All the times i watched this show back when it first ran, i never noticed that they left so many word stumbles in the final show. I still think it was a great show. Those stumbles make me like the show even more all these years larer.
My father worked for Southwestern Bell from the mid 60's to the late 90's. My step mother was an operator from the early 70's to the mid 80's. The stories they have about working for Bell are crazy. My father installed and maintained the phone systems in the central offices that calls were routed through. Those systems went from taking up entire buildings in the 60's to less than a room in those same buildings. I can't imagine how much they've changed since he retired.
I've probably watched this episode a couple dozen or more times, and I love it now just as much as I did the first time I saw it on TV....years ago. The style, mannerisms and content are second to none!
Ohhhh laddie I was there. I was there during the days of the Queen mum and the ten children she held over her head and the ten meters of snow. I was there during the days of the lightning house my dear children. This was the on the telly mind you. Ohhhh my dear lads, I remember the when the Ents roamed the streets of Yorkshire and lit the lamps at night. All will never be the same. All will not be the same save the wobbly bits of the telly.
Great fun to watch. I remember one of my lecturers used to say that there is always something new to learn and when you lose that concept you cease to be a good engineer. Today a modern linesman can be working on lines carrying voice, data and a combination of the two such as broadband. I have spent my entire life working with electronics and spent over 35 years in the alarm, IT and telecoms industries. When I worked for Openreach (the company that looks after all the wiring and interconnections between customers and exchanges) I helped in the testing of the Redcare and dualcom systems that gives you a secure line that alerts the alarm receiving centre even if the phone line is cut. Shortly before I retired due to health problems I worked as a broadband engineer visiting customers to rectify faults that are very rare when you consider that there are millions of lines out there that can be sending and receiving information at eye watering speeds. Today all that enters your home is a pair of twisted wires that have a huge bandwidth allowing someone to be having a conversation with someone hundreds or thousands of miles away whilst you are in the next room on the internet and browsing information from a server on the other side of the world all of this provided by two copper wires........ Of course there is an eye boggling range of equipment between you and the other end that could be linking you via a satellite in orbit, a pulsed light going down a fibre optic the diameter of a human hair or a microwave radio link sending data over large distances. It is hard to imagine the size and complexity of the system we all take for granted. I found this program very interesting and it took me back to some great times as an engineer. That is the wonderful thing about technology. It is always changing, evolving and becoming more efficient by the day. There is always something new to learn. There is a working strowger telephone exchange near Wolverton not far from Milton Keynes that is worth a visit. It is a great place or take the kids for the day. The Museum is here - www.miltonkeynesmuseum.org.uk/ or they may be one near to you in the uk. Have a look here for information - www.connected-earth.com/ What a great program. I really enjoyed it. Next time you post on facebook or ring up your Aunt Joan have a think about the billions of wires, digital links and the engineering that has gone into making something so complex into something we all take for granted !!!
@jeff Webb There is an independent telco in the UK using only coax (50ohm) that provide broadband internet and interactive tv. They use DOCSIS and have just moved to V3 that has better TDM and increased bandwidth. I don't know but I expect it is much the same technology running cable modems and TV in the US. Everything is moving over to fibre now though both on the last mile and exchanges. Coax connection was used extensively between exchanges since around the same time period but now is normally used exclusively for private wire or leased line links. Coax between exchanges is being phased out but when you consider the bandwidth you can squish down a coax with multiple rf ranges and multiplexing I cant help but feel that in the UK we missed a trick by not using coax on last mile as much as we could and that's a shame. I suspect that as the RF nodes converge at a cabinet when it is converted to fibre the potential for bottlenecks at that point was to high. As I am sure you are aware the cabinet equipment was and still is wallet numbingly expensive so they would rather converge with sub nodes, multiplex and send on to the termination cabinets to keep the costs down. Its rather sad as the UK has always been slow on the uptake of new comms technology. Mainly down to our penny pinching draconian government I suspect.
The perforated tape machine he showed was still used in the later 1970's by the UPI (United Press International) and the Telex machine which I operated both of them and could read the holes in the tapes. You typed into a machine, had no read out of what you were typing except for the perforated tape that came out of the machine. Then you ran that through a reader. The UPI machine sent perforated tape messages to the newspaper I worked at before anyone knew about it and we then printed the messages (NEWS) that day for the evening paper. Quite a fascinating job and I got pretty proficient at reading the tapes. The Telex was similar but different in that I sent messages over seas and the recipient would respond almost like a modern day text message except it was a tape with holes in it.
I remember watching these on basic cable in the US while attending my local university. I wouldn't say they are the sole reason why I majored in physics and electrical engineering, but they certainly didn't hurt. This is still one of the better educational series out there.
Just since this program was made in 1991 telephones have changed more than they did from when they were invented to this program!! Wonder if Tim could have foreseen that!
They have remained essentially the same. If you're referring to 'smart phones', they are a fully portable computer system with built-in telephony capability.
@jeff Webb i have 23 working stations, Western Electric phones and a few payphones in my home, and have no land line anymore. A dedicated computer runs Asterisk PBX and a channel bank allows dial pulse to work with the VOIP servixes I use. Even a bluetooth cell phone dock allows me to talk without having to look for the hard to find smartphone.
Absolutely brilliant, priceless!! Isn't it interesting how the telegraph (digital) morphed into the telephone (analog), & now, the telephone is morphing into a mobile web-connected computer node with video camera - for want of a better description - (digital).
Something which isn't mentioned here is that Strowger's automatic telephone exchange required four wires to the exchange. One wire was the "common ground" for the other three wires. As I understand it, one wire of the three was for sounds and for ringing the bell while the other two wires had simple on-off keys similar to Morse Code keys which were tapped a number of times to send the "units" and "tens" to dial the number. Obviously, Strowger never thought of having more than 100 telephones in a single system. Later improvements meant that all the signals could be sent through a single pair of wires, but telephone systems were generally still wired using 4-core cable inside the home right up until the advent of Voice Over IP which in some countries has almost totally replaced the old telephone network. The widespread use of VOIP could be thought of as the end of an era for the Plain Old Telephone network.
Excellent. It's interesting that we still call those wooden posts in the street "telegraph poles". I remember the days when you had to ask someone if they "were on the phone", now we just assume that everybody has at least one telephone. When I worked as a service engineer the GPO installed a jack socket in my bedroom so I could take the phone upstairs when I was on call at night.
I loved those old analog cell phones. You could eavesdrop on them with a radio scanner and hear some pretty interesting conversations and play pranks on the users. Sometimes you could hear famous people or government officials on them and prank them too.
...and FFW to 2019. - look what telephone did. The planet became a smaller place because of instant access to information on amazing technology, we never dreamt of just two-three decades ago. Mindblowing
The massive array at 16 minutes is now geriatric tech, likely replaced by wee tiny boxes in a closet somewhere. Brilliant show. Good info, intelligently presented. And not a 800-pound bride, arctic truck driver, or knife-making feller in sight.
@jeff Webb Yeah, plus the melodramatic acting, I cant stomach that as well. Plus, odd thing, I thought it was obvious that scenes in some documentaries, like that Air Crash Investigation was staged, to give the public a rough idea how it was. (there are such scenes, but then you can see they are real, crappy shots, fast movements, etc.) It boggles my mind that ppl think there was a professional camera crew at every location directly after the crash. Trump is that man! (that will push us to WW3 that is)
I remember when the Discovery Channel and TLC ran programs like these rather than pseudo-"reality" shows like "American Chopper" or "Moonshiners." No point in showing anything educational. :-(
Don't educate the population, it just makes them restless. Better to keep their bellies full and their minds empty. Make (insert country name) great again!
it may sound daft but i miss the sound to this day it had life or soul to it the exchange would get busy and it would get quiet it kinda breathed in cycles
@@kiwitrainguy yep remember when you would rush to the phone to see who rang now ..... stuff it if it's important they will ring again, and remembering numbers off by heart like the national anthem.
Many people that i tell this story to dont believe me, but when i was a young boy in the 50s, our village had crank phones up until 1959 when we got the dial system, we had an operator in the central part of town, her name was Mrs Peris, she had the office in her home, i think owned bye the phone company, when you wanted to call someone you cranked the little handle whitch was right where the dial should be, picked up the receiver , and the operator said NUMBER PLEASE, you told her the number, and she connected you, making a long distance cal could be quite the ordeal,
We did not get a phone installed until the late 60s in the UK, I remember the operator saying "Number please" and you gave the name of the exchange followed by a four digit number. Our exchange name was "Hillside" being the exchange used for North Finchley in London.
Don't forget the 40/60 make break ratio of the dial that drives everything. Imagine a Class 4 / 5 Central Office with 65,000 lines. Fully integrated digital system.
Looks like production date 1990. A lot concerning telephony has not changed all that much, but there are very few electro-mechanical central office switches still in use. Funny how I had completely forgotten about the shoe phone; probably a collectors item, though there are fewer and fewer homes where you could plug one it!
I’ve worked for 40 years for the phone company. Seen a lot of changes . It a dying industry most employees have been layer off. Sad to see it all implode do to technology
I wonder how Tim Hunkin's Secret Life Of The Smartphone would have gone? I guess it would have ended with... _And electronics have progressed even further to the point where, in something as thin as a notepad, there's still enough room for not only a radio receiver and transmitter, but several operating on many different frequencies to connect to cellular telephone networks, many means of connecting to the internet, to cordless devices such as Bluetooth headsets. In this slim package there is a large bright colour display, camera on the front and the back and a rather powerful and versatile general purpose computer._ _It's both miraculous and rather unremarkable compared to many millions of these tiny computers in the possession of ordinary people across the world._
This sure reminds me of my nineteen eighties navy electrician times. In the early years starters for heavy duty electrical run machinery had small liquid pots to control the time contacts were connected, by the time I left the starters had multi control bds. The idea was just swap a bd out if it failed, not so smart 500 miles at sea.
Though most of these amazing inventions that we find so indispensable today have their roots way back in the mid to late 19th century, we must remember: it was (and still is!) the "Rich folks" that got (and still get) to enjoy them first! The poor folks had to do without basics like electricity and telephones for a long time. While the truly "Wealthy" enjoyed them right from the start. My own Grandfather, born in 1898, never used a telephone until he was an adult in his mid 20's! And never had one in his home before the mid 1950's! My Mother, born in 1930, grew to adulthood, about age 19, before ever living in a home with electricity or indoor plumbing! And this was in the northeastern United States 🇺🇸. Not far from the big cities of Boston and New York. Other family members had jobs delivering ICE 🧊 right up into the mid 1930's. So, though the "Technology" was there, often for decades, the ordinary "Working Class" folks just couldn't afford it!
@@simonruszczak5563 There was also teletype, more often head of as RTTY (radio teletype) but it began at the point he was talking about where telegraph overflowed the transmission speed. My dream, as a mid 90's teenager was to persuade a z80 (zx81/spectrum) to decode RTTY. Sadly I didn't manage to lay my hands on the resources to make up for my lack of genius and only ever got as far as a half-working morse decoder. Shame really, shut inside a self made box; looking back now I realise I could probably have ordered a PLL (phase-locked-loop) chip from RS which would have been a major legup.
I use to work for plessey Telecommunications when I was younger helping to install strowger exchanges and adjust the wipers on the switches it’s funny that after 10 years for working for them went to work for the GPO and ended my career at the other end of the system check the safety of the telephone poles
There's a missing sound credit. It's Dave Brubeck's "Take 5" at the end credits. Not sure who the performing artist is unless it's just a slowed version of the original.
@18:40 His automatons look disturbingly like those retail gimmicks that caused Mrs. Slocombe so much distress on "Are You Being Served?" _And I am unanimous in that!_
I love the little details in this program, like the cartoon boobs at the end or the fact that they didn’t gloss over Bill Shockley’s racist controversy like most American educational programs would. This would never pass the puritanical censors in 1970s America.
When I was seven years old (in the late 80's). I pulled apart a phone with ten autodial settings. My Idea was to send video though the phone and make a cable tv network. I pluged a vcr into the phoneline from its coaxal cable and was going to hook up a tv with another at a freinds house. The idea was that they would ring me and I would pick up the handset and it would connect to my vcr with a tape playing. They would be able to watch the video though the phone line. If this worked the autodial would be used to change chanles by ringing another number connected to another VCR. My parents caught me building my prototype and shut me down and convinced me that only phone calls can go though a phone line and nothing else. Another 8 years go by and im 15 or so and the Internet comes to Australia. I had my told you so moment and they claimed I never built such a prototype and video will never be able to go though a phone line as the internet at the time was only text based. I had an idea for an LCD tv also to have that crazy idea shut down.
AWESOME!!! Sounds like your roughly around my same age... that totally sounds like something I would've wanted to do or experiment with back then (or even now!!)
Great :) Although you were a bit ahead of time. Its only by experimenting that us humans learn. I think you were a tad short on bandwidth back then ;-) .... I was always fantastic at taking things to bits, it did however take a few more years for the putting it back skill to appear :-D Did you go on into a technical industry as an adult ?
Do you have the rights to be broadcasting this video on TH-cam? As much as I like the content, I would have thought that Tim Hunkin, Channel 4 and Artifax own the rights to this material. Just Saying...
im here to build a 5 rotary phone network at my household, in my quest i have to learn a lot about this phone thing and thats why i have made a bitstop in here, im now moving on to find out the final peaces of the buzzel .
No other series had as much character as this, what a gem.
Connections is another fantastic series.
Sadly Rex Garrod passed away in April 2019
, this video should serve as a tribute to him RIP.
R.I.P. in that case.
I’m sorry to hear that. He seemed like a very nice person.
But think of all the brains he fed his inspirational knowledge to. Be well and stay safe.
What I love about this show is the demonstrations that show how things work in a very simple nuts and bolts way. Fantastic.
I have to say, the presenter is very likeable..bringing an air of normal layman to sophisticated equipment. very welook done if you ask me.
I miss documentaries like these. Now days it is more about fancy graphics then giving good information.
Eli Suryana but I wouldn't consider How It's Made a new show.
Some of the "information" was misinformation, unintentionally.
@@crispindry2815 I see what you did they're... their..... umm.... there! :-P
@@simonruszczak5563 For the sake of readers of your comment examples might be good :)
"Fancy graphics" are the best way to visualize anything... Your point?
All the times i watched this show back when it first ran, i never noticed that they left so many word stumbles in the final show. I still think it was a great show. Those stumbles make me like the show even more all these years larer.
"larer" lol
My father worked for Southwestern Bell from the mid 60's to the late 90's. My step mother was an operator from the early 70's to the mid 80's. The stories they have about working for Bell are crazy. My father installed and maintained the phone systems in the central offices that calls were routed through. Those systems went from taking up entire buildings in the 60's to less than a room in those same buildings. I can't imagine how much they've changed since he retired.
I understand how the telephone works.
But when they do all their demonstrations, it really makes it seem so amazing.
Just discovered these a week ago. I remember watching these and be fascinated as a teenager! Wonderful.
I've probably watched this episode a couple dozen or more times, and I love it now just as much as I did the first time I saw it on TV....years ago. The style, mannerisms and content are second to none!
This series was one of the very best things to ever go out on British TV !
Ohhhh laddie I was there. I was there during the days of the Queen mum and the ten children she held over her head and the ten meters of snow. I was there during the days of the lightning house my dear children. This was the on the telly mind you. Ohhhh my dear lads, I remember the when the Ents roamed the streets of Yorkshire and lit the lamps at night. All will never be the same. All will not be the same save the wobbly bits of the telly.
Secret life of machines was my favorite show growing up. Some might say that I was a weird child but I enjoyed the informational shows on 📺
One of the best educational show ever.
Great fun to watch. I remember one of my lecturers used to say that there is always something new to learn and when you lose that concept you cease to be a good engineer.
Today a modern linesman can be working on lines carrying voice, data and a combination of the two such as broadband. I have spent my entire life working with electronics and spent over 35 years in the alarm, IT and telecoms industries.
When I worked for Openreach (the company that looks after all the wiring and interconnections between customers and exchanges) I helped in the testing of the Redcare and dualcom systems that gives you a secure line that alerts the alarm receiving centre even if the phone line is cut.
Shortly before I retired due to health problems I worked as a broadband engineer visiting customers to rectify faults that are very rare when you consider that there are millions of lines out there that can be sending and receiving information at eye watering speeds.
Today all that enters your home is a pair of twisted wires that have a huge bandwidth allowing someone to be having a conversation with someone hundreds or thousands of miles away whilst you are in the next room on the internet and browsing information from a server on the other side of the world all of this provided by two copper wires........
Of course there is an eye boggling range of equipment between you and the other end that could be linking you via a satellite in orbit, a pulsed light going down a fibre optic the diameter of a human hair or a microwave radio link sending data over large distances. It is hard to imagine the size and complexity of the system we all take for granted.
I found this program very interesting and it took me back to some great times as an engineer. That is the wonderful thing about technology. It is always changing, evolving and becoming more efficient by the day. There is always something new to learn.
There is a working strowger telephone exchange near Wolverton not far from Milton Keynes that is worth a visit. It is a great place or take the kids for the day. The Museum is here - www.miltonkeynesmuseum.org.uk/ or they may be one near to you in the uk. Have a look here for information - www.connected-earth.com/
What a great program. I really enjoyed it. Next time you post on facebook or ring up your Aunt Joan have a think about the billions of wires, digital links and the engineering that has gone into making something so complex into something we all take for granted !!!
@jeff Webb There is an independent telco in the UK using only coax (50ohm) that provide broadband internet and interactive tv. They use DOCSIS and have just moved to V3 that has better TDM and increased bandwidth. I don't know but I expect it is much the same technology running cable modems and TV in the US.
Everything is moving over to fibre now though both on the last mile and exchanges. Coax connection was used extensively between exchanges since around the same time period but now is normally used exclusively for private wire or leased line links. Coax between exchanges is being phased out but when you consider the bandwidth you can squish down a coax with multiple rf ranges and multiplexing I cant help but feel that in the UK we missed a trick by not using coax on last mile as much as we could and that's a shame.
I suspect that as the RF nodes converge at a cabinet when it is converted to fibre the potential for bottlenecks at that point was to high. As I am sure you are aware the cabinet equipment was and still is wallet numbingly expensive so they would rather converge with sub nodes, multiplex and send on to the termination cabinets to keep the costs down.
Its rather sad as the UK has always been slow on the uptake of new comms technology. Mainly down to our penny pinching draconian government I suspect.
I like your documentary shows. I am learning things that I never learned in school. Today, your documentaries are valuable to me.
The perforated tape machine he showed was still used in the later 1970's by the UPI (United Press International) and the Telex machine which I operated both of them and could read the holes in the tapes.
You typed into a machine, had no read out of what you were typing except for the perforated tape that came out of the machine. Then you ran that through a reader. The UPI machine sent perforated tape messages to the newspaper I worked at before anyone knew about it and we then printed the messages (NEWS) that day for the evening paper.
Quite a fascinating job and I got pretty proficient at reading the tapes. The Telex was similar but different in that I sent messages over seas and the recipient would respond almost like a modern day text message except it was a tape with holes in it.
This show is amazing window into the past if things most of dont care about. I remember watching this show with my brother and being amazed
Yes, I wasn't looking for it, but it was in my suggestions list. I remember watching this program on repeat on cable and I enjoyed it.
I love this particular documentary. I spent twenty years fixing business phones and their systems that allowed the phones to function!!!
I worked for AT&T in 7 different dept, did inside and outside jobs. Worked in repair, as a tester and other jobs.
I remember watching these on basic cable in the US while attending my local university. I wouldn't say they are the sole reason why I majored in physics and electrical engineering, but they certainly didn't hurt. This is still one of the better educational series out there.
Just since this program was made in 1991 telephones have changed more than they did from when they were invented to this program!! Wonder if Tim could have foreseen that!
They have remained essentially the same. If you're referring to 'smart phones', they are a fully portable computer system with built-in telephony capability.
He didn't! He talks about it on his webpage: www.timhunkin.com/44_secretlifeofmachines2.htm
@jeff Webb i have 23 working stations, Western Electric phones and a few payphones in my home, and have no land line anymore. A dedicated computer runs Asterisk PBX and a channel bank allows dial pulse to work with the VOIP servixes I use. Even a bluetooth cell phone dock allows me to talk without having to look for the hard to find smartphone.
Thanks for posting this up. I've been looking for this for years. I loved this show as a kid.
Absolutely brilliant, priceless!! Isn't it interesting how the telegraph (digital) morphed into the telephone (analog), & now, the telephone is morphing into a mobile web-connected computer node with video camera - for want of a better description - (digital).
16:48 that is one of the coolest things I have ever seen
Something which isn't mentioned here is that Strowger's automatic telephone exchange required four wires to the exchange. One wire was the "common ground" for the other three wires.
As I understand it, one wire of the three was for sounds and for ringing the bell while the other two wires had simple on-off keys similar to Morse Code keys which were tapped a number of times to send the "units" and "tens" to dial the number.
Obviously, Strowger never thought of having more than 100 telephones in a single system.
Later improvements meant that all the signals could be sent through a single pair of wires, but telephone systems were generally still wired using 4-core cable inside the home right up until the advent of Voice Over IP which in some countries has almost totally replaced the old telephone network.
The widespread use of VOIP could be thought of as the end of an era for the Plain Old Telephone network.
24:08 im expecting to hear this from the othher end "we've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty"
Excellent. It's interesting that we still call those wooden posts in the street "telegraph poles". I remember the days when you had to ask someone if they "were on the phone", now we just assume that everybody has at least one telephone.
When I worked as a service engineer the GPO installed a jack socket in my bedroom so I could take the phone upstairs when I was on call at night.
That really was a marvellous series.
I hope both Hunkin and Garrod got their knightships for this series.
I loved those old analog cell phones.
You could eavesdrop on them with a radio scanner and hear some pretty interesting conversations and play pranks on the users.
Sometimes you could hear famous people or government officials on them and prank them too.
These documentaries are unsurpassable.
Well done, Rex Garrod! Thank you.
"The telephone itself has remained quite a simple gadget" Famous last words.
...and FFW to 2019. - look what telephone did. The planet became a smaller place because of instant access to information on amazing technology, we never dreamt of just two-three decades ago. Mindblowing
The massive array at 16 minutes is now geriatric tech, likely replaced by wee tiny boxes in a closet somewhere.
Brilliant show. Good info, intelligently presented. And not a 800-pound bride, arctic truck driver, or knife-making feller in sight.
Can we have these types of informative docus again? I cant stand history and discovery channel these days
@jeff Webb Yeah, plus the melodramatic acting, I cant stomach that as well.
Plus, odd thing, I thought it was obvious that scenes in some documentaries, like that Air Crash Investigation was staged, to give the public a rough idea how it was. (there are such scenes, but then you can see they are real, crappy shots, fast movements, etc.)
It boggles my mind that ppl think there was a professional camera crew at every location directly after the crash.
Trump is that man! (that will push us to WW3 that is)
@ >> only having 5 minutes worth of content in a half hour programme
love the exclusive documentaries
I call to a female operator...
She: Who would you like to call Sir?
Me : You.
The photo @17:16 would be a badass album cover for any electro music album.
I like the way he explains things.
Tim Hunkin needs to do a tv special about the evolution of the telephone to what it is now! Don't laugh your probably watching this on a smart phone 😂
Fantastic documentary
I remember when the Discovery Channel and TLC ran programs like these rather than pseudo-"reality" shows like "American Chopper" or "Moonshiners."
No point in showing anything educational. :-(
Don't educate the population, it just makes them restless. Better to keep their bellies full and their minds empty. Make (insert country name) great again!
OH WOW!!! I have been thinking about this series for years'!!
16:24. "Its quite surprising it works at all." Hunkin has said this in other episodes.
I remembered this show because of the theme song lol
Here's the theme song:
th-cam.com/video/pzqoqzSZkPs/w-d-xo.html
as a kid i loved the step by step exchange the whirring and chatter of the busy exchange
If you worked around all those stepping switches long enough their noises got burned in your head for a while after you quit work.
@@rayford21 yes i can still hear the robot welders too after at least 2 years out from that job
it may sound daft but i miss the sound to this day it had life or soul to it the exchange would get busy and it would get quiet it kinda breathed in cycles
@@dtec30 It probably got busy when a programme ended on TV, "I'll make that call at the end of this programme".
@@kiwitrainguy yep remember when you would rush to the phone to see who rang now ..... stuff it if it's important they will ring again, and remembering numbers off by heart like the national anthem.
I used to work on rotary exchanges that were inside office phone systems. Changing motors when I was a teenager.
That reggae version of Take 5 is badass!
Here you go th-cam.com/video/pzqoqzSZkPs/w-d-xo.html
I want one of those acoustic probes!!
Many people that i tell this story to dont believe me, but when i was a young boy in the 50s, our village had crank phones up until 1959 when we got the dial system, we had an operator in the central part of town, her name was Mrs Peris, she had the office in her home, i think owned bye the phone company, when you wanted to call someone you cranked the little handle whitch was right where the dial should be, picked up the receiver , and the operator said NUMBER PLEASE, you told her the number, and she connected you, making a long distance cal could be quite the ordeal,
We did not get a phone installed until the late 60s in the UK, I remember the operator saying "Number please" and you gave the name of the exchange followed by a four digit number. Our exchange name was "Hillside" being the exchange used for North Finchley in London.
Very nice
Thanks for uploading this video. U Rock!!
5:50 I love this so much
Great educational videos, thanks .
Don't forget the 40/60 make break ratio of the dial that drives everything. Imagine a Class 4 / 5 Central Office with 65,000 lines. Fully integrated digital system.
Looks like production date 1990. A lot concerning telephony has not changed all that much, but there are very few electro-mechanical central office switches still in use. Funny how I had completely forgotten about the shoe phone; probably a collectors item, though there are fewer and fewer homes where you could plug one it!
I love this crew ! Rex was so kewl!
I loved this so much, thanks
Giving everyone a cell phone simply means each of us can be ignored by a greater number of people than was ever possible with landlines.
I’ve worked for 40 years for the phone company. Seen a lot of changes . It a dying industry most employees have been layer off. Sad to see it all implode do to technology
I wonder how Tim Hunkin's Secret Life Of The Smartphone would have gone?
I guess it would have ended with...
_And electronics have progressed even further to the point where, in something as thin as a notepad, there's still enough room for not only a radio receiver and transmitter, but several operating on many different frequencies to connect to cellular telephone networks, many means of connecting to the internet, to cordless devices such as Bluetooth headsets. In this slim package there is a large bright colour display, camera on the front and the back and a rather powerful and versatile general purpose computer._
_It's both miraculous and rather unremarkable compared to many millions of these tiny computers in the possession of ordinary people across the world._
This sure reminds me of my nineteen eighties navy electrician times. In the early years starters for heavy duty electrical run machinery had small liquid pots to control the time contacts were connected, by the time I left the starters had multi control bds. The idea was just swap a bd out if it failed, not so smart 500 miles at sea.
Meucci and Grey possibly had a working telephone before Bell.
the marketing from the early days is amazing.
And now we are watching the video on smartphones
19:50 Ron Swanson worked in a telephone exchange before the Parks & Rec department.
Love these videos
"There ain't enough people dyin' hereabouts".. LOL I lost my shit at that point xD
I really want to find the old advertisements that they show in this.
Though most of these amazing inventions that we find so indispensable today have their roots way back in the mid to late 19th century, we must remember: it was (and still is!) the "Rich folks" that got (and still get) to enjoy them first! The poor folks had to do without basics like electricity and telephones for a long time. While the truly "Wealthy" enjoyed them right from the start.
My own Grandfather, born in 1898, never used a telephone until he was an adult in his mid 20's! And never had one in his home before the mid 1950's!
My Mother, born in 1930, grew to adulthood, about age 19, before ever living in a home with electricity or indoor plumbing! And this was in the northeastern United States 🇺🇸.
Not far from the big cities of Boston and New York. Other family members had jobs delivering ICE 🧊 right up into the mid 1930's.
So, though the "Technology" was there, often for decades, the ordinary "Working Class" folks just couldn't afford it!
Man you should check my smartphone😂
How deeeelightful!!! Thx a billion (or more)!! Congrats!! PSB
Ironically the telegraph is binary digital and the telephone is analog.
WOW very good point!!!!
Telephone now digital. (telegraph was usually a trinary code, dot, dashes, and spaces).
@@simonruszczak5563 Yes called Morse code. I can send and receive at 40 wpm
@@simonruszczak5563 And digital communications today are governed by the equations developed for telegraphy to model time-domain transmission lines.
@@simonruszczak5563 There was also teletype, more often head of as RTTY (radio teletype) but it began at the point he was talking about where telegraph overflowed the transmission speed. My dream, as a mid 90's teenager was to persuade a z80 (zx81/spectrum) to decode RTTY. Sadly I didn't manage to lay my hands on the resources to make up for my lack of genius and only ever got as far as a half-working morse decoder. Shame really, shut inside a self made box; looking back now I realise I could probably have ordered a PLL (phase-locked-loop) chip from RS which would have been a major legup.
I use to work for plessey Telecommunications when I was younger helping to install strowger exchanges and adjust the wipers on the switches it’s funny that after 10 years for working for them went to work for the GPO and ended my career at the other end of the system check the safety of the telephone poles
Awesome show
I always thought the crackling on old land line phones was from the wires or the network/switches but carbon microphones eh? Very interesting.
I used to want a Micky Mouse phone. :-)
There's a missing sound credit. It's Dave Brubeck's "Take 5" at the end credits. Not sure who the performing artist is unless it's just a slowed version of the original.
"The Russians Are Coming" by Val Bennett is a cover of "Take 5" th-cam.com/video/pzqoqzSZkPs/w-d-xo.html
Fantastic ska intro!
Little did there known what was to come with the phone.
after twenty years these little cellular devices haven't changed at all... if you just outcount the touchscreen, radio, mp3 player etc...
the character,s wanto turn there shit exaust down a bit they keep blowing around me 🤣🤣
Sharp thinking! Thanks Zardoz.
25:27 Maxwell Smart would have loved those shoe phones! 😅
You can download a rotary dial app for your smart phone.
@18:40 His automatons look disturbingly like those retail gimmicks that caused Mrs. Slocombe so much distress on "Are You Being Served?"
_And I am unanimous in that!_
Little did they know!!!!!
11:40, your face is baryed in the phone. LITERALLY
I love the little details in this program, like the cartoon boobs at the end or the fact that they didn’t gloss over Bill Shockley’s racist controversy like most American educational programs would. This would never pass the puritanical censors in 1970s America.
When I was seven years old (in the late 80's). I pulled apart a phone with ten autodial settings. My Idea was to send video though the phone and make a cable tv network. I pluged a vcr into the phoneline from its coaxal cable and was going to hook up a tv with another at a freinds house. The idea was that they would ring me and I would pick up the handset and it would connect to my vcr with a tape playing. They would be able to watch the video though the phone line. If this worked the autodial would be used to change chanles by ringing another number connected to another VCR. My parents caught me building my prototype and shut me down and convinced me that only phone calls can go though a phone line and nothing else. Another 8 years go by and im 15 or so and the Internet comes to Australia. I had my told you so moment and they claimed I never built such a prototype and video will never be able to go though a phone line as the internet at the time was only text based. I had an idea for an LCD tv also to have that crazy idea shut down.
AWESOME!!! Sounds like your roughly around my same age... that totally sounds like something I would've wanted to do or experiment with back then (or even now!!)
When I was a kid, we brought ice from the mountains to cool stuff.
LCD technology was developed in the late 1960s at my old University it has been around for decades.
Great :) Although you were a bit ahead of time. Its only by experimenting that us humans learn. I think you were a tad short on bandwidth back then ;-) .... I was always fantastic at taking things to bits, it did however take a few more years for the putting it back skill to appear :-D
Did you go on into a technical industry as an adult ?
Strange , but true the very first computer I had . Would over heat , so I would balance a bottle of milk on top of it to cool it down ! @@fjccommish
Do you have the rights to be broadcasting this video on TH-cam? As much as I like the content, I would have thought that Tim Hunkin, Channel 4 and Artifax own the rights to this material. Just Saying...
Oh my god, watching 23:00 is so weird without Tom Servo quacking like a duck.
What ever happened to shows having cool, jazzy intros?
And now for something completely different. A Monty Python start to the programme.
Shows bells 2 bros KEEL OVER..LMAO
I wonder what he’d think about the smartphone now?
Subscribed!
im here to build a 5 rotary phone network at my household, in my quest i have to learn a lot about this phone thing and thats why i have made a bitstop in here, im now moving on to find out the final peaces of the buzzel .
how'd this go? did you ever succeed?
_Mr. Watson come here I want to see you_ get people to look away from their smartphones from time to time.