Version History Hall of Fame

Hey, David Pierce here. Last episode of the season. So this is the last reminder from me for a minute. Please go subscribe to at Version History Podcast on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram. That's where we're putting all of our social clips. It's where we're gonna start to do more and more interesting stuff in between seasons. We have big plans for what we can do with Version History that isn't just make this podcast. I love this podcast and I'm very proud of it. And I think it's super fun. And I also think you should watch it on YouTube because it looks great. So keep it locked ation Vers History Podcast. And for now, please enjoy the season finale of season three of Version History. Way back when, once upon a time, phones were actually mostly for making phone calls. And way back then, there was only one phone that you would find in just about everybody's house. It was called the Western Electric 500. And it was borderline illegal to have anything else. From the Virgin Box Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today we are talking about AT T and the Monopoly Phone . Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan. And the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping pong ball . We build PCs with long-lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for a charger. And built in intelligence so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies. Built for you. Dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs . What's up y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom . And this is Ann Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Alright, we're back. It's time to talk landlines. Joining me in the studio at Neilai Patel. This is my dream episode. This is my whole career is wrapped up in this little this little gadget right here. Also with us, joining us remotely is author and Columbia professor Tim Wu. Tim, welcome. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm also very excited about this topic. So you we should say uh one of the reasons you're here is that you wrote a book called The Master Switch that is uh the the basis of my research, frankly, for a lot of this episode. You also recently wrote a book called The Age of Extraction , which is very good and about the internet and is like there's a lot of this story that bleeds right into that story. And I should say we're here to talk about this phone, the Western Electric Five Hundred, both on its own merits but also as a way to get into the history of AT<unk>T and Western Electric and the way that this monopoly took over America in a really unusual way. And if you've never seen a landline phone, which uh a a remarkable number of people watching and listening to this may not have. Let me just describe to you what a landline phone in 1950 looked like. It's this big brick of plastic that weighs, frankly, more than you think. And it has two main things on it. There is this big handset that you hold against your ears. It has it it there's a microphone and a speaker, and then on this one there is a rotary dial, which is this huge wheel that you have to stick your finger in at the right number, spin it all the way around, let it go back, and then do the next number. It made dialing a phone take six and a half hours. And this is what we did for decades. Uh and Tim, you have a Western Electric five hundred. Is this is this tru e? I didn't bring it with me at this exact moment, but yes, I have that phone. Why? Same one. Well, partially when I was writing the book, I was like, I can't just write this thing, I have to live it. And um partially because I believed some of the ATT propaganda that the quality of the connection would be good, so I wanted it for radio interviews back when radio interviews were on the telephone. So yeah, and I just like the way it looks. I mean it is there is really something about like Neil Eye I encourage you to just pick up this phone and hold it to your hands. This move where you can pick up the bass and walk around with your with the handset on your ear and you're just holding the b ass, this is power. Whatever this feeling Pacing back and forth in your office doing deals. Just holding this thing. Oh yeah. And then you're like, get out of my face. Like, I don't know. We gotta bring this back. How much heavier is that thing than you remembered? It's so heavy. I mean that's that's where it that's where the power comes from. It's like this is weighty. You're making a decision to hold this thing. Okay, so let's actually sort of start the history here because um it turns out we have to start at the Ciliv War, which means we have a fair amount of work to do before we get to this phone. But here we are. And so the the thing that was happening in the Civil War was the telegraph was a huge deal. This became a a revolution in how people shared information. And in particular, for our purposes here, I'm interested in this company called Gray and Barton at the very beginning of all of this, which was a manufacturing partner to Western Union, which at the time was the telegraph company. For a long time, Western Union was the biggest company in America. It was the most important information company anywhere. Graham Barton made a lot of stuff for a lot of companies. They were just like a contract manufacturer . Um, but their best business was with Western Union and in telegraphs. And in particular, I learned after the great Chicago fire of 1871, Western Union's headquarters burned down, but Gray and Barton didn't. So they just basically leaned on them even harder and they became like a crucial part of the telegraph ecosystem. One of the founders of the company, Elisha Gray, I think is how you pronounce it. He's the Gray of Gray and Barton, uh, decides that he wants to sell his part of the company to Western Union, but he also says there's this amazing thing that I've just done. I've invented the telephone. He didn't call this at the time, but he he had he he was in this patent war, it turned out , to invent the telephone. And this becomes this incredibly long legal saga that Tim, you you write a fair amount of about in the Master Switch. Can you walk us through that a bit? Well I think most of us learn an element ary school that uh Alexander Graham Bell, you know, this uh the kind of eccentric living in in a attic, invented the telephone. But if you look a little more carefully, the fact is, a lot of people invented the tele phone all at once, uh, one of them being gray. The Germans to this day believe that they invented the telephone. There is another kind of anecdotal account of somebody else inventing a telephone even earlier but not doing anything with it. So there's a lot of people who kind of arrived at the same, you know, invention point at the same time, which is they realized you could carry voice over a wire and then amplify uh the signals on on the other side . It really came down in terms of who was quote the inventor uh to the question of who won the patent battle and at some level who reached the patent office first. There there was um some of this history is all little anecdote or you know mythical because I I want to say that Bell and ATT had a pretty effective propaganda department. And in fact, uh history would have been very different. Aaron Powell Yeah. So this patent becomes like the thing that builds ATT. Like for for decades, it it uses this patent to win every fight against everybody else who wanted to do this kind of thing. Because I think the everybody invented it all at the same time is sort of a constant story in the history of science and technology. Like there are so many things that seem like just an idea whose time has come . And the telephone just seems like it was an idea whose time has come. And a bunch of people all around the world at roughly the same time came to that idea. I found so many salacious allegations in this patent warfare where like there there's some allegation that Alexander Graham Bell's lawyer had some leverage on the patent office so that they got secrets about what was in Gray's patent in order to redo their patent. And it becomes this whole like patent drama. And at the end of all of this legal drama, that becomes a huge piece of what happens here because they this fight between uh Bell and Western Union, which had bought Elisha Gray's company, and so it picks up this fight on his behalf. Western Union essentially agrees to get out of the telephone market. They're like, this is we don't care. Leave us alone. We're gonna go do our thing. You do yours. Let's just sort of split the market here. You you go build the telephone, knock yourself out. And there was this sense of like we actually they they saw it as somewhere between uh a interesting lark maybe for someday if if a bunch of things happen, and kind of a waste of time. And their their interest was doing better telegraphs, not cannibalizing telegraphs. And they actually saw the telephone in the best case as a problem. And so they're like, well, we actually we're happy to just get out of the market. So anyway, so at the end of all this, the other thing that happens is uh Bell buys a majority share of Western Electric, which is the company that uh Gray and Barton had turned into. This is the the manufacturing arm. So just to clarify, Western Union is the old telegraph company. Western Electric used to make parts for Western Union , but now they make parts for Bell. Western Electric at this point becomes the sole supplier of Bell's telephones and equipment. This becomes a very big deal. This is a small deal at the time because Bell is still a new company. It's growing fast. There's a sense that this is onto something, but this becomes an enormous deal. Western still made stuff for other companies, but over time it becomes basically the supplier to ATT. These two things are are not the same company, but boy are they the same company. Which again becomes very much the story of ACT. Like Samsung is the preferred supplier to so many cell carriers today. There was a time when LG made every phone for a handful of cell carriers. Nokia was this supplier. Blackberry, famously in Verizon, had this kind of relationship. Yeah. Only recently has that changed. Okay, so Tim, uh here I want you to do something impossible, which is just absolutely blast through about fifty years of history. Okay. Walk us through just very quickly how we get from Bell Lab's upstart to ATT absolutely utterly dominant pla yer in telephony in the course of just a few decades. Okay. So believe it or not, it turned out the telephone was popular. And and people thought this thing is pretty cool. Um, eventually, Bell's patent expired, and there came a period um that could only be compared to like the 1990s internet, where everyone was starting a phone company. There were suddenly thousands of phone companies across the United States and people were using all kinds of wire. Like there's some vaguely anecdotal accounts of people using like barbed wire fences to rig parts of their uh their phone networks together. So the idea was young man, go west and build a phone network. And so there they were all going and there was this period uh of extraordinary um both opportunity, hope, um, you know, interesting inventions, different ideas, but also a lot of chaos and uh non-internet interconnected networks. Because obviously a phone is a network, its value is how many people are on it. At some point, uh, Bell got new leadership, a man named Theodore Vail. He was a fellow who kind of took Theodore Roosevelt as his role model, although he probably thought he was better than Theodore Roosevelt. He was like the big man, the like empire building, the visionary kind of person. And he said something along the lines that like America needs one phone network. And this was his one network philosophy. And so uh in in service of that vision, he commenced what can only be described as industrial warfare. Actually, not entirely unlike uh John Rockefeller, who's another figure active in this era . He went to every place and convinced the independence to either sell to him the, independent phone manufacturers, join up with him on some kind of turns, or face their destruction. There's at least one account now people nineteenth century, as I said, there's a lot of propaganda on both sides. But there are at least stories of of Bell, you know, demanding everyone sell out to them, uh, join the Bell Network, and those that refuse have their equipment put in the middle of town and lit a fire in a giant bonfire as a horrible lesson for all those who would resist the the the bell system. So he had a kind of a simple message. He said we're better together, you know, join me, uh maybe be bought by me. Certainly interconnect on my terms and and join the one system. So this spreads. Um Bell begins to invest heavily in long distance, which is obviously an important technology. And it's also rate pretty expensive and hard for all of these little barbed wire phone companies to match. Yeah, although uh to to their credit, um you know, some of them are smaller, some of them are more efficient. In a way they could coexist if they agreed to interconnect. You know, to and those days interconnect is is a physical wire that you know switches them between them. But yes, there's a there's a lot going on. Important here is you have AT T, the growing monopoly, and eventually this attracts the attention of the Justice Department. Because um uh then and to some degree now, the idea of of um attacking your competitors and merging them into a giant trust uh is considered to violate the Sherman Act. So um the Taft administration begins an investigation uh after Roosevelt and pre-Wilson, the Taft administration, which actually is the most aggressive antitrust administration, begins an investigation of AT T for the crime of monopolization. And And you know, they they begin the lawsuit, the the two parties are are you know getting ready for a big fight. And um at some point, this is in uh the 1910s, they begin to negotiate and they announce uh a deal, which is known as the Kingsbury Commitment. And the deal roughly goes like this: Bell will interconnect with everybody. So on its side, it's going to agree to support everybody. But sort of more or less subtly, uh the United States agrees that Bell will be the monopoly, regulated monopoly for the United States. So we strike this deal. At the time , I should say all the independent phone companies see it as a as a victory um because now they have interconnection. But what they don't fully realize is that the gem or the idea of one monopoly for the nation has has won out. And you know there is some logic to the idea that one network makes more sense than a thousand networks. Right. That is to me the most interesting thing about this growth story. And I I I felt it doing the research. I felt it in your book, Tim. You go through and it's like, okay, ATT is waging industrial warfare. It is this ruthless, growth oriented company trying to connect everybody. And then you listen to Theodore Vale be like, but actually this whole thing is better if we're all on one network and we can all talk to each other. And you're like, oh crap. You're right. He was super right. Neilai, you're you're Mr. Free Market Competition over here. What do you what do you make of all of this? Aaron Powell I am always struck by the character of Theodore Vale, of Rockefeller, of Carnegie, who all were brash, extremely aggressive monopolists. But I mean they're the monopoly guys. And at the end, they all accepted the no tion that they should run regulated monopolies. And I think Vail makes that case pretty directly to the government in the context of all of this antitrust battle. He says you can be in charge of this network, but I have to build it. Right. I will accept your price controls on this network. I will accept what we would come to call common carrier rules where I have to connect to everyone and I can't monkey with the the what's going across the network. You look at a telecom company today , and the idea that the government can tell them anything to do with their network is out the window. Right. Like that is battle after battle. And so there's just this the literal character of these figures, there is something about their like on like their patriotism that actually balanced out their like viciousness. And that's the argument that they made so often. Yeah, there there's a real sense of noblesse oblig é that that I think is important here. I mean he's an industrialist veil and ATT is a rapacious company. But he you know comes and basically speaks to the public to Congress to the administration and says I shall serve as a public servant. I agree and will commit myself to connect every American at low cost. I um accept rate regulation. I except, you know, being more or less like the post office in many ways. That time the post office was admired for its efficiency, I I should point out. And you know, so he he undertakes these duties. He offers a big deal and he said we will all be better uh together and I think that is the seed of of the age of of regulated monopoly, which ends up uh lasting roughly um seventy years. Yeah. So okay, so that that was that was an excellent catch-up, by the way. Good job, Tim. So we this brings us to uh this this like enlightened monopoly phase for ATT, which is the phrase that that is used kind of all over. ATT was basically like given the the ability to do whatever it wants. And then in 1921, there's this thing called the Willis Graham Act that essentially just tells ATT that it's it's cool. Like don't worry about it. We have all these other monopoly rules. You are exempt from them. No problem. And also by the way, the Kingsbury commitment, which ATT made, big win for all of the the like little companies that didn't have to risk dying. So this this works for everybody. Um for a long time. And the network continues to grow. ATT continues to become this massively giant company. So we go through the First World War, we go through the Depression, we go through the Second World War, and then there are just a lot of political changes during that time. But then we get to the late 40s, and the U.S. government sues ATT again. We're just doing monopoly stuff again. And in this case, the goal is to separate ATT from Western Electric. This is where we start to get into landline phones. Because what the government wanted was to force ATT to buy from other manufacturers. ATT obviously was very happy to buy from its own subsidiary. And to your point about a lot of these regulations, there was an understanding that you could regulate the cost of service by regulating the cost of service. But actually ATT had a bunch of other ways to make as much money as it wanted. And one of them is by controlling the hardware, by doing the the price of the hardware, the services, the the leasing fees. Like people didn't own their phones. You didn't buy a phone. You leased one from ATT, which is like a just a bonkers thing to think about. But it's also kind of what we all do with our iPhones now. Like to some extent everything. We've tried so many times. It will come back in exactly the same form. This idea just never goes away. But so at the time, again, this is this is in the late 1940s, um just some of the numbers I found, the government alleged that Western Electric manufactures and sells more than ninety percent of all telephones, telephone apparatus, and equipment sold in the United States, and that a substantial part of the remaining ten percent is produced under the direct control of Western Electric. This is the only company making phones for all intents and purposes. And it is wholly owned by ATT. And it's it it's like you can look at history through a variety of points. There was a lot going on between I don't know, nineteen ten and nineteen forty. There was I would say. There were there were plenty of priorities for the nation as a whole to to pay attention to and rank higher than the phone system. Yes. There was almost zero innovation in the phone system during the time of ATT's monopoly. Except it grew. Except it grew. Which is a huge innovation, obviously very important. But the experience of like making phone calls pretty much stagnated. I can't think of a particularly meaningful upgrade in that 30-year period because the monopoly was like, we're gonna run the monopoly and extract our profits, and growth is the thing that we've promised you, so there will be growth. But uh user experience is not a thing that we need to compete on, so we will stop. The thing is inside uh from inside an industry, if you talk to any industry, they're always convinced that they're extremely innovative. It's just they measure it differently internally. You know, so a big there was one big innovation during that period, which is they got rid of operators, human operators, and replaced them with electric switching. Right. So that was one but you know what I mean? Like the product was the same. But I'm I I don't I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just amazed at the ability of any industry to be convinced that they have made enormous strides. Yeah. Like sometimes I talk to people in the airline plane industry and I say, you know, it's basically the same., fifty years And then they talk about a whole bunch of things that no one on the outside experiences as real changes. And all of them, I would point out, even in the case of the operators, is reducing labor cost. Yep. But like Tim, Tim, what you're saying, this is I th I do think you're right that that that probably counts as a meaningful innovation. The the idea of like you giving people this kind of control, it reduced labor costs. It made things a lot easier for ATT because you didn't have the to have these centralized offices connecting people , especially as the networks got bigger, the operator system became like huge and complicated. And being able to just let people dial onto the network w was actually really valuable to everybody. But the other thing that's happening here is that ATT is actually going out of its way to prevent anyone else from doing any kind of innovation. Tim, you you covered the story of the the Hushaphone. Do you remember the story of the Hushaphone? Oh yes, I do very very well. So you're right. Um ATT, you know , in some ways they as we've sort of suggested they're they're an admirable company in some some that I want to and I want to point that out in some ways. You know, it's true they were not improving the product at all, but they were trying to get the product to everybody. You know, I sometimes I I I I can't I must confess, like anything you spend a lot of time with, you end up with a mixed, you know, some admiration. And ATT Monopoly in some ways reminds me of the Roman Empire in the sense that like I do not approve of feeding people to lions or you know gladiator contests or massacring villagers, but there is still something mighty and exciting about building roads to every part of Europe. So it's I have the same kind of feelings about ATT. One of the things I will say about ATT is it was very controlling. They had the idea that they had to own every part of their system from top to bottom. And that meant you should not attach your own telephones. One thing that people may not realize, there was not a phone jack back then. It was just a wire coming out of the wall. Right. So it wasn't like if you wanted to hit up your own phone, you needed to be able to, you know, splice wires or something like that. Anyway, uh a bunch of uh people in in the 19 uh 50s uh uh in in uh invented something called the hushaphone and the Hushaphone was this plastic device that fit over the receiver and made it so that people around you were not bothered by your phone calls, if that if that makes sense. It really is just a gigantic piece of plastic. This big piece of plastic that that came out was actually originally invented in in the nineteen twenties. They did an advanced version of it. They consulted with this fellow named Leo uh Branick at MIT , who was a expert on acoustics. He later went on to uh help invent the internet. They invented this sort of improved model. And Bell freaked out and said we cannot have foreign attachments on our network. They went and they uh began threatening that they would disconnect the service. So they didn't have the power to sue people, but they did have the power to threaten to disconnect the service of anyone who used this foreign attachment. Um and ultimately it went to a suit. The FCC um, you know, uh first went along and they went back and forth. So grudgingly, they they ended up having a lawsuit over whether uh a hearing over whether the uh the Hushaphone actually interfered with phone communications. And ultimately uh it didn't. And um there there was it all the went all the way the DC circuit. And it came down uh ultimately uh to a kind of a landmark decision with DC circuit where they said an unwarranted interference with the telephone subscriber's right reasonably to use his telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without being publicly detrimental, can't be interfered with. So ATT finally had a little bit of pushback on their uh entirely encompassing control freak nature. Yeah. But that takes a while. Crucially that takes a long time and it about ruins the life of the Hushaphone creators in trying to do this. But they did. They they decided basically we have to fight this fight all the way out because we think it's important. And they do eventually win win their day in court, but it takes them a long time and an awful lot of money. And in in in that space, actually while AT<unk>T is fighting this fight is when this phone comes out. And so let's let's get to this phone, but first let's take a break. Then we're gonna talk some hardware. We'll be right back. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan. And the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping pong ball . We build PCs with long-lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for a charger. And built-in intelligence so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies. Built for you. Dell.co.uk forward slash Dell PCs . Get the new fix and fall tariff from British Gas, where prices can only slide down . If energy prices climb up, no worries, you'll be fixed for two years. But if later the market falls, so will your tariff. A win-win. Sorted automatically by us . Price cap taken care of. Fix your prices today. Search British Gas Fix and Fall. Ts and C's eligibility and limitations apply. Price review based on the off-gen price cap after twelve months see British Gas.co.uk slash verify for more. Alright, we're back . Let's talk about a designer named Henry Dreyfus, who is somebody I had never heard of before, but turns out to be a bit of a legend in the design world. So this guy, he's a he's a New York guy, he's a designer, he works on Broadway plays . He eventually opens a firm to do uh industrial design and ends up designing some truly iconic stuff. He this this guy is in like the the twenties and thirties and forties and fifties doing work and his big idea is what if we made things that were human centric? What if the design was was useful to people and also looked nice? And so he ends up designing a bunch of like truly iconic things. One of them is the this vacuum called the Hoover 150. One of the first vacuums to have basically be all sort of all contained like this and cleaner and simpler and less designed. He also designs the Honeywell T eighty seven thermostat, which is like the iconic shadow of a thermostat. So he this guy is like doing big important work. And he eventually, at the end of all this, goes to work for ATT. So at this point in the nineteen thirties, um, Bell Labs had released a phone called the Western Electric 300, itself a bit of an icon in the annals of landline phones. They're making this transition away from the old they called them candlestick phones, which is it was the those are the two pieces. You hold the one up to your ear and and the other one down here when as you talk into it. That had been the design of phones for forever. And right before the Great Depression, Bell Labs had done this big design rebo ot of all of its phones. Um there was still a second box, like you were talking about. There's a there's the phone on the desk, and then there's a thing stuck to the wall, basically, that is where a lot of the actual equipment is and also is how you connect to the network. The wars happen and the Great Depression happens, and so there's this giant pause in a lot of development. But then this stuff comes like roaring back in in the 30s and into the forties. And again, Tim, like you were saying earlier about kind of ideas all happening at once, everybody thinking about this kind of device around the world, right? Because ATT is not the only company in the world doing telephony, everybody starts to think about plastics, which are becoming a thing and new kinds of transmitters and new things are being cheap to manufacture. So everybody starts consolidating on this idea of like how do we make something a little smaller, a little simpler, and how do we put it all into one device. Rherat than the phone being sort of this like big wacky system that lives in your house. They're like, how do we just make it a thing? The other thing about the Western Electric 300 was that it was like really, really, really nice to hold. Bell Labs and others had done a lot of ergonomics research and people were starting to make more and longer phone calls. So the idea of like making this a nice experience was really important. So they're like, how do we make this more and more pleasant? So they come up with a bunch of little things. Like the fact that when you pick it up, the speaker actually covers most of your ear, but it has this sort of concave thing so that it actually puts a cup around your ear that it makes the sound better. Uh it puts your mouth right on the microphone by design, like you kind of can't put the microphone anywhere else. So that makes it sound better. They understood the phone as a physical object for the first time, which I think is really cool. This is like the end of doing it because it is what the technology requires and into like actually we have a bunch of options. How do we make this a lifestyle object? Yeah. Which I think is very cool and and leads to a lot of these a lot of these changes. If you go all the way back on ATT's YouTube channel, a thing that I had occasion to do. They uploaded a bunch of like old archival basically infomercials. Like ATT would make these long movies explaining to people how things would work, and they would play them at the beginning of like movie theater movies to For convenience in dialing, the letters go around the dial in alphabetical order , and the numbers are in numerical order from one to nine and oh . And in the center of the dial appears the number of the telephone you are using. With dial service , telephone numbers consist of a central office name and five numbers like this. Main 2 9 9 7 0. This is like there there was a time not that long ago that you had to explain somebody that the numbers go up in order. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Where they're like, here's how you unlock it. Very much so. We've gotten away from this. Yeah. So in nineteen forty-six is all of this is going on. Uh ATT starts working with Henry Dreyfus' company. Um they spend a couple of years sketching ideas, they test with customers, and eventually this thing starts to hit in 1949. This is the Western Electric 500. This is a big giant deal of a device. And they launch it as such. They understand that they have done something important and powerful. And there are a bunch of new things inside of this. So like one one way I would think about it is you have the base plate inside of the phone. There's a lot of like really complicated mechanics. And actually, we sent Andrew Marino, our producer , to the Long Island Telephone Museum, where there are actual, honest to God, old phone experts who did a much better job of explaining it. So let me just play this video that Andrew made for us. Okay, I'm here at the Long Island Telephone Museum and I'm here with the curator historian John Stallone. Hi John. Hi, how are you? I'm great. Welcome. We are gonna take a demo look at the Western Electric 500. We're gonna actually open one up and take a look and see how it all works. Exactly. All of the inner workings and how the magic occurs. Okay, great . So in 1954, it's a huge pivotal year for the telephone company. This is the first time that the 500 set now is available in a variety of eight different colors. We have a pink one in our office actually. Very nice. A pink one is rare. It would have been special ordered. Oh, okay, cool. This new type of telephone has a thing called a varister inside of it. So the varister is a combination of two words. It's a varying resistor. And this now allows that phone to be placed at any distance from the central office, whether it's close where it would have a more powerful current coming to it, or the further away where it would have a less powerful current from it. Gotcha. And normally when you're making a call or somebody would bang the phone down and hang up on you, you'd hear that loud click in your ear. That varister prevented that from happening. It also now, for the very first time, allows you to make your ringer louder or lower. Can we also talk about the plug here? In nineteen fifty-four, you could actually move your phone about your house wherever you might want it. If you wanted an outdoor jack on your patio, you were able to have that installed and then take your phone from inside and plug it into this little four-prong jack on the outside prior to that your phone was hardwired to the wall right So strangely enough, if you had one of these, even back in those days, you'd be able to unscrew it very simply from underneath. Two screws. But now we're going to uncover and look on the inside of all where all the magic happens. So we spoke about the bell earlier, and here's where you go be able to actually see it moving closer and further away from where the clapper is. That's in the center Just to pause really fast. This is such a perfect example of like the simplicity of the system that you're talking about. It's just how far are the bells from each other. They found so many like little tiny ingenious things to do here that make all of this Yes. And they can just fix it. Yeah. It's very clever. Very good. This is a jaw a giant magnet. And basically what's happening when the phone rings, 90 volts AC is being applied Right. Changing polarity to make that ringer be pulled back and forth. Right, and so that's the only way it's getting power is through the phone line, correct? It's actually coming through the regular wire that's coming in from the outside. The telephone works off of a thing called negative forty-eight volts V C. The ringer actually works off of 90 volts AC. Okay. So how does that get power then? So that power is coming from the central office with a big generator that was inside there, a ringing generator. And when you were gonna get a call, it would send that ringing current across the line, excites the ringer, now you're hearing . Okay, so at that point, the circuit's closed. This is your switch hook. You're gonna it's actually open and you pick it up. So yeah, when you pick up the phone, this yeah circles closed in and then boom, you're answering your call. Hello? Who's there? Can you walk through the dialing mechanism? So I I didn't disconnect it, but I could show it to you actually you could do a little work here and take this off. Cool . Alright so now we can kind of see the back of the dial. So every time you're making a call this governor is spin ning, creating an opening closing of the circuit, creating pulses for each number that correlates to what you spin. So if you were to do nine, of course, it would open and close the circuit nine times. If you go to zero, that's ten . So that would be ten times opening closing every time. The magic that happens behind the scenes after you spin that little wheel on your phone is translated all the way back to the central office, a building that's approximately a quarter of mile away from probably where your home is. And when you pick up your phone and you're dialing your number, this is going to register in the central office the number . So when we saw the um the clicks in the phone, it's kind of relaying that same signal. Signal to here. Right. So every time the those contacts open and close, it's registering a click inside the central office until you reach the number of clicks for your telephone number. Seven numbers. At that point, you're calling within the scene area of your central office, and now it's gonna translate it to the phone that needs to be getting ringed. So now the phone's ringing at the other location, you hear that ring, you pick up the phone, and now you're able to have your conversation . When you hang up, it resets and it waits for the next time or the next person who needs that line finder to be able to go and make the next call . Well, thank you, John. I really appreciate it. Yeah, this great was so fun. I learned so much. Um back to you, David. Say hi to David. Hi, David. Great, thank you . First of all, John is my hero. I aspire to that kind of knowledge about literally anything. But I think it's it's there's so much of that that is exactly this thing that we've been talking about. That A, it's this whole system that is the point. Right. Like you Tim, you and you and Neil I both been talking about the the Bell system. Yeah. This is the system. It's all those parts. It's all mechanical. Yeah. It's a it's a big mechanical system and it all has to work together exactly right. And I think that's where their like weirdo control freak nature came from. Like there's no slack in this system. You can just like knock the thing out of alignment and then the phone's broken. Aaron Powell And you can see how you would make a compelling argument that actually if we let somebody else into this system, they'll screw it up. It is very complicated and put together. But also they should have let work So all of this stuff is is some of it is new and some of it is just vast improvements over how all of this stuff works. The fact that you can control the volume, the fact that you can like like you you were doing earlier, you can pick it up and carry it around is like meaningful to people's experience with these phones. This becomes I think crucial to how people think about their relationship with their phones for decades. Yep. Right? Like th this is in so many ways the like iconic moment of phones were already mainstream, but this changes people's relationship to them in a way that I'm still like wrapping my head around because this is it is this is the phone in so many ways. Aaron Powell Yeah, it is the picture of a phone. It was the icon of a phone on cell phones for years and years and years. The idea that you would have more than one of them in your house that arrived with this device. Yeah. And that it is a consumer object made of plastic. I mean it really just changed everyone's relationship with the phone in serious ways. Aaron Powell They fixed a bunch of the things in it to make it more serviceable. A huge part of the goal of all of this for ATT is to make these phones easier to service because it's this is all still at this point kind of brittle technology. Yeah. And so they're spending a lot of mechanical money and a lot of time like going to people's houses and they have these huge repair shops that people are repairing the phones in. Like this thing is a lot of work. So anything they can do to make it easier to get inside and fix is a huge deal. So this one, like you you can literally just lift this cover off with a couple of screws and see all of the internals right there. And that is that's a big deal, right? Like there's a real repairability aspect to the thing. There are a couple of other little design things I just want to point out. One of them is that on the dial here, before the numbers had been inside of the dial. So when you would put your finger in, it would obscure the numbers. So it was actually hard to see. So on this one, they put the numbers around the outside and then they're actually part of the plastic. But then in testing they discovered that people didn't know where to put their fingers anymore. So they put these dots in the water . In order to just they're those are like places for your finger to land. Uh because people people didn't know where to where to actually put the thing because it was hard to navigate from the number the circle. I want to play maybe the most iconic and most lasting thing that happened from this device, which is Travis, our producer, can you call this phone? Oh. Oh, it's good. Oh , it's good. I cannot describe to you how like visceral reaction I have to that ring. And it's mechanical. There's a bell in there that's being struck by a striker and it you can feel it's vibrating the table. It's so good. Where does that take both of you? I just immediately become a kid again. Like, I'm home. I'm home in the eighties and I'm running down the stairs because the phone was in the kitchen, right? And again, this is like eventually there are more phones in the house and this stops being such a thing. But that sound is run to the kitchen. Yep. Same. Can I just say the word operator here printed on the side? It's so jaunty. Like this thing has whimsy to it. It's good. Whimsy. It's true. It's lovely. You know, it kind of reminds me design-wise, a little bit of like the Porsche nine eleven. Yeah. Or the Volkswagen bug. It has kind of a you know, it's roughly the same era. You know, a kind of rounded design that really lasted and became classic. Yeah, it's got that jet age feel, right? We're we're we're entering into we're gonna streamline everything. Totally. We're gonna cut through the water with the greatest of ease. A lot of rounded corners. Yeah. I think there's also a case to be made that this is the best sounding phone of all time. Like it's it's useful to remember for many people watching and listening to this, you've never heard a good sounding phone call. Never like it it's it's honestly true. But there was a long time where phone calls sounded awesome. Yeah. They had we had these super high fidelity lines, they were able to carry almost uncompressed speech. Like it sounded amazing. And there there was something meaningfully like emotionally different about a phone call. The phone companies used to compete on the quality of their phone calls. Yeah. This is this is g long since gone. Yeah. I mean I mean I guess that's the thing about the the story of innovation, which you know, I've been very critical of ATT, but to give them their credit, they just in some ways innovate in different ways. Like they innovated in terms of trying to have the perfect perfect like phone quality and the perfect reliability. Like the big deal for them was that every time you picked up the phone you get a dial tone. You know, not like nine out of ten times or five. And you know, on our current, even our current networks pretty advanced, occasionally a phone call just fails. And to them, that was, you know, that should never happen. Right. So they were they were going for a different ideal., let's just put it that way Well, it's actually it's an interesting incentive matchup, right? Because if you're if you're ATT and you've and you're Western Electric, because of the way your business works, because you lease these phones to people, every one of their incentives was to make these things awesome and last forever. Yep. Because it was it was much cheaper in the long run for them to do that than to make crappy things that broke. Like if they could make great things that didn't break, they would ultimately be vastly more than collecting rent forever. Trevor Burrus, which is like feel about that however you want. But it did incentivize them to make the phone great. And they did. Yes. Tim, uh politically and business wise, what's happening through this phase , right? Is this phase of the Western Electric 500 also sort of the the dawn of the end of the enlightened monopoly of ATT here? Aaron Powell That period, the 1950s, is sort of remembered, I think, by people, you know, sort of madmen uh kind of era, a lot of big business. But it was also the most active period of antitrust enforcement, maybe in US history, fifties and sixties. They were extremely aggressive. And one of the reasons is they were reacting to World War II, and the sense was that the Nazis and the Japanese Empire had been built on the back of monopoly. And there was a lot of worry that, you know, somehow monopoly and m over monopolization of industry was going to start to bleed into fascism in the United States in some way. And so there's this aggressive uh thing and and it spills over into AT<unk>T, um, and they say, hey, we have this company, uh, it's huge, it's really powerful, it's politically connected, they're sort of dangerous. Um, let's take a run at them. This is the justice department talking in the 50s. And, you know, this is crazy. How is it that they own the uh Western Electric Company? Those obviously could be two different companies. Around the same time they had just broken up the film industry into producers and um and theaters. They said, you know, uh film they they just changed the the the the film industry so that um the the big studios couldn't own everything in a vertically integrated fashion. So they're they they took a run at it and you know I think this is one of the most important periods in uh US technological history period not just this telephone because eight the just technic takes a big run at ATT they have them on the ropes. The'yre gonna break them up. And in those days, breakups were relatively common. And AT T pleads and frankly gets the defense department involved in this whole decision-making in the federal government. And the defense department says you can't break up ATT they're too important to national defense they help us operate our nuclear laboratories they do the early warning system against Soviet missiles um spare them uh they so they intervene and they arrive at this agreement, um which as I keep saying might be one of the most consequential for US tech history, the 1956 consent decree. Because in that ATT agre es to stay out forever of computing. They're like, let us have our monopoly . Let us, you know, continue to provide wonderful service for the American people and own everything, but allow us to keep will stay out of everything but telephony. And the other most important thing is they force them to license every single patent they own for free. And one of those patents is the transistor patent. And a whole bunch of people then quit Bell Labs, ATT, and start um transistor companies, including Shockley and a few others, eventually Intel . And so the there's two industries that are born in that exact period in this fight over the telephone. The US computing industry gets a big boost by getting the phone company out, so IBM gets its real start, and the US semiconductors industry. So there that little phone on your desk has some rule in birthing um two of the most important US industries. And actually some of the guys uh uh in that patent end up writing Unix. There there's a whole bunch of things can be linked just to that moment and just to that agreement where they let Bell keep its telephone but it let uh but frees up the rest of the tech world. Are we gonna talk about cardophone? I want Tim to talk about cardophone before he has to go. It's like the heart of the whole game to me. Amazing about this device, and Tim has mentioned several times now, is it's hardwired into the network. Well, eventually you just want to plug a modem directly into the phone network. Eventually we get to RJ11 connectors and we're plugging all kinds of devices. We have nineteen eighties cordless phones. All of that was the fight. Like when I think about the history of this device, what undid it was uh ecosystem of other phones that ATT had to be forced into allowing to connect to their network. And once they were forced into allowing other phones, they had to be forced into modems. And then you just then it's all over. And that's a decision, right? Tim, that's a fight. Can you talk about that fight? Yeah, sure. So it was actually similar to the Hushaphone fight, but with longer lasting consequences. So the Carter Phone made an acoustic coupler that connected to a radio , which was, you know, a a way of connecting the phone to the radio network. ATT, as usual, freaked out and said that's a foreign attachment, it's dangerous to our network. Um it cannot be allowed and uh Carterphone had enough resources and, you know, times were changing. There it is. And they they thought it out. Um and it went all the way to the DC circuit. Um, the FCC now had switched sides and was on the side of the uh innovators. And so eventually, through a court order by the DC circuit, um ATT was forced to acknowledge the possibility of things connecting to its network. Now that sets into event a whole string of events that I think are very important. The FCC at this point, is starting to wonder about this paradigm of regulated monopoly. And thinking that, well, maybe we can keep the monopoly, but um allow a little bit of competition in long distance uh and a little bit of competition on the handset or the attachment side. And they do something pretty radical, but with extraordinarily long-lasting consequences, which is they come up with a rule that compels ATT to install phone jacks in people's houses. Right. You know, the phone jack is one of those things in daily life, along with the electric plug, that is so radically essential to the history of technology uh that it's surprising we don't wonder at it more often because think of what it is it is an interconnection and interface that costs no money to connect with and is universal and totally permissionless. So suddenly people can plug stuff in the mid-50 70s into this phone jack and you know doesn't spread everywhere at once. That is what in some ways sets off the modern telecom revolution, along with long distance and the first net neutrality rules. And it comes from just this in a humble device. And if I'll say one more thing about it, ATT , they're they're like this grumpy old man at this point who just keeps doubling down because they go on a tear, and even though they're forced to have this phone jack, they still insist that it's a danger to the phone network. I had a uh uh a judge I worked for, Richard Posner , uh, who went to consult for ATT during this time, and he they hired him to try to prove that all these attachments were gonna be a danger to the ATT system. And he said, Well, what's the you know, what what's it gonna be? And they said, Well, um , you know, someone could attach something to the phone line that would send an electric current and then a repair man who was up on a pole would get shot and go falling to his death. This argument works for a while, by the way. Yes, it does. And I remember he said he said, does that ever happen? No, no, but there's always the first time . There's always a first time. And you know, they had all these other things dangerous, unhygienic, um, you know, spread disease. They insist and they they refuse to comply with the FCC rules. They do all these things. They insist on people having what they call a protective coupler. So it's something you you attach between the network and their devices. Their refusal to deal with and and I think this is you know, kind of the end point. Their refusal to obey the FCC's rules on attachments is a big part of what leads to the final antitrust lawsuit that leads to their total breakup into nine different companies. So the end of the Bell Empire, the old Bell Empire, is on the back of their refusal to let consumers attach uh you know whatever they wanted to their own walls. And it came just out of this, you know, kind of control freak mania that eventually led to a total breakup. And I bring it back to this phone, right? This phone represents the enlightened monopoly. We're gonna hire the designer. He's gonna look at how people are actually using this stuff and we're gonna gently curve the inside of the handset so your ear can fit into it and we will deliver unto you the perfect phone and it shall remain unchanged for forty years. And then you're like, or you can have a phone jack and now Sony can make phones and Panasonic can make phones and like let a thousand flowers bloom and the you fight against it so hard you kill yourself. And then you reform yourself like the Terminator, which is what ATT fully did. But that version of ATT killed itself over not letting people compete with this device. And I think that is just so fascinating because again, this thing is fully mechanical. It is obvious how it works. If you wanted to make a phone that connected to ATT's network and worked exactly like this one, all you have to do is open it up, which is very easy to do, look at it and say, well this is how it works. I can make my own. And it wasn't, you know, cryptographic signatures or DRM or secret passcodes or whatever. It was we're gonna take you to court and kill you. And they were just really, really good at that uh to keep people from using their network. You know, I mentioned ancient Rome, but there's certainly uh something of a Greek tragedy to the whole story about it. There was something beautiful and admirable about the ATT Empire, but ultimately their hubris , their desire to you know, be the one perfect network to control everything that ultimately led to their downfall. This has been terrific topic. I I I can't I wish we had another couple of hours to talk about the inner workings of ATT. But thank you again, Tim. Hope all goes well. Appreciate it. Hey guys, it's been great. I enjoyed it. Come back. Alright, we gotta take one more break and then me and and I are g Ionna come back and do the version history questions. We'll be right back . Hi, I'm Maria Sheripova, host of the Pretty Tough Podcast. Each episode I sit down with high-achieving women to discuss the pursuit of excellence without apology. This week on the show, clinical psychologist and founder Dr. Becky Kennedy and I unpack what it really means to raise kids today. I think parenting is the most important job in the world, and the one that has the most impact on your world and the world. It is non-stop . Check out Pretty Tough new episodes on Wednesdays. You can watch it on YouTube or listen in your favorite podcast app In the span of a decade, Ben Shapiro built the Daily Wire into a conservative media empire. He produced hit podcasts that bit at liberal excesses and documentaries and lectures about the founders, the genders, the gospels. He peddled polos, hats, candles, provided a home for deplatformed conservative stars like Matt Walsh and minted stars like Candace Owens. Let's put a pin in that. The Daily Wire even has kids programming, a judgmental puppet named Zodles. Zodles. Zodles! 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The right idea at the wrong time, wrong idea.. Wrong time This is the most this can be. This is the most right idea at the most right time. You think so? Yeah. This phone in particular. So what I want to do is I wanna I want to divorce like the bigger picture everything from this. And I want to specifically talk about like this phone in 1949 and 1950. Yeah. I'm saying it's the most ready at the most right time. Imagine if like Mark Zuckerberg had your best interests in heart. Do you know what I mean? Like this is the product of enlightened monopoly in that post war period. Like America is at its fullest flower and this phone exists. I will say it was the single most interesting thing about researching this whole thing was uh and we talked about this a little bit, is like I think I believe Theodore Vail, when he said he actually cares about people and wants to do a good job and make a nice thing for everybody. I also think he made a lot of money on the way. But I also think like a lot of this our our whole country is premised on the idea that you can do good and make a lot of money and that those two things can exist together and act like that. Like streamlined limousines and like kicking nickels to the street urchins, right? Yeah. It wasn't all great. But I think the idea of like we we want you to regulate us, but we think we can build the best network and that actually everybody benefits from the network being fully connected. I buy that whole theory all at once in in ways I did not expect to coming into this. But what I think what I wonder about where this goes on the matrix, I think right idea is very clear, right? Like this thing was this this represented like the absolute maximum vision of something. I I think if you take away all the stuff you're talking about in like the twenties, thirties, and forties, right, where there were other priorities, there were there was this huge sort of stop in innovation because of the Great Depression, could ATT have gotten to this idea twenty years sooner and been had had something even more powerful happened as a result? Could we have like sped up a century of innovation if ATT had gotten to this thing sooner? Aaron Powell No. I mean, this thing is a marvel of plastics engineering. It's true. Right. It's a marvel of like electronic miniaturization. There's a whole bunch of just World War II era defense spending embodied in this phone. Yeah. And may maybe may maybe if the whole of all of history was different. You know? But like in the in the timeline we live in, I'm saying there it's this is the right product culturally . It represents a I think Tim called it nobless obligé. Like it represents a different attitude towards the responsibility of billionaires across the board. And it hit at a time when all the people in the post war period were interested in new ideas, in new connections, and new ways of l like y it just doesn't get better than this moment, I don't think. Yeah. I think I agree. This might be the most up and to the right we've ever had on this show. Yeah. The way you describe it. All right, right idea, right time. I feel good about it. All right. Question number two. Was this peak anything? I think this more than most has has the chance to do a lot of things. And I want to offer you se veral. Okay. Was this peak phone ringer? I just want like I want to point out this was you can still Andrew Marino, our producer, pointed out to me this morning, this ringer exists on the iPhone today. It's called old phone. Yeah. You can make your phone sound like this now. And you should because it takes a it 's not gonna come through because you know it's microphones, the internet, new tube compression. In person , that physical bell ringing sounds so good. It does. It is just a remarkably good sounding thing. Even though it still provokes in me the sense of panic that I need to run downstairs and answer the phone before my mom talks to my girlfriend. Were you instructed on how to answer the phone? Like as a as a kid, did you have I was told very specifically that I was to say, Pierces, this is David when I picked up the phone that was how I answered the phone my whole childhood. No. I th we were just we were we were all just freestyling. You were just like, what up? It's your boy Neh. Uh well so my parents were doctors. So the hospital was always called. Oh sure. And so like the only thing that ever really happened was someone would ask for a doctor would tell and I would have to say which one smaller thing to say. Okay, so I think I think pink peak ringer is yes for sure. Um was this peak handset, just like the feeling of holding a phone? I think the Yeah, that's pretty good. It's very good. I think it's possible that the the trim line, the one that came after, was a little more sort of comfortable to do the like snuggle it between your shoulders. The trim line was the one where they started selling those big foam attachments that you would lean up against. I don't know. I think this this one has a a strong a strong case to be made. I do think the fact that you just immediately picked it up in one hand, put it to your ear in the other hand and felt powerful is like there's something there's something too. Yeah the trimline never made anybody feel powerful. No it didn't the trim line made you feel like you were trying a flight. The trimline it was that or it like you're a you're a high school girl like lying on the ground kicking your legs in the air. Like that's the trim line. Do you know what I mean? And then okay, one other one that I was thinking about that I'm curious if you have any others. Was this peak ATT? Like does this thing represent i in latent Monopoly ATT? That that version of like ATT at its absolute most powerful is this phone that moment. Yes. And I I think the argument of this episode is this phone represents the beginning of the end. The only case against it I think is like by now the the there is an antitrust fight started that will like the the the extent to which all of this stuff happens in like 18 months is nuts, right? This phone comes out and sort of establishes ATT in people's houses in a new way. There's an antitrust fight that comes out. Hushaphone is going on. So like all the cracks are coming, even as ATT is flexing its power. Right. That's what I mean in total. This is if if you are ATT and you're the enlightened monopolist , you've made this product because this is your prom you're this is you keeping your promise. Yeah. And then all around you is your downfall. Right. So everybody is like creeping up the mountain towards it, but this phone just sits alone at the top of the mountain. Yeah. Okay. I agree. I think that's right. Did you have anything else? Peak anything? No. I mean I fundamentally I think this phone just represents like peak America in that way. Like it is a symbol of a particular kind of America. And this is like everybody in today's America like longs for for I would say many incorrect reasons, a moment in history that was this moment. Yeah. Like there's so many people who were like life was better in the fifties. We did it in the fifties. There are a lot of people who correctly disagree with that assessment. But there is a very particular kind of like Americ Americana America that is tied up in this. All right, question number three. If you could travel back, knowing everything we know now and develop it yourself, could you make the product more successful? And for you, I want to say, not ATT. This product. I'm not asking, could you fix ATT? Could you make this phone a bigger hit? And I I want to offer you one idea that I don't think is true, but I think is an interesting sort of counterfactual. If ATT had embraced the idea of this as a more Allow the Hushaphone, allow the Carter phone, like buy into the idea that actually we want to be the center of a larger gadget ecosystem around your phones. Maybe this is Oh, mine is so much dumber. It's so much dumber. You're like you're off in the weeds. See the cord? The cord is fixed on these phones. You would just make it longer. This is the big problem with these phones. This cord in particular was quite short, which limited where you could put it. Eventually, when the you know the phone jack came out and everything was sort of modular in that way, like long phone cords were an innovation. Oh yeah. You would see them places. I remember you would have the one on the that was like high up on the wall and the cord would touch the floor. Yes exactly. You have like fifteen feet of cord. Yep. Exactly. So that's my one innovation for this device. That's pretty good. I'm very much in favor of rotary dials, I think. Okay. Like just the idea of the the work required to make a phone call is a good thing. And I think we should bring that back. You should have to know someone's number and do it for one whole minute before you're allowed to make a phone call. Yeah. That's the thing I believe. Question number four, will the youth ever make it cool again? And I I the broadest version of this question is, is there a landline revolution upon us? Because I would like to very briefly make the case that it is like in very small ways kind of happening. Yeah. There's this company called Tin Can that has built these sort of closed networks for neighborhoods and and friendly. This is a hottest thing for the seven-year-old girls. This is like a thing that is is happening. But I wonder, is there a phone as a object for phone calls and B dedicated phone call making device . Is there a possibility of a comeback for that? Aaron Powell I feel like all of this runs into the reality of how the net works themselves work. But tin can is like its own little weird Wi-Fi calling service. Yeah. You actually want to make phone calls, like the best way to do it is to like be a thing like a weird Bluetooth handset for a cell phone. Yeah. And all that sucks. I would love it if landlines made a comeback and we were all made more intentional phone calls and we would like schedule the calls the way that we used to do with my family. But it that it's like because the there's no way to build that without a cell phone right now. Right. Or no efficient way or cost effective way to do it. And you're kinda like, well I'm just Bluetooth into my cell phone over there. I might as well watch TikTok. So I I think that the the tin can't the world and this is this is stuff really you know I've I've got an elementary school daughter like they all want these products. Yeah. Because we won't let them. Really? Like tin can is cool? Interesting. It was all sold out for Christmas. Really? Yeah. So you can just see that there's something else happening there, but I think that's because the parents are so opposed to giving out cell phones. So you're basically just shoving them back into the ATT paradigm. That's fair. This does kind of bleed into um question number five, which is what feature of this product should every current version have? To me the answer is blindingly obvious, it's good sounding phone calls. Yeah, obviously that's like if the answer is good sounding phone calls, that bleeds back into the other thing. Like I was thinking about this in i with video chat, right? There is there's an argument to be made that there's no going back to phone calls because video chat has just eaten it alive and if you're a young person you associate calling somebody with looking at them. Yeah. Those sound like shit too. Yeah. Because you're either you're holding your phone far away from your face so that you can see, which kills the sound quality, you're talking into a laptop from far away, which kills the sound quality. Like there is no version of this thing that is set up to make anything sound good because we sounding good is not important. But I I honestly do believe that if you could bring back the actual fidelity that we've lost over the decades, it would make it more compelling for people to do it more often. Aaron Powell I absolutely know so. When it changed uh oddly was the pandemic. I really people got so used to Zoom and they got used to this huge quality degradation. Because the point was just to communicate. Right. So you would accept almost anything as long as you could get the bare bones of communication across. Before that, you know, I I would do like TV hits and you know, if you would go on the radio or TV, all the producers would say, Can you get to a landline? Oh yeah, that's true. They would ask you every time, can you get to the landlord? They would they cared about the quality and then the pandemic hit and everyone was like, Yeah, Zoom's fine. Mm-hmm and we we just have n uh that's like a little marker. It's obviously not everyone's having that experience. But to me it was when the radio producers gave up on on sound quality. Like it was like there's no hope for anyone else. Like these are the last people in America who truly care. And like it's gone. I'm a nihilist about people caring about audio quality, as you know. Uh I don't know. I don't know if that one's coming back. I think you're right, but I I I wish it would. Yeah. And I think a lot of things would get better if it did. All right. Now we have three questions left. These are the Virgin History Hall of Fame questions. A product has to pass all three of these tests to make it into the Virgin History Hall of Fame. Question number one did this product do something truly new? Again, not ATT. This is the the Western Electric five hundred. About which I actually think this question is harder than a lot of episodes. This is very difficult. I would say yes. Uh to your point about design, right? I think I agree. I think there is a case to be made that the answer is yes for the one before this, that actually this is the iteration on a brand new idea that is ultimately what makes these things successful. But I think there is some combination of like you could control the loudness of it. The dialer was simpler. There's just a lot of like little bits and pieces that I do think added up to something genuine. It's the refined version of the big idea. For me, that refinement counts for a lot. Yeah. I think I agree. Yeah, we can't give it credit for being pink. We should say, uh uh like like Andrew learned in his video, this is a a limited edition one. Yeah and we're very proud of this. Uh but we don't get credit for it being pink 'cause it wasn't at first. But that was also a big deal. The idea that there were new colors, they did lots of different designs. There was one called the princess, like lots of new ideas about what a phone should mean in people's lives that I think did start here. Question number two : was this either remarkably good or remarkably bad? It's remarkably good. That's the answer. I think it was. It's obviously this thing is very important. It's like why we're here, but also I think I think it's it's not only is it very important, like we picked this to sort of mark a moment in a bigger story, but I do think this thing is more of a moment in that story than I realized when I started this process. I mean, also they you know they shipped it unchanged for four years. I know. Like you're just kind of like, well, it it goes in. Yeah. Imagine if you were still using an iPhone one because it was good enough. It did the thing. Like that's crazy. What's funny is we never got to test the theory because like there was no competition. There was it wasn't useful to compete with this. Nobody tried because you couldn't get into the network. Yeah. There was only one company making this. And and like we said, they had incentives to make it good. They had incentives to make people like it and use it. There were lots of reasons that it is as good as it is . But it is a fun sort of counter history. What if there had been honest to God free market competition much soon er, would somebody have done a much better job than this much sooner? Like all that's are off. Yeah. But it got you want a weird cordless phone? Like we'll send you one. It's almost a shame that we didn't get a longer run of the telephone before it became all these other things. Because like telephone innovation essentially sort of dies at the hands of all these other new things that are being invented, and everybody goes and finds more exciting things to work on, like computers and televisions and all these. So it's not like there is some multi-generational, fascinating new kind of telephone over the years, which I think is one of the reasons this thing lives as long as it does, is that even when other stuff comes along, it's not like there are a hundred brand new ideas about the phone. I don't know man. I feel like we could we're gonna have to do the entire episode on that one panasonic answering machine that they used in the movie sneakers. Like I made sure that my family had that answering machine. Yeah. It was overshadowed. I agree with you. But it did continue for quite quite a long time. Yeah. I agree. All right. And then question number three, and I think this is this might actually be the easiest one of the three. Did this thing have a lasting impact? Did it capital M Really? It di it did. But you know, it was like forced on the American public. And so I I think matter is when it impacts the culture on its own merits. Yeah. Yeah. The way we've been describing it is like is there is there a world before this and a world after it? Yeah. And you don't think so? No. I mean it was just like this is a phone. Like I it like you know like that's the moon. Like it's just there it is. Like does it matter? Like yeah, it's pretty important. Sure. But like it doesn't it doesn't warp the culture around it in a way that uh the iPhone like is like paramount on this list, right? Yeah. Like the culture warps around the iPhone in like a very specific way. Interesting point. I think this this was just like given to America. Like here it is. Right. And I think that's actually a really interesting point, because not that long before this, we were still in the this is a growth phase, this is a new thing. People don't understand. Like we're we're in this sort of steady march of this technology into people's lives. But I think you're right, at this point this was this was ubiquitous. The things I'm saying about it that are very important, right? This is when it became a consumer product, this is when people would have more than one of them in their house, this is when you could pick it up by this handle, which I am just addicted to doing. Like all that stuff is very important. But it's not my relationship to the phone has changed or I'm changing my behavior around this phone. I still think it goes in the Hall of Fame, but like the to me the matter question is always it centers around did the culture change notice ably after the thing? And we've done a bunch of episodes about things where we talk about it so directly we don't even notice that's what we're talking about. The culture changed around the TiVo that we have sitting over there. It changed around the iPhone. Did the culture change around this? Like it's in a bunch of movies , but the way that we all use the phone remained essentially the same until the network was opened up. Trevor Burrus, What's an interesting design fact of it, right? And this goes back to like I spent a lot of time reading about Henry Dreyfus, who I find totally fascinating. And maybe that was his great achievement, right? Was what he did was discover what people wanted and what culture was was and hand them the perfect thing to do that. He didn't deliver some brand new idea about how everything was supposed to work. He just like nestled this thing perfectly into your life. Which is itself a huge achievement, but is not that kind of like there it it doesn't create an inflection point. Yeah. It just immediately makes this thing feel completely natural in your house. Yeah. Which is a a very different way of thinking about innovation, but is I think in many ways just as innovative. Like to build a thing that immediately feels like you've had it forever is very hard to do. Yeah. What it reflected was the power of the network. Like the network obviously matters, right? And this is the way to access the network that ATT is instructing you to do. Like because you're not making a choice, I think the matters question gets very difficult. Yeah. So okay, so just to be clear, you think the answer to number three is no, but you still want to put it in the hall of fame. Yeah, absolutely. This is like what do you want for me? Listen, the I'm not here to make your job simple. The people out there who say the Hall of Fame needs stricter rules are gonna have a field day with this one. It's obviously in the Hall of Fame. I'm just the the point that I'm making is that the the element of choice makes the matter question so much different. You can obviously make the argument that this thing matters capital M. Sure. My rubric is that it's when everyone's behavior changes by choice that that's when you win. Yeah. Obviously goes in the Hall of Fame. Okay. I think This thing represents like every idea we've ever had at the verge. I know I'm we're we're gonna put it in for that reason and also because I keep looking at the shot that we're doing here, and we've done a lot of these episodes now. Nothing has ever looked as good on the desk as this phone. See what I'm saying , as a as just an object, I am uh in love with this thing. Yeah, everything else is like a black rectangle. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's it's yeah. So for that reason alone, it gets in. Uh we're we're bending the rules. Fourth secret fourth casting. This is why Hall of Fame rules are are famously secretive, because it's just a bunch of bunch of men with bad ideas. Yeah. Melchick five hundred in, Bill Bellichick out. All right. Neely, thank you. This has been this has been a delight. Nothing like having a reason to talk about monopolies for now Thank you again to Tim Wu for being here. Read the Master Switch, read The Age of Extraction, follow him in all of his many internet travails. If you want to support all of this, that we're doing the best thing you can do is subscribe to The Verge, the Verge.com/slash subscribe. It's how we get to do all of this. It's also how you get all of our podcasts, including this one, ad-free. Thank you again. We'll see you next time. Virgin history is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. It's produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Markin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffrin and Joe Nebris. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarlane. 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