The History of Phone Phreaking Blog

Playing a Tune for a Telephone Number

In the 1950s Bell Labs was in the habit of running magazine advertisements touting its latest innovations.  And why not?  They had every right to be proud of their inventions.  Take these three, for example:

The one to the right is Playing a Tune for a Telephone Number (Popular Science, February 1950).

It is beautiful in many ways, including the close-up of the operator's newfangled push-button dialing arrangement and the musical notes representing the tones used to transmit dialed digits.  (If only they had included KP and ST!)

Then there's Does your dial system really think?  (Popular Science, February 1955.) "This question can't be answered until we learn more about the nature of thought.  But dial telephone systems do simulate many of the processes of the human brain..."  You know, like counting, remembering, deciding, testing, selecting, and reporting.  (Today it would be, "Does your dial system really beat humans at Jeopardy?")

And don't forget He's out ... but he's answering his telephone!  (Popular Mechanics, November 1954)  By just giving over a little bit of desk real estate to an imposing electromechanical contrivance you too can have your callers record their messages on "talking rubber, a Laboratories-developed recording medium of rubber-like plastic and iron oxide."  (Next month's ad: "Does your rubber really talk?")

All legitimate things to be proud of.  I must say, though, I am puzzled by the tagline of the latter two ads:

Bell Telephone Laboratories: Improving telephone service for America provides careers for men in scientific and technical fields

Bell Labs: A jobs program for geeks.  Who knew?  :-)

Rachael Morrison's "Joybubbles"

The short version?  Call this number: 718-362-9578.

The long version:

Back in May 2010 I got an email from a woman named Rachael Morrison.  Rachael said she was an artist who wanted to create an audio art piece having to do with Joybubbles, the blind whistling phone phreak who passed away in the summer of 2007.  She wasn't sure exactly what the piece was going to be or what precisely she was going to do with it, but it seemed like a neat idea.  We ended up talking by phone and she interviewed me about phone phreak history and Joybubbles' life.  She also interviewed Steven, Joybubbles' long-time friend and the executor of his estate.

Months past and, honestly, I pretty much forgot all about it.

So it was a lovely surprise to get an email from Rachael saying that she had completed her audio artwork.  You can listen to it old school -- over the phone -- just like an episode of Joybubbles' Stories and Stuff telephone recordings line.  It's at 718-362-9578.  You can listen to it in one 38-minute episode, or, if you don't have that kind of time in one sitting, Rachael has broken it up into four shorter chunks.

I think she did a really nice job with it, especially the way she blended Steven's remembrances with audio from Joybubbles talking on old recordings of Stories and Stuff.

That number again: 718-362-9578.

Call now, operators are standing by.

Some New Bell Laboratories Record Articles Posted

In digging into the birth of nationwide dialing for my book, I copied and scanned a nunber of Bell Laboratories Record articles from the 1950s that may be of interest.

Some bits of history:

• "Englewood Begins Long Distance Customer Dialing", December 1951, p. 571
• "Historic Firsts: Lettered Dial", January 1952, p. 12
• "Early Work on Dial Telephone Systems" by R. B. Hill, January 1953, p. 22
• "The Early Years of the Strowger System" by R. B. Hill, March 1953, p. 95

Articles related to nationwide distance dialing:

• "Problems in Nationwide Dialing" by O. Myers, May 1951, p. 197
• "The 4A Crossbar Toll System for Nationwide Dialing" by O. Myers, October 1953, p. 369
• "Converting Toll Crossbar Offices for Nationwide Dialing" by S. J. Brymer, May 1955, p. 188
• "Common-Control Features in Nationwide Dialing" by J. B. Newsom, December 1953, p. 481

Flights of fancy:

• "Switching Systems as Mechanized Brains" by John Meszar, Feburary 1953, p. 63
• "Switching at Its Boldest" by J. Meszar, December 1954, p. 441

And for the coding geeks (bonus points if you can spot the hand-written numbers in the article and know their significance):

• "Code Patterns in Telephone Switching and Accounting Systems" by J. W. Dehn, January 1952, p. 9

Indices and tables of contents:

• Bell Labs Record tables of contents from 1953, 1954, and 1955
• Bell Labs Record index for 1951 and 1952