personal, non-licensed use?

Calling for help on a military walkie talkie converted to use civilian frequencies. No connection to the landline telephone network.

In late 1945 the United States Federal Communications Commission unveiled a radio plan called the Citizens Band for private individuals and small businesses; a set of radio frequencies ordinary people could use to communicate. No connection to the telephone network was permitted or imagined, just people talking directly to each other using wireless. Like Walkie-Talkie users today. Only a simple operating license would be required, however, rules to certify the radio equipment itself took years to develop and were strict. Starting a bad tradition, the bureaucratic F.C.C. took four years to fully implement Citizens Band radio, and then few companies bothered to make radios under the strict rules for the new equipment. By 1952 only 1,401 people had Citizens Band operating licenses, most using converted A.M. military Handie-Talkies. This brings us to an important point: a major factor limiting American radio development has not always been technology but often the policies and delays of the F.C.C.

General Radio Telephone Company MC-5 22 channel Citizens band radio. Used tubes. Old, heavy radios are called boat anchors.

The United States Congress created the Federal Communications Commission in 1934 to regulate telephones, radio, and television. It was part of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" plan to bring America out of the Great Depression. Not content to merely follow congressional dictates, and unfortunately for wireless users, the agency first thought it should promote social change through what it did. To promote the greater good with radio, the F.C.C. gave priority to emergency services, broadcasters, government agencies, utility companies, and other groups it thought served the most people while using the least radio spectrum. This meant few channels for radio-telephones since a single wireless call uses the same bandwidth as an F.M. radio broadcast station. Spectrum at high frequencies contained a great deal of usable space, but the F.C.C. did not approve such large frequency allocations for telephony until the 1970s.

Treating radio like a public utility, something like the railroads, it was thought a public agency could protect the public against monopoly practices and price gouging. But like many bureaucracies, at every opportunity the FCC tried to enlarge its role and power, eventually aligning itself with large communications companies and then actually working against the consumer. The worst examples were outside of telephony, helping the RCA corporation against F.M. broadcasting, ruining Edwin Armstrong in the process, and favoring RCA over Farnsworth, the first real developer of television, leaving him penniless as well. Along the way were maddening delays in approving technical advances and frequency allocations, something that continues to this day.

Police departments across the country quickly converted to F.M. after WWII.

Click here for a larger picture. Warning! -- this is a BIG file

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On June 17, 1946 in Saint Louis, Missouri, AT&T and Southwestern Bell introduced the first American commercial mobile radio-telephone service to private customers. Mobiles used newly issued vehicle radio-telephone licenses granted to Southwestern Bell by the F.C.C. Mobiles operated on six channels in the 150 MHz band. Bad cross channel interference, something like cross talk on a normal telephone line, soon forced the Bell System to use only three channels. No more than 25 people at once could use the system. Operators placed calls for each customer. Despite high costs and constant busy signals, waiting lists developed in every city where radio-telephone service was offered. The chief problem was that the F.C.C. would not make enough channels available for a high capacity mobile telephone system. Still, technology and planning moves on, even if bureaucracies do not.

What might have made up an early mobile telephone; equipment is actually unrelated. "A" is the control head, the mechanism placed inside the cab which controls volume and channel selection. "B" is the microphone, no telephone handset or keypad used. "C" is the actual radio gear, the transceiver, which gets built into the trunk. Massive size, weight and bulk. Click here for closeups

In December 1947 Bell Lab scientists circulated a paper amongst themselves describing a prototype cellular system. It would overcome every limitation of the present mobile telephone service. They now knew everything needed for cellular radio, but it would take hundreds of new frequencies, a digital telephone switch, microprocessors, and digital signal processing circuitry to make this dream a reality. One major step toward completing that dream occurred the next year.

On July 1, 1948 AT&T unveiled the transistor, a joint invention of Bell Laboratories scientists William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain. It would revolutionize every aspect of the telephone industry and all of communications. Some say that it was the greatest invention of the 20th century. One engineer remarked, "Asking us to predict what transistors will do is like asking the man who first put wheels on an ox cart to foresee the automobile, the wristwatch, or the high speed generator." The transistor would dependably amplify and switch signals while producing little heat. Equipment size would be reduced and reliability increased. Hearing aids, radios, phonographs, computers, electronic telephone switching equipment, satellites, and moon rockets would all be improved or made possible because of the transistor.

My writing on the transistor / Michael Riordan's writing on the transistor

The first transistor looking as crude, perhaps, as the first telephone. Click here for a slightly larger photo.

Fostering world wide transistor development was a relaxed patent policy by AT&T. Fearing an anti-monopoly lawsuit by the U.S. States Justice department, the Bell System allowed anyone for $25,000 to use its transistor patents. Starting then in the late 1940s, and continuing for twenty years, radio engineers around the world replaced fragile, bulky, high current vacuum tubes with rugged, miniature, low powered transistor circuits. It was not until the mid 1960s that most electronics eliminated tubes and become all solid state. Still, radio advanced in other ways throughout this period.

In 1950 the PRC-6 Handie-Talkie debuted as a replacement to the badly aging World War II Handie-Talkie. The military's first F.M. hand-held radio, the PRC-6 weighed less than its older brother, used less power, and contained fewer tubes. Few saw actual service in the Korean War, with most battlefield communications using World War II equipment. Then, in 1951 an improved backpack or Walkie-Talkie also began production. The PRC-10 had a range of three to five kilometers. Again, owing to limited numbers being made, few were actually deployed to Korea.

The handheld PRC-6 on the left and the backpack PRC-10 (without the backpack that normally contains it) on the right. Photos are from this great radio resource: http://www.armyradio.co.uk (external link), the place to buy used military radio gear.

On January 31, 1954 a 64 year old man wrote a letter to his wife, dressed for work, and walked out of his 13th floor apartment window, plunging to his death. Colonel Edwin Armstrong, the father of modern radio, and the creator of the first F.M. system, had committed suicide. A brilliant but sensitive man, Armstrong allowed the U.S. military to use his patents royalty-free for the duration of World War II. Before that he played a crucial role in communications during the First World War. He pioneered vacuum tube technology, making it practical, and invented radio circuits that transformed the entire communications industry.

Armstrong rightly believed that F.M. was a revolutionary operating system and that it should replace A.M. equipment for broadcasting. Indeed, no technical reason exists for A.M. broadcasting to continue. A.M., with its static, high power requirements, and fading, continues only because of tradition, bureaucracy, and sloth. Tired and despondent after fighting one patent lawsuit after another against industry giants like RCA, his personal fortune spent on promoting and defending F.M., Armstrong finally gave up and killed himself. Every radio today has circuits Armstrong designed. 1954 also marked happier events.

Edwin Armstrong, radio genius.

In October, 1954 the Regency TR-1 became the world's first commercial transistor radio, using Texas Instrument's new silicon based transistors. Built by the little known American firm Industrial Development Engineer Associates, but actually designed by Texas Instruments, it was followed six months later by Japan's first transistor radio, the Sony TR-52, an experimental set never actually released for sale. In 1957 the Sony TR-63 came to America. These transistor radio receivers were important milestones but both radio-telephone and military radio used higher current to transmit than transistors of that era could handle. Transmitting was still a job best left for tubes and an all transistor Handie-Talkie would have to wait.

Regency's TR-1 (1954) on the left, and Sony's TR-63 (1957) on the right

Radio research and development increased in the late 1950s when America entered the Space Race with the former Soviet Union. One great achievement was the integrated circuit by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments in 1958. Putting several dozen transistors on a single silicon chip quickly reduced radio size and weight. In that same year the Bell System petitioned the F.C.C. for more conventional radio-telephone channels. Citizens Band had become more popular but people really wanted to communicate by telephone. Every radio-telephone system AT&T maintained was at capacity and there were no more frequencies to service new customers. Worried they would give more power to the Bell System, which had in effect a monopoly on most wired telephones in America, The F.C.C. did not seriously consider their wireless appeal for ten long years.

In 1962 Motorola introduced a fully transistorized two-way radio. The Handie-Talkie HT200 weighed approximately 1 kilogram and was known affectionately by its users as "The Brick." Shortly thereafter, in 1965, the military got the PRR-9, the first all solid state portable for the armed forces. This VHF equipment received but did not transmit, it's companion, the FM PRT-4 transmitter did that. The PRR-9 clipped onto a soldier's helmet. I don't have a photograph of that model in action, but check out this well dressed warrior from 1963; the principle is the same.

By 1968 the U.S. military was using many new portables in the Vietnam War, including tiny models called survival radios that provided communication between downed fliers and rescue services. The greatest change from previous wars was a decision to make voice and data communications secure if needed, hence all radios became encryption ready from that year on.

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Mobile telephone expert Geoff Fors (external link) comments on the mobile telephone photograph on this page, and the other two images on my Seattle Telephone Museum Page:

"With apologies to the hard working people at the Telephone Museum, the photograph does not depict an old mobile phone, even though it might look like it does."

"The drawer unit (electronics package) is a GE Progress Line BE-33 or WE-33; they look the same, I think this one is a BE. Six volt versions were BA-33 or WA-33. The "B" means Bell System and the "W" means Western Electric. This unit appears to be a BE-33 which is actually a "dispatch" radio made for the Bell System maintenance trucks, and those usually did not have a VS-1 supervisory signalling set (the little stepper decoder). You can see the mostly empty panel inside where the VS-1 normally sits. I have such a radio in the basement. The WE-33 looks the same but came with a Western Electric series 47A head and a VS-1 rotary stepper decoder."

"Sometimes BE-33's were later made into mobile phones by using a Scantlin transistorized decoder which mounted under the car dashboard. The GE Progress Line unit in the photo dates from 1955-58. Bell System radios were for telco maintenance trucks and not true mobile phones. They are usually identified by the white "Bell System" lettering on the case. Only the WE-33 was a true mobile phone. I am not sure if WE-33 Western Electric contract phones said Bell System on the case as well. You would think they would have, but there were some strange protocols at the time."

"The control head above it goes with a Motorola Twin-V conventional two way radio of 1955-57 vintage and has nothing to do with the GE. They are not compatible and were never used together. The mike has nothing to do with any of the other pieces either."

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In 1968 the F.C.C. re-considered the Bell System's ten year old request for 75 MHz of spectrum in the 800 MHz band. The F.C.C. considered it only when waiting lists for radio-telephone service were so backlogged that the government could not ignore them. Yet it would be another eight years before the F.C.C. granted additional spectrum and two years after that before the first trial of a cellular system.

For a much bigger picture of this1AESS master control panel click here

In the mean time, the first digital telephone switches appeared by the mid 1970s. These switches were now quick and smart enough to handle the hundreds and then thousands of simultaneous calls a high capacity mobile telephone system would have to handle. A Western Electric 1AESS is pictured on the right. Microprocessor technology advanced too, decreasing in size and price, increasing in power. Their smaller size let these powerful processors go into not only digital switches but portable equipment like cell phones. Radio prices kept dropping while at the same time capabilities increased.

For more great pictures of various central office switchgear visit this site:
http://www.montagar.com/~patj/phone-switches.htm (external link)

On October 17, 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper for Motorola filed a patent entitled 'Radio telephone system.' It outlined Motorola's first ideas for cellular radio and was given US Patent Number 3,906,166 when it was granted on September 16,1975. In the New York Times photograph above he shows off the earliest handheld model. But it was not until late 1984 that Motorola was allowed to field a commercial cellular telephone system.

For more on the first handheld cellular telephone click here

Modern Citizen's Band transceiver. Operates on 40 channels. Point to point transmission. No connection to the landline telephone network unless manually patched through.

Helped in part by falling electronic prices, America went through a Citizen's Band fad in the mid to late 1970s, with millions buying hand-held and car-mounted two way radios. Such large numbers of people applied for C.B. permits that the F.C.C. could not keep up with the flood of paperwork and consequently dropped all operator license requirements. With no license required and no enforcement of C.B. regulations, Citizens Band ceased being a good way to communicate. Although some truck drivers still use it for highway communications, disturbed people, often shouting obscenities for minutes at a time, now monopolize the C.B. band. But the large number of users showed demand for cellular telephones would be very high. So it was that the first commercial cellular systems were from the beginning a success.

Personal radio spawns dreck. Disco wasn't the only cultural disaster happening in 1978. In that same year Sam Peckinpah produced the abysmal movie Convoy. Subverting the humorous novelty hit Convoy, the movie portrayed desperate people uniting against evil, with C.B. radio as the technology that helped liberate them. Yes, it was as stupid as it sounds.

In 1984 the former Bell System company Ameritech began a cellular system in Chicago, Illinois. Western Electric, Oki Electric, E.F. Johnson and others supplied network equipment and phones. Near Washington, D.C. in that same year another cellular carrier started operating, using Motorola equipment. These were analog systems, sturdy, but featureless compared to today's all digital cellular networks. At first only car-mounted telephones were available, you drove to your local telephone company for installation and service. Portables came out in great number in the mid-1980s.

The first OKI car mounted cellular telephone. Used by Ameritech in the first United States commerical cellular system. Click here for a much larger image

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As their mobiles got smaller and smaller, Motorola cellular telephones featured three major design changes, leading up to the StarTac design of today. The bag, the brick, and the flip proved extremely popular.

Click here for a larger image of the bag phone

A transportable or luggable phone, the bag phone contained a heavy cellular transceiver with a large battery enclosed in a leather bag. Since battery life wasn't good, most people plugged the unit into a car's cigarette lighter and used it while driving. Power output was twice that of the brick, the hand-held cellular phone that borrowed its name from Motorola's first Handie-Talkie. Dwarfing any present hand-held, except perhaps satellite phones, the brick's battery itself was larger than most cell phones on the market today.

Click here for a larger image of the brick phone

When the first digital networks were built Motorola introduced the flip phone, part of their Personal Digital Communicator Series. It could work in analog or digital mode. Many are still being used although the StarTac, introduced in 1996, and now the MicroTac, have since replaced the original flip phone.

Click here for a larger image of the flip phone

For a look at how Ericsson cellular telephones evolved, click here

We discussed how reducing radio size and weight in World War II was less important than the modulation technology hand-helds eventually used: F.M. Today, as every company produces smaller and smaller radios, the technology used to transmit information is the most important development: C.D.M.A. or code division multiple access. Sometimes called spread spectrum or frequency hopping, C.D.M.A., puts bits and pieces of several calls on different frequencies. It's the most efficient technology, allowing more calls in the same spectrum than older digital systems. And where did CDMA start out? Well, you may have guessed the answer.

Spread spectrum was first used during World War II to prevent signals from being jammed. By rapidly changing frequencies the Allies found the Germans could not interfere with their transmissions. This immunity to interference is yet another reason for C.D.M.A.'s great popularity, indeed, the entire wireless world is embracing this technology. When GSM based systems evolve they will use it, as well as the next generation of I-Mode. This new yet old operating method reveals again the important and continuing link between civilian and military communications.

Patent illustration 2,292,387, for a Secret Communication System, utilizing spread spectrum. Co-filed by the movie star Hedy Lamar

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How a small group of radar pioneers won the Second World War and launched a technological revolution
by Robert Buderi, Simon & Schuster (C) 1996 Robert Buderi All rights reserved.

BOOK EXCERPT, CHAPTER ONE

The Most Valuable Cargo

"When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one to America in1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores." --James Phinney Baxter III, Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development

The black japanned metal deed box could just be seen above thewartime throngs on the shoulder of a railway porter. The small container bobbed along frustratingly out of reach, as Eddie Bowen zigzagged throughthe crowd in hot pursuit. Only moments before, sometime around 8:15 themorning of August 29, 1940, the Welshman had arrived at London's EustonStation with the box safely in his possession. Innocently, Bowen hadhanded it to the porter while gathering up his remaining luggage, thenwatched helplessly as the man headed off to find the 8:30 train to Liverpoolwithout waiting for his customer.

As he struggled to keep the porter in sight, Bowen would not have drawn much attention from busy Londoners. In stature and build he blended into a crowd and would have seemed like any other young man in a hurry. Only his face set him slightly apart. Wavy hair cut short crowned a wide forehead and jaw and gave his head a squared-off look. Old photographs often show an infectious grin spanning the broad tableau. But one could also imagine the weathered visage locked in determination--and that August morning Bowen had reason to be concerned. Just five days short of the war's first anniversary, Britain faced one of her most desperate hours. Bombs were falling nightly on Liverpool, Nazi armies ringed the country from the Norwegian coasts down to France, and an invasion was expected within weeks. As Bowen knew, the seemingly ordinary solicitor's deed box--now visible, now not in Euston's morning rush--held the power to change the course of the conflict.

Inside lay nothing less than the military secrets of Britain--virtually every single technological item the country could bring to bear on the war. Had some freak accident burst the lock off the chest, the platform would have been awash in blueprints and circuit diagrams for rockets, explosives, superchargers, gyroscopic gunsights, submarine detection devices, self- sealing fuel tanks, even the initial germs of the jet engine and the atomic bomb.

Among these treasures, nothing carried the all-pervasive importance of the resonant cavity magnetron, Britain's most closely guarded secret. The black box contained one of the first 12 production copies of the mysterious device--probably the only piece of hardware it sheltered. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, the magnetron looked like a clay pigeon used in skeet shooting, with a few wire leads thrown in. Yet, it could spit out pulses of microwave radio energy--on a wavelength of about 10 centimeters--so powerful conventional scientific wisdom still put anything like it years off.

The magnetron was a radar transmitter, one with the potential to bolster British military capabilities almost across the board and give the country the upper hand in what already seemed like a technological war: no one in the country knew it, but the Germans were generally ahead in the radar race until the device arrived on the scene. More immediately to the point, as Bowen chased the porter across the Euston platform, the strange copper disk offered a way to invigorate the strapped British defenses that had been coping with Luftwaffe bombing onslaughts the past six weeks--a softening up before Hitler's planned invasion. Radar, or radio distance finding as Bowen's countrymen called the technology, formed the backbone of these defenses. Imposing towers up to 350 feet tall--the Chain Home station network--lined the country's south and east coasts to provide the only effective early warning of German attacks. These electronic sentries operated round-the-clock, rain or shine, sending out pulses of radio energy and picking up the faint echo from enemy aircraft more than 100 miles away. Radar was basically all the outgunned country had that enabled Fighter Command to husband its too-thin air resources. Without it, planners would have to consider keeping standing patrols aloft, wasting fuel, needlessly fatiguing pilots, and risking being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Magnetrons represented the next crucial step--a leap, really--in the evolution. The Chain Home stations worked well in daylight, when a pilot's sharp eyes could correct for the several-mile error range inherent in their long operating wavelengths of between 10 and 13 meters. But to cut losses, the Germans were widely expected to move soon to concentrated night attacks, when visibility was slashed dramatically. The British had tried to supplement the chain by installing short-range systems inside fighter aircraft--the idea being once the main network got the interceptors close, airborne radars could carry them the rest of the way--but these remained clumsy and inaccurate. Only the magnetron seemed certain to keep the British well ahead of the game. Its 10-centimeter transmissions ran a mere fifteenth those of standard airborne radars. Fitted into nightfighters, such a device would generate sharper pulses in a tightly concentrated parcel of energy that would fan out far less during the brief journey to an enemy aircraft and back, making it immensely easier for pilots to home in on their quarry even on the darkest nights.

That, though, was only the beginning. Although the magnetron had been invented just eight months earlier by two physicists at the University of Birmingham, its portability and versatility soon summoned visions of putting the beleaguered nation on the offensive. Aircraft equipped with centimeter radar might pick out U-boat periscopes rising under cover of darkness. Lancasters and other bombers could use the extremely short waves the magnetron produced to illuminate the way through the thick cloud cover obscuring Hitler's forces and factories on the European continent, keeping planes flying on days the Royal Air Force would n