First-Hand:The Telephone
Submitted by A. Michael Noll
January 21, 2025
Many decades ago, a telephone and a telephone call were very special. Growing up, we had a small table in the corner of the dining room for just the telephone instrument. There was a chair, and the telephone directory was kept under the table.
A telephone call was indeed very special. We learned of deaths – and marriages and births. I discussed my homework over the phone with fellow students. I answered the telephone always giving my name that it was I speaking. The quality of the voice told me much about how the other person was feeling: sad, happy, ill, or angry. It was as if I could “see” the other person – decades before today’s video calls.
Most people had a party service, in which two users shared a single line. If you picked up the telephone handset to make a call, you would hear the other party speaking if they were already on a call. The etiquette was not to listen, or gossip about what might have been overheard. If there was an emergency, you could interrupt and ask for the line to be released.
Today, telephones are smart telephones, also functioning as a camera and as a text messenger, and also as a computer for World Wide Web access to graphic and text information. Conversations occur while driving the car, or walking the aisles in the supermarket. It seems that communication is available everywhere, anywhere, and at any time.
With caller identification and call waiting, I can be suddenly told there is another call, and placed on hold – without even being asked. Clearly the new call is more important than speaking to me. With speakerphone, I am never told who else might be there physically, listening to the conversation. In the old days, it was considered polite to ask before placing a call on the speaker, and to then inform of who else was there listening.
It seems that telephone etiquette is gone. Calls go astray in the middle of a conversation, frequently because the user of the smart phone inadvertently pushed the wrong button on the screen. Sometimes I receive a call made by the smart phone itself with no one there itself because a button was inadvertently pushed in a back pocket.
Oh well. I guess I have become an old-timer remembering those good old days. Later in my career, I would write some text books about the technology of the telephone and the telephone network.
Working at the Executive Office of the President in the early 1970s, I was an advocate for the packet switching of the then ARPANET, which would evolve into today’s Internet. Working at AT&T Marketing in the late 1970s, I was a champion of text communication, which would evolve into today’s texting. So, I guess I was more than just an old-timer clinging to the past. But as the future evolved, some things were lost – the good old days.