The Unspin Room: Hello and goodbye, operator
The anthropomorphic face of a an early Western Electric party line phone.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY DALTON DELAN
“Beechwood 4–5789, you can call me up” — two minutes and 13 seconds of pure sonic joy, recorded by the Marvelettes on May 19, 1962, with co-writer Marvin Gaye drumming its propulsive rhythm, released on July 11, soon reaching №7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Its use of a telephone exchange set it solidly in the tradition of nearly a century, since Hungarian engineer Tivador Puskas ventured this notion to his boss, Thomas Edison, in 1876, the same year Alexander Graham Bell received the original patent on a telephone. Two years later, the first phone exchange linked 21 subscribers in New Haven. When the Marvelettes ruled the radio waves, I could easily remember our phone number because it was Templeton 1–0080.
Despite Bell’s patent, the phone boasts many fathers. British physicist Robert Hooke strung wire between two poles in 1667, carrying sound via mechanical vibrations, much as we did as kids with two cups and a string. The telegraph linked the waystations of the old West. But by 1904 there were 3 million phones in the U.S. connected by manual exchanges. Exporting our expertise, the president of AT&T dialed England in 1927. Spot of tea, guvnor?
“One Ringy-Dingy!” We all remember Lily Tomlin’s star turn as Ernestine the switchboard operator on Rowan & Martin’s “Laugh-In” in the late ’60s; her nasal signature became part of the lexicon. It encapsulated an era in which the human voice, whether a two-way street or incorporating strangers via the intercession of the belles of the switchboard and party phone lines, connected us and dyed the fabric of our lives. The ringing phone in the middle of the night. Who died? The request for a date celebrated by the Marvelettes, and a wacky hit a year later from Allan Sherman, with his plaintive call from camp in “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.” The phone was a pillar of our emotional architecture.
The stories we tell define us, and the phone played a central role in not only song but TV and movies. Dial M for Murder. I carved out the sole of one of my boots in an unsuccessful attempt to fit a rotary dial into it like Maxwell Smart’s shoe-phone. The now-unmentionable filmmaker Woody Allen, back when he made us laugh before becoming fodder for multipart Netflix crime dissection — a tawdry sickness of the current crop of celebrity slumming — created a filmic trope by citing the times at which he could be reached at a succession of phone booths. Check out all the iconic and telephonic street hardware in his movie “Manhattan.” Yet you’ll look in vain for Clark Kent to change into Superman in a booth in the kitschy TV series; although the comic books had him donning his cape in those confined quarters back in 1942, it is so much in our heads that we imagine it even when it isn’t there.
In 1973, a manager at Motorola called AT&T on a cellular device, and the migration to mobility began. Remember bulky car phones and pagers clipped to your belt? Seems eons ago. While on this side of the pond there isn’t much to miss about phone booths reeking of drunken necessity and discarded syringes, in Britain the slow death of the iconoclastic red telephone box on the corner, a fixture since the 1920s, seemed to sap the defining color from London streets. Now, untethered from cords, we are instead tethered to work and reachability 24/7. The barriers between day and evening are gone. In our “Jetsons” world, the smartphone is an everything machine, combining hand-held computer, cellphone, digital camera and internet access. Soon it may zoom ahead to microwaving your hot dog or reading your mind. Patent it, Mr. Bell!
When it was Blackberry or bust, I was happy because my secure synchronicity with the dwellers of the wings of the White House enabled me to communicate when I needed help onsite; the only place the Canadian marvel needed to be parked was when staff entered the Situation Room, just in case they had Putin in their pocket. But all too soon the physical keyboard of my trusty handheld gave way to the slick wonders of Blackberry’s competitors, and it was blackened toast. To keep me from freefalling into the future, my savvy mother-in-law Susan sent me an old-style handset to plug into my mobile, restoring the heft of a real phone.
Why even term it a telephone? Voice calling, though it got a mini-boost during pandemic isolation, has generally fallen among millennials and Gen Z to a sop used to palliate the ‘rents. Printed words, acronyms and emojis own the phone. We can reach each other all the time, so we no longer need to hear a human voice. We can tell Mr. Bell to take a silent bow.
Dalton Delan can be followed on Twitter @UnspinRoom. He has won Emmy, Peabody and duPont-Columbia awards for his work as a television producer.
