One of the special people I have interviewed recently is 93 years young and a woman I have known all my life. At 77, Maddie Howard was my babysitter, when I was a 10 pound newborn. Even then, Maddie was showing up at our house in her jeans and rolling up her sleeves to take care of me and my 2 older sisters.
She has always modeled “aging gracefully” for our family and many others, and she keeps on going as if she was still 65!
Maddie and I had a conversation about communication recently for this website and I can't think of a more wonderful way to spend an hour than sitting at her kitchen table chatting.
I knew she had effortlessly navigated the evolving stages of telephone communications, and used a cell phone just as well as any 40-somethings, but what I didn’t know was that her roots were especially deep in communications. Let's listen...
Maddie was one of the original telephone, operators, connecting callers with cables that needed to be plugged in and out of vast walls of holes.
Image Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_switchboard
Maddie and I spoke at great length one Sunday afternoon about how the telephone was so important to her husband, a country doctor. Everyone had their home phone number and Dr. Howard would get calls at all hours, in any weather, and gladly drove to people’s homes to care for his patients.
She said that they were lucky because they had a private line, but in those days, most people shared their telephone line with their neighbors, in something called a “party line.” I was curious about how that worked when it comes to privacy, but Maddie said people seemed more courteous back in those days and honored each other’s privacy.
While you could listen in on your neighbors, you probably wouldn’t tell anyone about what you heard. (Maddie demonstrated the nuances of what you had to do to listen in but not be discovered!)
She said there was one phone in the house, usually in the kitchen, so there was no thought to privacy on the phone inside your own household either.
This made me think about how “privacy” isn’t really “private” in the digital world. A digital “conversation” or photos are essentially “public” because of the digital ability to share everything. That reality was not lost on Maddie. She spoke at length about how people seemed to cherish deeply personal moments back when they happened organically in a slower world. People who were “gossips” were considered the lowest class.
But in our world of sharing content on the web, “the gossip” is even muddy water too.
Image Source: http://www.sacbee.com/entertainment/living/health-fitness/article45080046.html
Maddie and I also spoke about how technologies like Texting and Emails have changed the way we connect with others. At one point in the interview Maddie jumped up suddenly and grabbed her ipad off the kitchen counter. She excitedly opened her email andread emails from her family to us, one after another, and pointed at them with joy. They were tiny, instant moments of connection. They seemed to have all the weight of a personally, hand- written note, but even better connection because of the immediacy of the feedback loop.
It was fantastic to see her zoom around on her ipad as I imagined her once plugging and unplugging the cables at the phone company.
This small revelation made me hopeful about the way my own parents may grow old gracefully, adapting and taking advantage of what is possible.
It made me realize that by the time I am Maddie’s age – 77 years from now – who know’s how we will all be communicating!!
And that thought made me dive deeper into the history of the telephone. Again, this is something most of us think we know something about, but might find ourselves actually thin on facts.
Image Source: http://boredstiffgeeks.blogspot.com/2010/03/youre-skating-on-thin-ice-mister.html
Maddie’s life experiences with the telephone made me want to do a little research for us to understand the scope of the most ever-present technology in the world. You may already know that in March of 1876 Alexander Graham Bell was the person who spoke the first words into a telephone, speaking to his assistant in the next room.
While that was 51 years before Maddie was even born, the telephone did not advance very well in its initial half-century, so Maddie lived through the telephone’s major leaps.
In 1877 the first telephone line was constructed and the first “long distance” call (to a person 10 miles away) was placed but there was no way to connect multitudes of people. That’s when telephone operators became the linchpin in the whole system...
Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVDGuCjog_0
To make a phone call required someone – usually a woman, sitting in a place called “an exchange” – to plug cables into a vast array of receiver wholes, literally connecting caller and receiver by hand after a brief conversation with the caller. Maddie tells us that was one of her first jobs as a young woman..
I found it interesting to learn that the “styles” of telephones has always been a factor in its history. You may have seen in the movies the two piece phone called a candlestick phone that was used for 40 years of telephone history. There were two types. One required using both hands and the other, you spoke into a little bell-shaped receiver attached to a wooden box on the wall, and you held another bell-shaped piece by your ear during the phone call.
Maddie remembers using this wall-mounted box telephone throughout her childhood, but it died out in the 1930’s just about the beginning of her working life, when styles and technology allowed for rotary phonels.
The rotary phone became really popular in the 1940’s. To dial, you just put your finger in the hole over the number you were choosing, and then you would rotate the dial clockwise with your finger in the hole until your finger reached a little stopping arm, and then released. The dial would then slowly rotate back, counter-clockwise, to the resting position, while making a characteristic series of clicking noises.
Image Source: http://bgr.com/2013/12/13/telephone-timeline-a-brief-history-of-the-phone/
My parents, who were born in 1960, remember rotary phones in their homes but the version was much more modern than the previous picture.
It seems to me that dialing like that would be incredibly tedious, but they say that dialing long distance was a big deal, almost never done, and even more of a surprise to me was that almost all local telephone numbers were just 5 didgets long.
Most people were using push button phones by the mid 1970s which seem much closer to what we all think of as a telephone. Each key would transmit a certain frequency, signaling to the telephone operator which number you wanted to call. Rarely did we have to actually speak to an operator, and the job market there shrank significantly.
Imaage Source: http://blogs.lanacion.com.ar/movilandia/noticias
Once the phone became essentially a box with buttons, the box behind the push buttons just got smaller, and smaller until we eventually, in the early 1990’s we had wireless phones in cars that weighed about 8 pounds and were about the size of a shoe box. By the late 1990’s average folks had cell phones about the size and shape of a smallish TV remote. Now, of course, we are pushing buttons on something smaller than a deck of cards by weight and dimensions.
The rest of the story may be familiar:
2003 saw the first cellphone with a camera, just about the same time digital cameras replaced film cameras. 2004 saw the first cellphones with personal information capabilities like PalmPilot. Blackberry came along in 2005 and everything was going their way until the first iPhone in 2007. Not to be outdone by Apple, Google bought Android and unveiled the Android operating system in 2007 too.
None of this was lost on Maddie. As I mentioned, she was staying in touch with everyone with the most popular devices today, and I suppose if I drop by her kitchen when she's 98, she'll be teaching me a thing or two about whatever we are doing for communication then.
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Most of my facts came from a few good sources on the web:
www.abbieandeveline.com/tag/abbie-elizabeth-webber/page/2/
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/150/1870.xhtml
http://bgr.com/2013/12/13/telephone-timeline-a-brief-history-of-the-phone/