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Breaking news: New Telephone Service Coming Soon! - 1940's edition [1]

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Date: 2022-08-28

Where would we be without cell phones?

Kids these days will never understand what it was like to have a telephone in your home. When it was invented in 1875 it was in a fairly crude form, but by the 1900’s it had been refined into a “candlestick” model. You simply pick the receiver up from the hook, put it to your ear, maybe tapped the hook a couple times to catch the operator’s attention and when she said, “Number please”, you spoke into the transmitter (microphone) on the “stick” and told her who you wanted to call. The operator made the connection on her switchboard, and you could talk. Every town had a bank of switchboards and several operators depending on the population of course. This “new-fangled” gadget ushered in a new age of long-distance instantaneous communications.

The next improvement was pulse dialing, the idea was to relieve the operators of some of the stress involved in placing calls. People could simply dial the number they wanted and electronic switching equipment would make the connection automatically. Operators could still be reached by simply dialing “0” and could help you find a number and connect you or in emergencies, connect you to the appropriate departments like fire or police. Operators also did a lot of suicide prevention as just a “normal” part of their job, a friendly voice when a person needed one. Operators were real heroes.

The next two videos were put out to inform people about the switch to dial-up and how they pulled it off. When they went to push button (tone) dialing they still had the pulse dialing service at the same time and I haven’t found a video about that yet.

Now, mobile phones were another story and one more step to cell phones. The equipment was expensive and took a lot of room. If you had a mobile phone in your car, you didn’t have a lot of space in your trunk. You probably had your charging system and your battery beefed up to handle the extra electrical load of all the vacuum tubes and transformers in your trunk. I’ll let the video explain it.

Of course, our modern cell phones wouldn’t exist without the invention of the computer. This is from 1976, listen to what the guy says in the first minutes of the video, his predictions were pretty much on the mark! They touched on robotics and AI as well.

OK, I confess to a click-bait title for the diary, but if this was the 1950’s, it would have been correct. I happened across a site that is dedicated to preserving these old videos and they have a lot of them. You can see for yourself at www.youtube.com/… If you like stuff from the Pre-WWII era and the post-war era, you will love this site.

That’s all for now, until next time, Be safe!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/28/2118551/-Breaking-news-New-Telephone-Service-Coming-Soon-1940-s-edition

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