In an era where "amplifiers" did not exist (i.e., tubes and transistors), all electrical signals had to be send over wires via "transducers," which are devices that convert energy from one form (sound pressure) to another (electricity). The race was to see who could build the better transducer. It all seems so easy now, but back then, no one had the answers. They had to be invented, as this fantastic documentary ably demonstrates.
We had one of these Magnetos from an old phone back in the 60s. We would hold on to the live wires and crank it and see who could last the longest from electrocution Thats how boring our lives were with no TV or Internet...
Pain tolerance contests are a staple of being a young teenager. However, the ones we did in my day were worse. Pouring salt in your hand, slapping down an ice cube in your palm and clenching into a fist and seeing how long you could take it frequently resulting in both participants getting a numb palm and opening their hands to reveal frostburned, black skin. The hot water challenge was another at the fast food place I worked at when I was 16. Fill up the dish sink with hot water...not insanely hot but just shy of steaming...and dunking your hands in at once and seeing who pulled back first. 'Arms' was a third. Probably been done forever, though - you punch your buddy in the arm, he punches you. You continue this until you both have headaches from the repeated slamming against your shoulder banging your brain around in your skull. Ah - the good old days.
People do the same things and tbh T.V. and internet doesn't equal less boring life. T.V. is actually a really bad these days. You might feel more consistently entertained, but in reality you have become much more boring. life becomes empty and antisocial. When all you do is play games, watch videos and shows. IMO It is because of people being obssesed with constant entertaiment that many have become unproductive, uncreative, and mentally inert. When all you do is waste your time and do nothing. Your just never actually do anything.
When I see these old instruments, I'm impressed by the amount of work it took to make prototypes. Laborious wood and metal working in the hopes that it might possibly work. It was always a long shot. No test equipment to quantitatively evaluate the results either. They were so clever to try different combinations of basic materials. Making batteries was a chore too. I think that Bell spilled some acid on himself when he made his famous first telephone call for Watson to come help him.
This might have been only 33 minutes but it felt longer than any other single episode documentary. Absolutely jam packed with excellent pics and information for every second.
13:30 - The carbon microphone. Yep, used on most telephones, well into the 70s. When the carbon granules packed, you whacked the handset on the table, too loosen them up.
Australia's farms used wire fences on mostly hardwood posts. The top wire of this was constructed as private party lines. These were in use into the 1930s.
@ Mark Rowland: Thank you very much your information concerning the Party Lines. To me a new and a very interesting knowledge :-) Thanks Mark Rowland ;-)
My cousin's sheep station in South Australia used a single wire party line fixed to the top of 3 metre wooden posts cut from nearby trees until 1970. It was the local entertainment for all the other stations along the line to listen in to the gossip! I can still hear the twang when wind blew the wires! And the other graziers hanging up when they got bored :)
At my childhood home we had two of the wall mounted L.M.Ericsson phones. One was for my parents and the other one for my great grandmother. When the big batteries had to be replaced, I got the used ones for satisfying my curiosity. The interesting part was the big, hard carbon element, maybe 1/2" thick, 2" wide and over 6" long. I had been told that soot was carbon. But how could carbon also be as hard as these electrodes were? Somehow I saved a few of them, until many years later I got from somewhere a transformer taken from some radio -- I guess -- and started playing with it. The secondary was probably about 250 V AC and quite adequate for generating an arc between two of these carbon electrodes. I could not burn the arc for very long, as both the carbon electrodes and the transformer got too hot. My first electrical experiment, with thousands -- and more practical experiments -- followed. Actually continuing, with much more modern items. But I guess, I owe a thanks to Lars Magnus Ericsson at least for part of my career .
My grandmother was a manual switchboard operator. We had one of the last manual switchboards in the country. They still had the old switchboards in the old library when I was a little kid. I remember my grandma showing me what to plug in where to connect my house to hers.
I started work in a hospital in 1975. They had two manual switchboards and rotary dial phones. I learned to operate the switchboards and eventually went on to become their first telephone tech when we switched to electronic, then processor controlled Northern Electric (Nortel) PBX's. I literally saw the change from manual to fully computerized systems in a period of about 15 years. Eventually everything was upgraded to VoIP which is basically telephony over the Internet.
All of my grandparents remembered the days when telephones were rare, electric lights were uncommon and automobiles were an occasional sight. In 1969 I was watching the moon landing with a 92 year old neighbor. He said : "I remember when two guys from Ohio flew a machine in North Carolina. If you told me in 1903 that I would be sitting in my living room, in 1969 watching men bounce around on the Moon in a box on the floor (TV), I would have called the Public Health Department for you."
Have you heard the joke regarding, "it's not rocket science!" Yet to this day bicycle science is nowhere near understood...lol i think we should rephrase as such, "it's not as complex as bicycle science!"
@@ericjianuzzi3448 Isn't it odd that bicycle engineers were able to do what Langley couldn't? *They* scienced the s*** out of the problem and read about experiments from around the world. Poor Simon Newcomb! Never say never!
When I was a little guy I would ask a lot of questions of my great-grandparents. They were born in the 1800's. Seeing the evolution of the telephone alone has been nothing short of mind-boggling. I always called it 'living' history.
My late father said that they got their first phone in the 1920's & it had no dial. You would pick up the receiver & speak for the operator saying "Hello, give me central." Then you'd tell who you wanted to speak to.
My grandmother had one of those phones, I was just a toddler at the time and I remember my mother picking me up to speak into the piece (mic?) that was sticking out of the front of the box that was mounted on the wall at the bottom of the stairs ..then someone put a handheld listening device to my ear that had been sitting on a cradle towards the bottom of the phone box ..I remember them trying to get me to listen and talk into the box but I don't remember who it was on the other end. I also remember the crank that was on the right hand side that they cranked whenever they wanted to chat with someone ...it sounded like a bicycle bell whenever they cranked it ..and I loved it but it was mounted much too high for me to ring it for myself ..I remember feeling disappointed that I couldn't reach it ...darn! ..good thing I guess because I would have cranked it incessantly! ..good memories though.
When I was a scientist at Bell Labs in the 1980s, the labs had in their employ a man with the surname Watson, who was the grandson of old Tom. I don't know what he did; maybe was just part of the museum.
I was a child in the 80's A neighbor lady worked at Bell Labs and she had a computer where the modem was acoustically coupled to a phone receiver through rubber cups. and she printed me a Snoopy picture. She took me to some kind of event, but all I remember seeing was soda fountains.
@@dictare You're making me feel old. I used acoustic coupler modems along with Teletype terminals to learn Basic programming in high school. in 1975. I've been in the IT field ever since.
Great video and fabulous collection of historic phones Hilbourne Roosevelt, cousin to Teddy Roosevelt was a pipe organ builder, with his younger brother Frank. They were one of the more important organ firms of the late 19th century, and pioneered the use of electrical key controls to operate the mechanism which let air into the organ pipes, as well as one of the first practical "combination" actions, where the organist could pre-select any combination of stops, store the combination in a mechanical memory, and when desired, while playing an organ piece, hit a small door bell like button on the strip of wood below the keys and those stops, pre-selected would pop on, and the other would turn off. Similar to a car radio where radio stations can be stored and at a press of a button a new station is activated and the old station turned off.
The first telephone I remember was the Western Electric tank style phone. It had no dial. When a call was to be made you would pick up the receiver and click the receiver button to get the operators attention. You would then give her the prefix, number, and or the name of the person you were trying to contact.
No mention is made of the purpose of the "generator" (which was more commonly called a "magneto" here). It was used to create the much higher voltage/power levels needed to ring the bells on distant switchboard and telephones. One would turn the crank a few times to alert the operator, then pick up the receiver in order to make the proper connections for the voice circuitry.
@@stmounts There was no multiplexing back then, each phone had to have its own line to the switchboard. Thats why in old photoes you see *so* many telephone lines through cities....
@@monad_tcp No electret mikes are quite different but when connected to a FET transistor behave very similar to a variable resistance type carbon microphone. As Jonka1 says below.
Telephone technology improved by tiny incremental steps over a long time. The overall jump is almost incomprehensible when you compare the original to a cell phone. When people don't understand the process they can jump to conclusions such as "ancient aliens" gave us the technology or other technologies. I've had two different people suggest such ideas to me. What they are thinking is "It's so complicated, nobody normal could think of it".
And the same kind of people tell you ''the human organism is so complicated, there must've been an intelligent designer'' Therefore: Aliens or God, Or godmade aliens. Or gayliens. The ultimate creators of everything
@@NuclearTopSpot Yes, the same process applies there. Evolution and other theories are very complicated; placing quick and easy understanding beyond many. It would be easy and tempting to dismiss religion or god in the same argument but religion, even if based on a faulty conception can still lead to an improved society. Just as the all the variables in the universe have lead to our life in this planet, our present society, religion, human needs and science have lead to our present abilities. Just as many warn about small changes in CO2 ruining the Earth, small changes in society or civilization could doom us even more quickly. I see many Sorcerer's Apprentices casting spells that could ruin our society.
Indeed, the weight of technological progress leads to technological debt as ordinary people can't understand it, and not even specialists can understand everything relevant to the field.
Interesting. But I don't understand what the ancient aliens theory has to do with modern technology. I was under the impression that particular theory had to do with the origins of religion and the building of certain ancient monuments.
The true inventor of the telephone was an Italian-American called Antonio Meucci. In 1854 Meucci built the first telephone to communicate some rooms of his house, beacuse his wife suffered from rheumatism. In 1860 he presented his invention in New York, but he didn´t have enough money to pay the patent expenses.
I love the presentation. It is solely about the continuing designs of early telephones. This sort or information is missing in history of the telephone. I find it fascinating. Thank you
The video was produced in 1996, whom are you talking to? For all we know people who made it may allready be dead. Sheesh.... Did kids nowdays think that everything they see on YT is made solely by the channel owne... content creator exclusively for YT?
Thank you for your very informative video. I have ever only seen a few of these designs and did not realize the many different designs over that 30 year span.
People back in the day went overboard with their diction because analog media was prone to degridation. This way, even if the audio was still muddy, the voice could still be interpreted. Now adays, if the media is currupt, in even the slighted way by a single 0/1 bit, the entire thing won't even go through, or will have masive knockon effects, like game breaking glitches or scykadelic tv colors.
A very interesting documentary. I just found this by chance, and am so glad I did. I am going to watch more now. Thank you for your excellent and articulate delivery.
i'm 79 so my memory goes back to my first "scrapping" job sorting the old wall hanging phones...brass this box screws in the jar etc. still have a couple of magineto desk phones. selective ringers etc. nothing this old though.
The truth is that Antonio Meucci was really the one who invented the telephone and it would be good for us to begin to recognize it. On the other hand, I understand that the video was made at a time when little or no knowledge was known about this information.
"utilizing a tiny moisture-resistant capsule", today our phones can be submerged in pools. What an amazing time to be alive. Wish I could live back in 1900s.
The narrator made a boo-boo! The segment (@ ~29:24) where he states that the Ericsson Skeletal phone was introduced in 1992. I'm sure he meant to say 1892.
no one who was older than a lil kid during this period is still alive... i wonder if there's a single person who remembers the invention of the "magneto-generator-crank" 😍
I have an old magneto phone at home. I tried it out about twenty years ago and it worked. the main difference was the sound quality while talking & listening, putting out a hollow but intelligible sound. Friends of my parents had such telephones including a candlestick one in Vermont when I visited them in the 1950s.
@@jetstream6389 - Yeah, so what's your point? 10 cents in 1960 is the equivalent of about 90c in 2020. And 25c in 1970 is the equivalent of $1.75 now days. If you cannot make a phonecall for 90c, you need to change cellphone providers.
@@blacktape52black72 - Oh, silly me.... I always thought that the TH-cam comments section was intended for *COMMENTS ABOUT THE VIDEO* rather than for people to post up random and irrelevant "facts" of the moment.
It is fascinating seeing telephones stripped down to their mechanical essence. it makes me realise how peculiar and magical they are. It is easy to forget when it is a tiny plastic box.
In many areas ADSL and VDSL connections still run over sections of 100+ year old telephone wire. Where I live, local telephone engineers commented on certain sections of the city still having lead-sheathed, paper insulated telephone wires underground. Knowing this, ADSL and VDSL seem somewhat miraculous, being able to eek dozens of megabits per second of bandwidth over these century-old (or more) cables.
Where do you live????? I worked for the company that invented paper wrapped cable and latter for the company that hold most of the patents for Fibre optic cables for 40 years between them and believe me that is not true not in the UK Canada Australia and Western Europe ( where I have worked ) the signal to noise ratio would make it near impossible to multiplex on untwisted pairs over more then about 3 metres. So only one call at a time. I of NO Telco that is using Paper wrapped cable . And very very few are using copper at all in trunk( distance ) lines
The paper insulated and lead-sheated phone cables had one great feature (compared to plastic insulated ones), if they got wet, the paper swelled a short distance both ways from the hole or bruise and then water did not travel any longer. The plastic insulations did not swell and the water could travel very long distances. As the dielectric constant of water is huge (some 81), the voice signal was badly shunted by the capacitance. The paper insulated cable was easy to fix for the couple of feet length, but the plastic insulated one became quickly a real nightmare. The biggest problem on the lead jacket was pinholes resulting from use of recycled (battery) lead, which almost always had some lead oxide particles imbedded. Flexing during the cable installation tended to open a pinhole around the oxide particle.
We have the oldest phone lines where I live 2 wire setup and still exists today, my house was built in 1880 and didn't get electricity until 1921 and was 30amp service used all the way up until 2017.
Early technology absolutely amazes me. We have a working 1960 Bell Rotary hooked via a Dialgizmo into our Spectrum modem. I do however recall getting into trouble as a child in an antique store when my Mom caught me showing my brother "Tune in Tokyo" with one of the old double bell phones. Obviously knew what I was referring to.
Its so ironic that his name was “Bell” and we associate that name with the ringing bells of a telephone. Bells were used by educators to signal their students to come to class or when it was time to eat, so it certainly is a fitting term to apply to the greatest device ever invented for communication.
Family bought my Gramps house about 1954. We still had a 20 party line with hand crank phone 19F4, which means we were the 19th party on the line and our ring was "fast 4" I was 6, now 73
The best, the best, the best, so much knowledge of the progression of technology. Don 't let the knowledge of this technology be lost to time. This is information of the ages, and it should be savored and studied. Enough of this feeble mind. Great information and thank you.
When we moved from the Home Place to a rental farm, after father put our land in the "Soil Bank" the house we moved into introduced us to two new things! First of all, it had electrical power! We had been living without that all our lives to that point, and in the kitchen on the wall was an old crank phone, a late model, of course, this was, after all the1950's. Of course it was not on line, and when the phone company came to hook us up, they took the old phone off the wall and replaced it with a dial phone (the dial did not work at that time) and we were in the modern age! OF course I still had to empty the piss pots every day, well twice a day and carry water in from the well powered by arm strong, for washing and drinking, as well as all the other things water was used for, but here, instead of hundreds of yards away, the well was beside the house so it was just out the door and around to the side of the house! Modern! The old wall phone had a plunger because it was a party line you had to lift the receiver and listen before trying to get an operator, if the line was busy you were supposed to hang up and try again, but most ladies would listen in to get some good gossip! The plunger kept the microphone part of the receiver from working so the party could not hear you breathing or laughing at their conversation. To make a call you lifted the plunger and the operator would come on the line and asked "Number please?"
6:09 Admission to one of his demonstrations was 35 cents and 50 cents. That was seriously expensive for that time and place. That would have been around 10 bucks and 15 bucks respectively.
@@donaldrandall9277 Had my black Princess telephone on the black grand piano. Called my organist girlfriend from it and played J.S. Bach over the telephone.
@@donaldrandall9277 From a mall telephone store I boughtwo fliphones. (gave one to her) They had dynamicrophones, not carbon granule, and good ear speakers. We.re shocked! We had no idea a residential telephone line could transmit suchigh fidelity sound!!
@@robertgifto i know - in the 90s i had phone that analog cordless. it had excellent clarity, depth and no distortion. it was hifi filtered to 300-3000KHz. weve been aggressively regressing since.
@@hardrays KOA radio called to do a live telephone interview. I found and connected the flip phone. After the interview the station's engineer was amazed athe clear high fidelity sound on my residentialine.
My high school girlfriend's family had a party line till at least 1976 (when we went off to different colleges)! And this was just 5 miles west of midtown NYC!
This made me remember the rotary phone I used to use as a kid in the 80's. We lived in a small town in a small state, so for local calls we only needed 4 digits. We had to dial 7 before we upgraded. After a while my friends thought it was weird that we still had such a primitive phone, but it worked for us. Eventually the phone system stopped supporting it and we had to upgrade. Compared to these early phones it was a modern technological marvel.
He's Australian, other than that, not sure. I heard him in many educational pieces growing up in Melbourne Victoria. It's cultivated Australian English which (I think) is based on Oxford English but sounds a bit flatter for lack of a better explanation. It's most common in Sydney and Melbourne.
Am 26. Oktober 1861 präsentierte der 27jährige Physiklehrer Philipp Reis (1834-1874) im Physikalischen Verein zu Frankfurt am Main erstmals einen Apparat, der Sprache mit Hilfe des elektrischen Stromes in die Ferne übertragen konnte - er nannte ihn "".
The inventor of the telephone is not disputed, the research and experimentation was done in both the USA and Canada. There is a lot of debate related as to where the first telephone conversation occurred, the message however is the same. Bell worked in the USA and spent summers in Canada, Brantford Ontario and Baddeck on Cape Breton Island. Searched 'Alexander Graham Bell' in Wikipedia and the Canadian Encyclopaedia
A few years back I had just learned about Skype and had a phone that could use it. I was at the museum of electricity in Bellingham where they have one of the phones that Bell used for the first intercontinental calls. I stood in awe of the difference between the candlestick phone with no dial that at least at some point had Alexander Graham Bell's fingerprints on it and my Samsung that I could do video calls all around the world. So much change in a short time.
Very interesting. Thirty years seems to be how long many new inventions take to become generally accepted. Have you any plans for a similar video on the fax machine?
I was born in 1946, and we had a magneto phone in the early 1950's. Party line--I think our ring was three long and two short. It was a moderately remote hamlet.
In an era where "amplifiers" did not exist (i.e., tubes and transistors), all electrical signals had to be send over wires via "transducers," which are devices that convert energy from one form (sound pressure) to another (electricity). The race was to see who could build the better transducer. It all seems so easy now, but back then, no one had the answers. They had to be invented, as this fantastic documentary ably demonstrates.
There were electromechanical amplifiers, using a speaker directly coupled to a carbon microphone.
We had one of these Magnetos from an old phone back in the 60s.
We would hold on to the live wires and crank it and see who could last the longest from electrocution
Thats how boring our lives were with no TV or Internet...
Pain tolerance contests are a staple of being a young teenager. However, the ones we did in my day were worse. Pouring salt in your hand, slapping down an ice cube in your palm and clenching into a fist and seeing how long you could take it frequently resulting in both participants getting a numb palm and opening their hands to reveal frostburned, black skin.
The hot water challenge was another at the fast food place I worked at when I was 16. Fill up the dish sink with hot water...not insanely hot but just shy of steaming...and dunking your hands in at once and seeing who pulled back first.
'Arms' was a third. Probably been done forever, though - you punch your buddy in the arm, he punches you. You continue this until you both have headaches from the repeated slamming against your shoulder banging your brain around in your skull.
Ah - the good old days.
@@angryzergling7832
Haha yeah...the good old days !
As a child of the 90s, fortunately were still getting up to this sort of thing.
People do the same things and tbh T.V. and internet doesn't equal less boring life. T.V. is actually a really bad these days. You might feel more consistently entertained, but in reality you have become much more boring. life becomes empty and antisocial. When all you do is play games, watch videos and shows. IMO It is because of people being obssesed with constant entertaiment that many have become unproductive, uncreative, and mentally inert. When all you do is waste your time and do nothing. Your just never actually do anything.
@@dickrichard626
100% right
When I see these old instruments, I'm impressed by the amount of work it took to make prototypes. Laborious wood and metal working in the hopes that it might possibly work. It was always a long shot. No test equipment to quantitatively evaluate the results either. They were so clever to try different combinations of basic materials.
Making batteries was a chore too. I think that Bell spilled some acid on himself when he made his famous first telephone call for Watson to come help him.
"You didn't build that". Barrack O'Shitface
This might have been only 33 minutes but it felt longer than any other single episode documentary. Absolutely jam packed with excellent pics and information for every second.
13:30 - The carbon microphone. Yep, used on most telephones, well into the 70s. When the carbon granules packed, you whacked the handset on the table, too loosen them up.
The problem with stuff back then is it rarely broke. Now we build crap ensuring return customers.
Australia's farms used wire fences on mostly hardwood posts. The top wire of this was constructed as private party lines. These were in use into the 1930s.
My exe's mum lived up a rural road in New Zealand. This road still had a party line in the late 90s.
@ Mark Rowland: Thank you very much your information concerning the Party Lines.
To me a new and a very interesting knowledge :-)
Thanks Mark Rowland ;-)
My cousin's sheep station in South Australia used a single wire party line fixed to the top of 3 metre wooden posts cut from nearby trees until 1970. It was the local entertainment for all the other stations along the line to listen in to the gossip! I can still hear the twang when wind blew the wires! And the other graziers hanging up when they got bored :)
This was done in the USA and probably many other countries.
At my childhood home we had two of the wall mounted L.M.Ericsson phones. One was for my parents and the other one for my great grandmother. When the big batteries had to be replaced, I got the used ones for satisfying my curiosity. The interesting part was the big, hard carbon element, maybe 1/2" thick, 2" wide and over 6" long. I had been told that soot was carbon. But how could carbon also be as hard as these electrodes were? Somehow I saved a few of them, until many years later I got from somewhere a transformer taken from some radio -- I guess -- and started playing with it. The secondary was probably about 250 V AC and quite adequate for generating an arc between two of these carbon electrodes. I could not burn the arc for very long, as both the carbon electrodes and the transformer got too hot. My first electrical experiment, with thousands -- and more practical experiments -- followed. Actually continuing, with much more modern items. But I guess, I owe a thanks to Lars Magnus Ericsson at least for part of my career .
My Father said: "don't burn the place down while we're gone"
My grandmother was a manual switchboard operator. We had one of the last manual switchboards in the country. They still had the old switchboards in the old library when I was a little kid. I remember my grandma showing me what to plug in where to connect my house to hers.
I started work in a hospital in 1975. They had two manual switchboards and rotary dial phones. I learned to operate the switchboards and eventually went on to become their first telephone tech when we switched to electronic, then processor controlled Northern Electric (Nortel) PBX's. I literally saw the change from manual to fully computerized systems in a period of about 15 years. Eventually everything was upgraded to VoIP which is basically telephony over the Internet.
If you think about it, these types of telephones would have seemed like space age technology to people back then!
All of my grandparents remembered the days when telephones were rare, electric lights were uncommon and automobiles were an occasional sight. In 1969 I was watching the moon landing with a 92 year old neighbor. He said : "I remember when two guys from Ohio flew a machine in North Carolina. If you told me in 1903 that I would be sitting in my living room, in 1969 watching men bounce around on the Moon in a box on the floor (TV), I would have called the Public Health Department for you."
Have you heard the joke regarding, "it's not rocket science!" Yet to this day bicycle science is nowhere near understood...lol i think we should rephrase as such, "it's not as complex as bicycle science!"
@@ericjianuzzi3448 Isn't it odd that bicycle engineers were able to do what Langley couldn't? *They* scienced the s*** out of the problem and read about experiments from around the world. Poor Simon Newcomb! Never say never!
@@jsl151850b indeed! We live in a fascinating 🌎.
@@ericjianuzzi3448 Nor does it require as much bravery as Bicycle Repair Man.
When I was a little guy I would ask a lot of questions of my great-grandparents. They were born in the 1800's.
Seeing the evolution of the telephone alone has been nothing short of mind-boggling. I always called it 'living' history.
Magneto crank signalling systems were used on military field phones and ship's phones right into the 21st century.
My late father said that they got their first phone in the 1920's & it had no dial. You would pick up the receiver & speak for the operator saying "Hello, give me central." Then you'd tell who you wanted to speak to.
My grandmother was a “Hello Girl” in Philadelphia in the early 1900’s. Later they adopted the name Operator.
Hello, Central, information. Give me Jesus on the line.
"Hello, central" was an element in the book "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889) by Mark Twain
It was still like that in many places still into the 40 and 50s, you would have a number but you would tell them who wanted to call instead of dial.
@@bizzzzzzle In small towns like Grafton ND where I lived, even into the 60s.
My grandmother had one of those phones, I was just a toddler at the time and I remember my mother picking me up to speak into the piece (mic?) that was sticking out of the front of the box that was mounted on the wall at the bottom of the stairs ..then someone put a handheld listening device to my ear that had been sitting on a cradle towards the bottom of the phone box ..I remember them trying to get me to listen and talk into the box but I don't remember who it was on the other end. I also remember the crank that was on the right hand side that they cranked whenever they wanted to chat with someone ...it sounded like a bicycle bell whenever they cranked it ..and I loved it but it was mounted much too high for me to ring it for myself ..I remember feeling disappointed that I couldn't reach it ...darn! ..good thing I guess because I would have cranked it incessantly! ..good memories though.
How old are you now Sir
When I was a scientist at Bell Labs in the 1980s, the labs had in their employ a man with the surname Watson, who was the grandson of old Tom. I don't know what he did; maybe was just part of the museum.
I was a child in the 80's A neighbor lady worked at Bell Labs and she had a computer where the modem was acoustically coupled to a phone receiver through rubber cups. and she printed me a Snoopy picture. She took me to some kind of event, but all I remember seeing was soda fountains.
@@dictare I was directly connected to the Internet on my office terminal. I had email, but it was another 10 years before the World Wide Web.
We should all aspire to be museum exhibits.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@dictare You're making me feel old. I used acoustic coupler modems along with Teletype terminals to learn Basic programming in high school. in 1975. I've been in the IT field ever since.
"Mr Watson, come here I want you"
Mr Watson doesn't like to talk about what happened next.
That is a huge collection of history, no CGI, only real macoy.
McCoy
@@davidlogansr8007 That too lol, I saw it later; but it was to self-explanatory of a typo to bother with an edit.
Great video and fabulous collection of historic phones
Hilbourne Roosevelt, cousin to Teddy Roosevelt was a pipe organ builder, with his younger brother Frank. They were one of the more important organ firms of the late 19th century, and pioneered the use of electrical key controls to operate the mechanism which let air into the organ pipes, as well as one of the first practical "combination" actions, where the organist could pre-select any combination of stops, store the combination in a mechanical memory, and when desired, while playing an organ piece, hit a small door bell like button on the strip of wood below the keys and those stops, pre-selected would pop on, and the other would turn off. Similar to a car radio where radio stations can be stored and at a press of a button a new station is activated and the old station turned off.
The first telephone I remember was the Western Electric tank style phone. It had no dial. When a call was to be made you would pick up the receiver and click the receiver button to get the operators attention. You would then give her the prefix, number, and or the name of the person you were trying to contact.
Hey, Siri...
No mention is made of the purpose of the "generator" (which was more commonly called a "magneto" here). It was used to create the much higher voltage/power levels needed to ring the bells on distant switchboard and telephones. One would turn the crank a few times to alert the operator, then pick up the receiver in order to make the proper connections for the voice circuitry.
Did that mean all your neighbours on the same party line also started ringing?
The magneto is mentioned starting at 9:20
@@stmounts yes
@@stmounts There was no multiplexing back then, each phone had to have its own line to the switchboard. Thats why in old photoes you see *so* many telephone lines through cities....
@@Debbiebabe69 Look what 'party line' means....
I have some of those Ericsson phones 100 years old and they still work!
It's just nuts: voice being reproduced by pellets of carbon rattling around with current running through it
and that's how they work even today, small electret miniature electret mike.
870
@@monad_tcp I recommend that you google electret. It does not use carbon granules, it uses capacitive change to operate.
@@monad_tcp No electret mikes are quite different but when connected to a FET transistor behave very similar to a variable resistance type carbon microphone. As Jonka1 says below.
Even a youngster like me (51!) can remember having to tap a telephone carbon microphone to stop it crackling.
Telephone technology improved by tiny incremental steps over a long time. The overall jump is almost incomprehensible when you compare the original to a cell phone. When people don't understand the process they can jump to conclusions such as "ancient aliens" gave us the technology or other technologies. I've had two different people suggest such ideas to me. What they are thinking is "It's so complicated, nobody normal could think of it".
And the same kind of people tell you ''the human organism is so complicated, there must've been an intelligent designer''
Therefore: Aliens or God, Or godmade aliens. Or gayliens. The ultimate creators of everything
@@NuclearTopSpot Yes, the same process applies there. Evolution and other theories are very complicated; placing quick and easy understanding beyond many. It would be easy and tempting to dismiss religion or god in the same argument but religion, even if based on a faulty conception can still lead to an improved society. Just as the all the variables in the universe have lead to our life in this planet, our present society, religion, human needs and science have lead to our present abilities. Just as many warn about small changes in CO2 ruining the Earth, small changes in society or civilization could doom us even more quickly. I see many Sorcerer's Apprentices casting spells that could ruin our society.
Indeed, the weight of technological progress leads to technological debt as ordinary people can't understand it, and not even specialists can understand everything relevant to the field.
Interesting. But I don't understand what the ancient aliens theory has to do with modern technology. I was under the impression that particular theory had to do with the origins of religion and the building of certain ancient monuments.
What a great point 👍
The true inventor of the telephone was an Italian-American called Antonio Meucci. In 1854 Meucci built the first telephone to communicate some rooms of his house, beacuse his wife suffered from rheumatism. In 1860 he presented his invention in New York, but he didn´t have enough money to pay the patent expenses.
Thank you.
If you search the records you will see that many things were invented simultaneously by people around the world.
I like how you speak clearly and slowly. And that you don't have music over everything.
I agree, i only wish he would add some music and speed it all up, maybe add some montages and meme characters
@@kai990 lol........that's hilarious..........
I love the presentation. It is solely about the continuing designs of early telephones. This sort or information is missing in history of the telephone. I find it fascinating. Thank you
@@tomterrific9459 if you find that hilarious you should watch the history channel
The video was produced in 1996, whom are you talking to? For all we know people who made it may allready be dead. Sheesh....
Did kids nowdays think that everything they see on YT is made solely by the channel owne... content creator exclusively for YT?
Man, awesome documentary. Gets right to the fucking information and doesn't stop until the end.
Thank you for your very informative video. I have ever only seen a few of these designs and did not realize the many different designs over that 30 year span.
This guy's voice and pronunciation is impeccable.
People back in the day went overboard with their diction because analog media was prone to degridation. This way, even if the audio was still muddy, the voice could still be interpreted. Now adays, if the media is currupt, in even the slighted way by a single 0/1 bit, the entire thing won't even go through, or will have masive knockon effects, like game breaking glitches or scykadelic tv colors.
This is the Brit equivalent to stateside trans-atlantic accent. Its always fun hearing artificial accents within the context of the English language.
Is problematical the right word?
@@temporallabsol9531 no, it isn't. Nostalgia for the past has no place for the "problematic".
And his pecker is unpronounceable
My uncle owned a motel in the late 60's and had one of those switchboards. Man, I had SO much fun playing with it.
That was quite wonderful. Thank you, and your team.
Excellent documentary....greatly appreciate your posting this!!
the images are fabulous! Thank you very much for the education.
A very interesting documentary. I just found this by chance, and am so glad I did. I am going to watch more now. Thank you for your excellent and articulate delivery.
i'm 79 so my memory goes back to my first "scrapping" job sorting the old wall hanging phones...brass this box screws in the jar etc. still have a couple of magineto desk phones. selective ringers etc. nothing this old though.
Thanks for sharing this very interesting documentary. :)
Fascinating!
Uncovered every question I ever wondered about old phones.
Thank you for posting this!
Born in 1950 in a very rural place, We actually had a wooden telephone when I was little. Also no indoor plumbing. We got the plumbing first.
My father worked for Bell telephone for 35yrs.My sister and I had a lot of old phones.
The truth is that Antonio Meucci was really the one who invented the telephone and it would be good for us to begin to recognize it. On the other hand, I understand that the video was made at a time when little or no knowledge was known about this information.
Magneto era didn't end in 1900. Improved magneto equipment continued up to the 1960s, mostly in rural areas.
Thanks folks. Wonderful encapsulation of early telephone development. Especially since you show the actual equipment along with the commentary.
This was OUTSTANDING! Easy to follow, detailed, Judy WONDERFUL!
Imagine being the first person in history to tell someone else that they won a free vacation.
"Mr. Ford, we've been attempting to contact you in regards to the maintenance contract on your auto-carraige."
The Ericsson firm went on to invent one of the best computer programming languages for handling realtime requirements.
bell labs invented unix... which became linux.. that is turned mac os, chrome os, android etc...
@@mrrolandlawrence Yes and Claude Shannon was at Bell Labs; he articulated information theory.
Are you talking about Plex and Asa?
@@paulsengupta971 Erlang.
Ah.
Thanks to these guys they played a huge role in transforming the world in communication technology unto what we are nowadays.
This excellent work. You have filled a huge gap in my mind on this subject. Thank you so much!!!
"utilizing a tiny moisture-resistant capsule", today our phones can be submerged in pools. What an amazing time to be alive. Wish I could live back in 1900s.
in my mind i only live before the world trade center disaster.
The narrator made a boo-boo! The segment (@ ~29:24) where he states that the Ericsson Skeletal phone was introduced in 1992. I'm sure he meant to say 1892.
He did say 1892. His brit accent was the issue in how it sounded.
No, He made a mistake and said 1992.
@Toby Callen Stop spamming, you clown.
@Toby Callen IDIOT TROLL
@@hopemissions3608 Nope
Excellent film, thank you for sharing this.
Excellent video. Great to see so many original units still in existence.
3:42 still a better love story than Twilight
Spectacular graphics and pictures, with a hyper-interesting historical account. Very well done!
no one who was older than a lil kid during this period is still alive... i wonder if there's a single person who remembers the invention of the "magneto-generator-crank" 😍
Excellent Video 5 stars.... Thankyou
I have an old magneto phone at home. I tried it out about twenty years ago and it worked. the main difference was the sound quality while talking & listening, putting out a hollow but intelligible sound. Friends of my parents had such telephones including a candlestick one in Vermont when I visited them in the 1950s.
Amazing! I worked for AT+T for many years...very intresting.
Now I need to hear how all these different models actually sounded.
Yes!
In the 1960s we paid 10 cents to make a phone call if we were outside our home far away.
Wow. And your point is.... ???
@@jetstream6389 - Yeah, so what's your point?
10 cents in 1960 is the equivalent of about 90c in 2020. And 25c in 1970 is the equivalent of $1.75 now days.
If you cannot make a phonecall for 90c, you need to change cellphone providers.
@@johncoops6897 his point is stating a fact that is informational. stop being such a plebbitor
@@blacktape52black72 - Oh, silly me.... I always thought that the TH-cam comments section was intended for *COMMENTS ABOUT THE VIDEO* rather than for people to post up random and irrelevant "facts" of the moment.
@@johncoops6897 bro chill
It's a nice reminder that we had digital technology- telegraph- before analogue technology- telephone- and now we mimic analogue using digital.
It is fascinating seeing telephones stripped down to their mechanical essence. it makes me realise how peculiar and magical they are. It is easy to forget when it is a tiny plastic box.
Very educational, thanks.
Great exposition of the initial development of the telephone before amplification was possible!
Boy do I remember those mags, dad had one and could it shock 😲 YA🤭🤔🤫
In many areas ADSL and VDSL connections still run over sections of 100+ year old telephone wire.
Where I live, local telephone engineers commented on certain sections of the city still having lead-sheathed, paper insulated telephone wires underground.
Knowing this, ADSL and VDSL seem somewhat miraculous, being able to eek dozens of megabits per second of bandwidth over these century-old (or more) cables.
Where do you live????? I worked for the company that invented paper wrapped cable and latter for the company that hold most of the patents for Fibre optic cables for 40 years between them and believe me that is not true not in the UK Canada Australia and Western Europe ( where I have worked ) the signal to noise ratio would make it near impossible to multiplex on untwisted pairs over more then about 3 metres. So only one call at a time. I of NO Telco that is using Paper wrapped cable . And very very few are using copper at all in trunk( distance ) lines
The paper insulated and lead-sheated phone cables had one great feature (compared to plastic insulated ones), if they got wet, the paper swelled a short distance both ways from the hole or bruise and then water did not travel any longer. The plastic insulations did not swell and the water could travel very long distances. As the dielectric constant of water is huge (some 81), the voice signal was badly shunted by the capacitance. The paper insulated cable was easy to fix for the couple of feet length, but the plastic insulated one became quickly a real nightmare. The biggest problem on the lead jacket was pinholes resulting from use of recycled (battery) lead, which almost always had some lead oxide particles imbedded. Flexing during the cable installation tended to open a pinhole around the oxide particle.
We have the oldest phone lines where I live 2 wire setup and still exists today, my house was built in 1880 and didn't get electricity until 1921 and was 30amp service used all the way up until 2017.
Early technology absolutely amazes me. We have a working 1960 Bell Rotary hooked via a Dialgizmo into our Spectrum modem. I do however recall getting into trouble as a child in an antique store when my Mom caught me showing my brother "Tune in Tokyo" with one of the old double bell phones. Obviously knew what I was referring to.
Its so ironic that his name was “Bell” and we associate that name with the ringing bells of a telephone. Bells were used by educators to signal their students to come to class or when it was time to eat, so it certainly is a fitting term to apply to the greatest device ever invented for communication.
Family bought my Gramps house about 1954. We still had a 20 party line with hand crank phone 19F4, which means we were the 19th party on the line and our ring was "fast 4" I was 6, now 73
My uncle had a pair of “crank” telephones. One in his work shop and one in the kitchen so his wife could “call” him for dinner.
Excellent professional and informative.
The best, the best, the best, so much knowledge of the progression of technology. Don 't let the knowledge of this technology be lost to time. This is information of the ages, and it should be savored and studied. Enough of this feeble mind. Great information and thank you.
When we moved from the Home Place to a rental farm, after father put our land in the "Soil Bank" the house we moved into introduced us to two new things! First of all, it had electrical power! We had been living without that all our lives to that point, and in the kitchen on the wall was an old crank phone, a late model, of course, this was, after all the1950's. Of course it was not on line, and when the phone company came to hook us up, they took the old phone off the wall and replaced it with a dial phone (the dial did not work at that time) and we were in the modern age! OF course I still had to empty the piss pots every day, well twice a day and carry water in from the well powered by arm strong, for washing and drinking, as well as all the other things water was used for, but here, instead of hundreds of yards away, the well was beside the house so it was just out the door and around to the side of the house! Modern! The old wall phone had a plunger because it was a party line you had to lift the receiver and listen before trying to get an operator, if the line was busy you were supposed to hang up and try again, but most ladies would listen in to get some good gossip! The plunger kept the microphone part of the receiver from working so the party could not hear you breathing or laughing at their conversation. To make a call you lifted the plunger and the operator would come on the line and asked "Number please?"
6:09 Admission to one of his demonstrations was 35 cents and 50 cents. That was seriously expensive for that time and place. That would have been around 10 bucks and 15 bucks respectively.
Wonderful video! Thank you. Wish that I stilhad our Princess telephone. Had a nice night light inside.
And it was pink instead black.
@@donaldrandall9277 Had my black Princess telephone on the black grand piano. Called my organist girlfriend from it and played J.S. Bach over the telephone.
@@donaldrandall9277 From a mall telephone store I boughtwo fliphones. (gave one to her) They had dynamicrophones, not carbon granule, and good ear speakers. We.re shocked! We had no idea a residential telephone line could transmit suchigh fidelity sound!!
@@robertgifto i know - in the 90s i had phone that analog cordless. it had excellent clarity, depth and no distortion. it was hifi filtered to 300-3000KHz. weve been aggressively regressing since.
@@hardrays KOA radio called to do a live telephone interview. I found and connected the flip phone. After the interview the station's engineer was amazed athe clear high fidelity sound on my residentialine.
Thanks ... well done.
Before this era we used 2 cans and a string.
Fantastic video.
During long distance calls, my wife still SHOUTS like this... circa 2021.
Excellent video!
My grandma told me a lot about the party line.
We had a party line late 50s.
My high school girlfriend's family had a party line till at least 1976 (when we went off to different colleges)! And this was just 5 miles west of midtown NYC!
Crazy good, editing and script. Of course it’s an old video, quality like this is only behind paywalls if at all.
This made me remember the rotary phone I used to use as a kid in the 80's. We lived in a small town in a small state, so for local calls we only needed 4 digits. We had to dial 7 before we upgraded. After a while my friends thought it was weird that we still had such a primitive phone, but it worked for us. Eventually the phone system stopped supporting it and we had to upgrade. Compared to these early phones it was a modern technological marvel.
Nicely done. Thank You : - ))
Faraday was working and writing about electricity and magnetism in the late 1830s. 40 years later we had telephones....
Who is the narrator ? Excellent pronunciation !!!
Yeah I was thinking the same thing
He's Australian, other than that, not sure. I heard him in many educational pieces growing up in Melbourne Victoria. It's cultivated Australian English which (I think) is based on Oxford English but sounds a bit flatter for lack of a better explanation. It's most common in Sydney and Melbourne.
Am 26. Oktober 1861 präsentierte der 27jährige Physiklehrer Philipp Reis (1834-1874) im Physikalischen Verein zu Frankfurt am Main erstmals einen Apparat, der Sprache mit Hilfe des elektrischen Stromes in die Ferne übertragen konnte - er nannte ihn "".
thanks for sharing PHONECOinc
brilliant!
The inventor of the telephone is not disputed, the research and experimentation was done in both the USA and Canada. There is a lot of debate related as to where the first telephone conversation occurred, the message however is the same. Bell worked in the USA and spent summers in Canada, Brantford Ontario and Baddeck on Cape Breton Island. Searched 'Alexander Graham Bell' in Wikipedia and the Canadian Encyclopaedia
A few years back I had just learned about Skype and had a phone that could use it. I was at the museum of electricity in Bellingham where they have one of the phones that Bell used for the first intercontinental calls. I stood in awe of the difference between the candlestick phone with no dial that at least at some point had Alexander Graham Bell's fingerprints on it and my Samsung that I could do video calls all around the world. So much change in a short time.
Very interesting. Thirty years seems to be how long many new inventions take to become generally accepted. Have you any plans for a similar video on the fax machine?
Who could have imagined these telephone things would one day be as important as oxygen, water, and food to people.
I love it, it is incredibly interesting
Why does his voice sound like that one widely used robot voice but... realistic
William Thomas of Victoria: "Made a call on a phone down under!"
Haha nice one bill proper aussie ingenuity :D
I’m watching this on my Apple I phone.
I was born in 1946, and we had a magneto phone in the early 1950's. Party line--I think our ring was three long and two short. It was a moderately remote hamlet.
I had heard from someone that the last central office to switch from magneto crank to step by step was in 1983! Which I think is kinda surreal.
FYI Bell is a popular Satellite TV service, and cell phone company Canada wide as of 2021
Very well presented.