Buzz
Phones have significantly evolved from the days of traditional landlines. Our smartphones are compact, speedy, and boast far more computing power than NASA used during the Apollo missions to land a man on the moon.* While some advancements came by adding features, others resulted from simplifying the devices. One notable omission, especially for those who remember the old days, is the dial tone. What happened to it? Simply put, we don’t need it anymore. Or at least, the phones don’t.
In the early days of telephony, when you picked up the handset, a switchboard operator would connect your call. However, when automated systems took over in the late 1940s, the dial tone was introduced to signal that the phone was properly connected and ready for use.
For many, the dial tone was a simple and useful feature, but it puzzled President Dwight Eisenhower when he first encountered it. Having never used a rotary phone, he was unfamiliar with the sound of the dial tone and had a dial-less phone in the White House connected directly to a switchboard. After his retirement in 1961, he faced a humorous moment involving both the dial tone and a rotary dial, witnessed by a Secret Service agent. According to the Eisenhower National Historic Site, “Upon lifting the receiver and being confronted with a dial tone, the President began to repeatedly press the dial tone button. When that achieved no results, he hung up and began turning the dial as though the phone were a safe. He finally gave up and turned to the agent for assistance.”
Ike eventually got the hang of the rotary phone, and years later, Bell Laboratories was preparing to propel the world of telephones forward once again, with cellular mobile technology poised to supplement, and for some, replace landlines. Tech expert Dan Goldin was reading *The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation* when he encountered the man who would end the era of the dial tone. He quotes the book:
At the same time, Phil Porter, who had worked with Richard Frenkiel on the original system, found a permanent solution to an interesting dilemma: Should a cellular phone have a dial tone? Porter made a bold suggestion: it shouldn’t. A caller would dial the number and then press 'send.' This method would reduce the caller’s rush and shorten the call duration, thus minimizing strain on the network. The fact that this idea—dial, then send—would later play a critical role in the development of texting technology was never considered.
The phone could operate just fine without a dial tone, so why keep it? Porter’s ‘dial-and-send’ idea, known as ‘pre origination dialing,’ along with the decision to leave the dial tone off the mobile network, also conveniently set the stage for the advent of text messaging. Goldin wonders, ‘How many other technologies and businesses built on top of SMS wouldn’t exist without this decision? I’m sure an SMS-like technology would have emerged regardless, but it makes me curious about how past technological choices shape the present.’
For all the benefits its absence brought, some still long for the old dial tone. The company Jitterbug took advantage of this by offering a mobile phone and service—including a dial tone—that appeals to baby boomers and the elderly. [Via Dan Goldin, via Gizmodo]
*I forget where I heard this or who first made the observation, and I wonder how accurate it is. That’s a post I should totally do, right guys?
