The Old Private Line Newsletter, Number 3, April, 1999
April 1, 1999
mailto:privline@pacbell.net
Greetings once again. Thanks for subscribing. Hope you've all been well the last month. And I hope you checked in today for the April Fools' edition of TelecomWriting.com's homepage. I will leave it up a while longer:
I. The Pleasure Telephone
II. Timelines and Short History Pieces
III. The Wireless Basics Article
IV. What's The Best Wireless System? -- A Good Read
V. Encryption Basics
VI. What Do You Want In Telephone Clip Art?
VII. The Ericsson and Qualcomm agreement
VIII. Tracking TelecomWriting.com
IV. The Last Manual Cord Switchboard In The Bell System
X. Major Cellular History Article!
XI. Book Recommendations
XII. Notes On History Research
XIII. Post Pay Lives
XIV. Telephone Science Fair Project Wins Blue Ribbon
XV. Chickswithguns.com
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1. Remember the pleasure telephone I described in a previous newsletter? I stated that it was more a microphone than a telephone. Wrong. The pleasure telephone was used to broadcast events over the telephone, preceding radio broadcasting and in many cases continuing after it became developed. Here's the original e-mail I received:
Dear Tom
I thank you for your prompt reply. I found out a little more. The system was also known as the "electrophone" which first was used in Leeds(?) in 1880 by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) and later in London in one-offs for the Prince of Wales.
It seemed very widespread in Budapest in the 1890s. The company was a commercial concern which was wound up in the 1920s after Marconi's Wireless was started. I enclose an 1890s line drawing of children listening to it.
Yours, Colin Coffey
I posted the picture to TelecomWriting.com where you can look it up.
http://www.TelecomWriting.com/Clipart/Children.jpg
2. But I was still confused about it until I discovered Megan Gallagher's piece:
Yet, even after Bell introduced the two-way telephone and abandoned his idea of radio telephony, subscribers clung tenaciously to it. As late as 1890, Vice President E.J. Hall of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company described a plan to provide music for all telephone subscribers: Thus a family, club, or hotel may be regaled with the choicest airs from their favorite operas...and the effect will be as real and enjoyable as though the performers were actually present in the apartment (Briggs, 44).
Telephone operators were often the first to learn about recent events and transmit news about crises like floods, fires, missing persons reports, man-wanted bulletins, and accounts of recent crimes ( Martin, 145). Soon, customers began to expect such news reports when calling the central telephone switch. Operators at the Philadelphia Bell Telephone Co. began giving callers round-the-clock news summaries with information provided by the local newspaper, the North American (Aronson, 33).
In Budapest, Hungary, an enterprising telephone company went even further, introducing a telephone newspaper in 1898 which provided subscribers with current events, music and theatrical skits ( Aronson, 33). For many, such services were far more valuable than the conversations one could conduct by phone. As telephone usage spread throughout the countryside by 1894 through farmers cooperative lines, the operator became the isolated farmer s only access to the outside world. In the early years of its existance, the telephone was much more than a way to communicate with others. Bell s invention became a combined newspaper, concert hall and theater for the thousands who used it daily.
http://sparc20-1.unixlab.virginia.edu/~ams4k/enwr201/connect/megan.html#cites
April 21, 2001: Link now dead!:-(
By Megan Gallagher quoting
Briggs, Asa. The Pleasure Telephone. The Social Impact of the Telephone. ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge, Massachusetts: the MIT Press, 1977. (41-48).
and
Aronson, Sidney H. Bell s Electrical Toy. The Social Impact of the Telephone. ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge, Massachusetts: the MIT Press, 1977. (18-33).
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II. I Love Timelines and Short History Pieces:
3. AT&T timeline:
http://www.att.com/press/0595/950508.csb.html
Another time line with lots on the law and the FCC:
http://www.technologylaw.com/techlaw/telephony.html
April 21, 2001: Link now dead!:-(
Lengthy although somewhat spotty history of GTE:
http://www.gte.com/aboutgte/organization/history/index.html
April 21, 2001: Link now dead!:-(
Here's something nice from Siemens:
http://www.icn.siemens.com/customer/9704/11.html
October 10, 2003: Link now dead!:-(
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IV. The Wireless Basics Article
4. Been working away on the digital wireless article. Tough going. I'm bogged down with the IS-136 page but it should be semi-completed in two days or so. I'm also making small changes to many, many pages every week. These pages, though, have been completely rewritten and I kind of like them:
http://www.TelecomWriting.com/PCS/channels.html
http://www.TelecomWriting.com/PCS/Framesandlayers.htm
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IV. What's The Best Wireless System? -- A Good Read
5. I'm often asked what wireless technology works best. That depends on what you need, where you live, and what carrier you use. If you don't need a bunch of fancy features, conventional analog cellular still works great, with better coverage outside large cities. (All cellular phones default to analog, if you are shopping.) All digital PCS systems works well if you need their features and you stay within large towns and built-up areas. TDMA or CDMA? I think most CDMA networks like Sprints are still not built out, with more dropped calls happening than TDMA networks like AT&Ts. But your coverage depends on the local infrastructure -- how well your carrier has supplied enough base stations and antennas to cover the area. And then there is the local carrier. For a great, informative read on service and coverage today, read this article by David Willis:
http://www.networkcomputing.com:80/1007/1007colwillis.html
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V. Encryption Basics
6. Puzzled by encryption? So am I. But try this article written by Rich Adams for private line Number 11. It's just a text file but I think if you read it two or three times you'll have a good start on understanding the much more complicated encryption material on the web. It's the clearest short article I've yet read on the subject:
http://www.privateline.com/issues/pl.No11.html#anchor7009337
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VI. What Do You Want In Telephone Clip Art?
7. Lots of people look through my telephone clip art collection but they don't check with me too often. The question is -- what images do you want? Old phones? New phones? Line art? Photos? Let me know.
mailto:privline@pacbell.net
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VII. The Ericsson and Qualcomm agreement
8. Ericsson and Qualcomm last week agreed to drop lawsuits against each other. It was a very important day in telecom. Litigation threatened to postpone or derail many third generation wireless systems based on spread spectrum. Europeans favored a scheme called wideband and Qualcomm favored a narrowband technology. Wideband CDMA is a different way to make CDMA work. The original version, called IS-95 in the States, was developed by Qualcomm and uses only 1.25 MHz for each radio channel. Wideband CDMA channels are, well, wider. So what was the difference?
9. European wireless and GSM operators wanted to use CDMA for many things. But they did not want want to pay licensing fees to Qualcomm for its technology. So they came out with their own system which used many methods as existing IS-95. Just wider channels with a few small differences. In truth, wideband CDMA existed before Qualcomm, however, Qualcomm has a bunch of patents that may or may not have covered what the wideband CDMA folks were using.
10. The argument was really about money and about who pays whom, not about superior technology. But to differ themselves each side put out amazing amounts of confusing material claiming their approach _was_ better. That's going to end. We're going to see Ericsson pushing through a single approach with options that companies can elect to take advantage of. Ericsson produces both TDMA and CDMA equipment. This agreement positions them to become the driving force in telecom today, behind only Lucent and AT&T. But coming on fast. Here's the press release URL:
http://www.ericsson.se/pressroom/19990325-0007.html
April 21, 2001: Link now dead!:-(
I'm a big fan of Ericsson. Please check out their whole site for great information.
Here's an introductory newspaper article on third generation and the coming universal mobile telephony system:
http://www.iht.com:80/IHT/TECH/tek032599.html
April 21, 2001: Link now dead!:-(
And here's another article on the kind of products we'll see with 3G:
http://cnn.com:80/TECH/ptech/9903/23/newbreed.tech.lat/
April 21, 2001: Link now dead!:-(
Editor's note on April 21, 2001. I am so disgusted with people pulling good information off their servers that I will start archiving articles, properly credited, of course, that I like at TelecomWriting.com. Removing the history of technology is a greater crime than any possible copyright infringement. . .
VIII. Tracking TelecomWriting.com
11. Here's a cool URL to check out the traffic going through TelecomWriting.com. Turn on Java and turn off virtual memory:
http://w114.hitbox.com/Stats?hb=W97903244280
October 10, 2003: Link now dead!:-(
12. It's a great tool for anyone with a website. It gives me amazing statistics and information: hits, home page impressions, domain names, countries, words people used in a search engine to get here, and on and on. Just to let you know, these trackers don't know who your are. No one knows your e-mail address unless you give it out. That's a feature of the Internet. All a tracker knows is the internet service provider you use. They do gather other information as you will see but none of it can be tracked to you since there is no specific e-mail address along with the info.
IV. The Last Manual Cord Switchboard In The Bell System
13. Tom:
A friend is asking me what city was the last to convert from the switchboard to the rotary dial phone. I read the history of the telephone up to the 1970's but I saw nothing that would indicate this.
Tim:
14. The last manual cord switchboard in the Bell System was pulled out of service in 1978 (!) on Santa Catalina Island, California, twenty two miles offshore from Los Angeles. It was replaced by a 3ESS, the first Bell switch, incidentally, to be shipped by barge. The city would have been Avalon. That's according to the June, 1978 Bell Laboratories Record. The original _may_ have been a toll board for long distance calls so that locals could have had dial service before.
As an aside, the manual switchboard was created before The Bell System was born, yet this simple switching technology came within six years of outliving the most advanced telephone company on earth.
But read much on the truly last manual exchange in American service by going to the telephone history series --->
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X. Major Cellular History Article!; Call for Comments
15. I've written a detailed article on U.S. commercial radio-telephone service history. I think it's the most detailed on the web; it goes along with my larger wireless article. AT&T and IEEE documents were used along with the web to find a goodly amount of information. It's some of my best writing. Let me know what you think:
http://www.privateline.com/PCS/history.htm
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XI. Book Recommendations
XII. Notes On History Research
17. I got an e-mail recently from someone looking into fax machine history. It led me to think about researching today. I use the web to get leads on history but then I research hardcopy sources for confirmation, citing the earliest, most authoritative books I can find. Many people now give up investigating something if it is not on the web. To some extent that acceptable for the newest news on technology, since much on the net is more current than library texts, but for telephone history it is just the opposite, with little authoritative, original work being electronically published. And few good telephone history books have been scanned and put on the net. So what's a person to do? Get to the library!
18. Spend a day at your local library to confirm or investigate points you've developed. Good research takes time. Besides your local library, from which you can do inter-library loans to get the books you want, many colleges offer "Associate member" programs to non-students. You can check out books for a year or a semester. These borrowing privileges usually cost from $40 to $60 dollars.
19. You'll find you needn't cite me or encyclopedias for most things, instead, you'll read books I used for my writing. I would prefer, in fact, that people not cite my history writing alone, instead they should confirm my points with hardcopy sources, phrase the subject in their own words, then cite both electronic and hardcopy sources. Deciding what books to quote or source gets tough. Commonly cited texts, which combine scores of footnotes, a good index, and an author who has written extensively on telephones before, are logical choices to refer to.
XIII. Post Pay Lives
20. I visited Northern California's Clear Lake area last Saturday, about 100 miles northwest of Sacramento. Along the way I passed through the Capay Valley. The Evans Telephone Company serves this rural area. Tiny towns like Brooks, Rumsey and Guinda lie along State Highway 16, next to beautiful Cache Creek.
At Brooks I checked out the Indian Casino. Gambling money has made the previously dilapidated rancheria quite prosperous. While the casino didn't interest me much, the convenience store payphone next door certainly did. It was a post pay phone, although the Evans Telephone Company calls it semi-postpay. Its number is (916) 796-9997, although you get a "Can't complete your call as dialed" recording when you phone it.
21. I wrote about post pay in privateline. No. 1. It's a simple payphone scheme that works differently than dial tone first operation, the nearly universal North America method. In post pay you remove the handset, wait for dial tone, then deposit your money (20 cents) after your party answers. No coins needed to get a connection like in dial tone first. Coins aren't returned since you don't deposit them unless you get a connection.
Further up the road the fun continued.
22. At the Junction of Highway 16 and 20 a public phone serviced by Citizen's Communication sat just off the junction. It had just a handset and a keypad, allowing only operator assisted and credit card calls. Citizens may not have wanted coin service since rural phones suffer from constant vandalism. Like in the case of the pedestal's faceplate, which was missing. Revealing, hold your breath, another handset! In the rat's nest of wiring was another handset connected into the line with modular jacks. I do not know its purpose or if this is a common arrangement with Citizens.
It's fun finding these rural oddities; e-mail if you have a story to share. With these two discoveries I am back into a telephone mood and looking forward to a good week of writing.
XIV. Telephone Science Fair Project Wins Blue Ribbon
Tom,
23. My daughter built a small phone company using three shoe boxes, two handsets, cords and modular adapters, two on/off switches, two- small 6 volt lamps, two modular jacks, 14" modular cord and two 6 volt lantern batteries.
24. The two mod jacks were cut into the top of one box with inside wire going out to the other two. She cut two half moons in each of these boxes to act as a cradle. The switches were wired between the + side of the battery and the handsets and the lights were wired common to the jacks. This allowed the jack box to act as a switchboard.
25. When one handset was lifted and the switch thrown the corresponding light was illuminated signaling her to patch phone 1 to phone 2. Of course it wouldn't work unless these shabby boxes were covered in the wrapping paper of her choice. She was excited about doing this project, it seems eleven year olds still enjoy this stuff. It was simple enough she could follow and understand and then build the thing. She even drew a schematic of it. Best of all she received a blue ribbon and her and her project go on to the regionals to be held at Notre Dame soon. If others might be interested in this project please feel free to share.
Thanks,
Bob
Best wishes and I will see you soon. Remember to check out the site today to see the April Fools edition.
