Humans as switches have lots of advantages, qualities such as judgment, sympathy, warmth—the personal touch that is part of customer service. But they have disadvantages too. For one thing, you have to pay them. For another, they’re slow. Between a lack of long-distance capacity and humans having to put through the calls, a coast-to-coast call in 1922 might have taken fifteen minutes or more to be connected. They make mistakes, for instance, plugging the wrong cord into the wrong jack. And then there are their all too human frailties. They eavesdrop on conversations. They gossip. They have loyalties.
The last of these qualities, legend has it, was the straw that broke an undertaker’s back. Back in the late 1880s Almon Strowger, a mortician in Kansas City, Missouri, noticed a disturbing drop in his business. As it happened, the wife of a competing undertaker worked as an operator at the neighborhood switchboard. She, the story goes, tended to connect callers to her husband’s business—not Strowger’s—when someone would call in and ask for the undertaker.
You can think of many solutions to such a problem. You could complain to the telephone company. You could have a friendly chat with your competitor. You could even sue. But Strowger could see through to the root of the problem: pesky humans. Eliminate human operators and you’d eliminate the problem. Strowger set upon inventing a system to make human operators obsolete. Who needs a bunch of people plugging cords in boards when a machine could do the work more quickly, more accurately, less expensively —and more honestly?
Strowger’s first mechanical telephone switch was patented in 1891. It allowed telephone subscribers to “dial” their own calls without needing to go through an operator. The original Strowger system didn’t involve an actual circular telephone dial; rather, each telephone had three buttons: one for the hundreds digit, one for the tens digit, and one for the ones digit. To call telephone number 315, you pressed the hundreds button three times, the tens button once, and the ones button five times. Inside, the fiddly bits of the switch worked together to connect you to the person you wanted. Look Ma Bell, no operator!
Strowger formed the Automatic Electric Company to build and sell his mechanical telephone switch. The first automatic telephone exchange, based on the Strowger switch, opened in November 1892 in La Porte, Indiana, with seventy-five subscribers and room for ninety-nine total.
Like many inventions, the first Strowger switch wasn’t quite ready for prime time and required a great deal of additional work before it became a commercially solid product. But it got there eventually, and with tremendous success. Bell eventually began using Strowger switches from Automatic Electric in 1915, and by 1926 Bell had licensed the Automatic Electric design and was manufacturing the switches itself. Telephone switches based on the Strowger switch—called “step-by-step” switches within the Bell System—would go on to become the dominant type of telephone switch for more than seventy years, seeing widespread use around the world. In the United States, the popularity of the Strowger switch reached its peak only in 1972 when more than 42 million telephone lines were connected to step-by-step switches descended from Strowger’s original design.
Other types of automatic telephone switches followed the Strowger switch. The Bell System began a metamorphosis, from a purely human affair to a gigantic cyber-mechanical-human endeavor: a mix of operators and machines switching calls, supported in the background by still more humans designing, building, installing, and caring for the switching machines. Functions that were once the domain of human operators slowly became increasingly mechanized: switchboards became switching machines; tandem switchboards became tandem switches (“tandems” for short)—specialized machines designed to connect trunk lines from other switching machines, building up the long-distance telephone network link by automated link.
Bell Telephone’s worries about competition starting when its patents began expiring in 1894 turned out to be well founded. Just ten years later there were more than six thousand competing independent telephone companies providing local telephone service. For Bell Telephone and its shareholders, this competition was bad enough. But in some ways it was worse for the customers. Prices varied considerably, with some telephone companies opting for flat-rate service in which customers paid a fixed yearly fee for all the local calls they could make, while other companies went with measured-rate service and charged customers per call (and sometimes per minute) for local calls. Worst of all, the telephone lines of independent companies didn’t connect with those of the Bell System, or, for that matter, with other independents. Cities would have multiple telephone companies and subscribers to one company couldn’t call those of another. Businesses had to have different phone lines installed from different telephone companies to support their customers.
Despite the chaos caused by these kinds of problems, the independents looked to be winning. By 1903 Bell had about fifteen hundred telephone exchanges and about 1.2 million subscribers. The independents had more than six thousand exchanges and about 2 million subscribers.
Bell Telephone fought back with everything it had. It drove independents out of business through what some would call predatory pricing, and it bought up many of those it could not drive out of business. It denied the independents the use of its long-distance network. And it engaged in more underhanded tricks, including bribing public officials to prevent the establishment of independent telephone companies as well as using company influence with banks to deny its competitors badly needed loans. It also launched an effort to dominate the telegraph industry, buying a controlling interest in its old nemesis Western Union in 1908. AT&T was described as a “ruthless, grinding, oppressive monopoly.”
The U.S. Justice Department began an antitrust investigation against AT&T in 1913, culminating in a recommendation that the Interstate Commerce Commission dig into AT&T with an eye toward regulation. The possibility of breakup of the Bell System—or even government takeover of the telephone system—loomed. Such a possibility was not idle speculation. Britain had nationalized its telephone system in January 1912, and in 1913 the new U.S. postmaster believed that the telephone system should be owned by the government just like the postal system.
AT&T began a series of negotiations with the Justice Department to forestall such an outcome. By the end of 1913 AT&T vice president Nathan Kingsbury reached a compromise with the government, the first of what would be several over the next seventy years. Under what became known as the Kingsbury Commitment, AT&T agreed to do three things. First, it would divest itself of Western Union. Second, it would stop buying up independent telephone companies, at least without Justice Department permission. And third, it would allow independent telephone companies to connect to the Bell System’s precious long lines, allowing customers of independents to make long-distance calls—for a fee.
The Kingsbury Commitment appeared to be a tremendous victory for the government and independent telephone companies, and a huge concession for AT&T. But appearances can be deceiving. Tim Wu writes, “The trick of the Kingsbury Commitment was to make relatively painless concessions that preempted more severe actions, just as inoculation confers immunity by exposing one’s system to a much less virulent form of a pathogen.” In particular, Kingsbury traded involvement in an old industry, the telegraph, for government-approved dominion of a new industry, long-distance telephone.
The Kingsbury Commitment started AT&T down the path of becoming a regulated, government-sanctioned monopoly. By 1925 the Bell System had coalesced into more or less the form that would carry the company forward for the next sixty years: American Telephone and Telegraph as the headquarters company and long-distance provider, Western Electric as its manufacturing division, Bell Laboratories as its research and development arm, and more than a dozen regional Bell telephone companies that provided local telephone service: New England Telephone and Telegraph, New York Telephone, the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, etc. It employed almost three hundred
thousand people and had annual revenues of $761 million in 1925—more than $9 billion in today’s dollars. Its network connected about 50 million telephone calls each day for some 16 million telephone subscribers over 45 million miles of wire and cable.
AT&T’s vast size, clever engineering, and distinct fusion of humans and machines made this communication network possible. What AT&T didn’t realize was that, in building this network, it had also built an electronic playground.
Three
Cat and Canary
BY THE MIDDLE of the twentieth century the playground—that is, AT&T’s telephone switching network—was largely formed, at least in its broad outlines. Millions of telephone subscribers used it to switch their calls across the country, and even overseas, every day. Not one of them noticed that the telephone system was anything more than a utility, a dull, drab, predictable —and predictably expensive—service for getting calls from point A to point B.
What the playground needed was someone to start playing with it.
David Condon† would turn out to be that person.
†A pseudonym.
Condon was in a Woolworth’s store in 1955 when he heard a sound that transfixed him. Louder than the background noise of the other shoppers in the store, it was also ear catching, increasing in pitch and then decreasing. Not pure but warbling. If a pure musical note was still water, this was water with ripples in it.
Condon scanned the store, trying to see past the other customers. Where was it coming from?
There.
He walked over to the counter, to the thing that was making the noise.
A small electric motor and air compressor were connected to a brightly colored plastic toy. It was a plastic flute, about ten inches long, with a small plastic bird in a small plastic birdcage on it. A plastic cat on the whistle gazed longingly at the bird. As part of the Woolworth’s display, the motor ran the slide of the whistle back and forth while the air blew, producing the rising and falling pitch he had heard. A small metal clip inside the whistle added the warbling quality to the sound.
“Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute,” read the sign above it. A picture showed Davy Crockett in his trademark coonskin cap, playing his flute, while songbirds swooped down, attracted by the magical melody.
It was forty-nine cents.
It was perfect.
The whistle soon found itself under the knife. Wire cutters snipped off the plastic birdcage, freeing the canary. A soldering iron melted the plastic under the canary itself, freeing it still further—all the way into the garbage can.
Condon borrowed some equipment from the lab at the school where he was studying for his master’s degree in chemistry. He took a motor from a chemical mixer—a blender for chemistry labs, basically—and mounted an aluminum disc on it. He placed some tape on the disc to make an insulated spot that would break an electrical connection as the disc spun. He adjusted the speed until a borrowed pulse counter told him it was rotating twenty times a second. He used a signal generator to feed a precise tone through this contraption. It made a warbling noise, a bit like a buzz but more pleasant. He adjusted the tone until it was centered in pitch about two octaves above middle C: a thousand cycles per second, or 1,000 Hz, as the engineers say.
He adjusted the slide on the Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute until it, too, made a 1,000 Hz tone when he blew it. Then he turned his attention to the bronze-phosphor metal clip in the whistle. He drilled holes in it until, by ear, it matched the pulses coming from his mixer-motor, wheel-counter setup: twenty pulses per second.
It was going to work, he was sure of it.
He waited for night to fall.
Say you travel back in time to 1955. You land in Miami, the weather is nice there, and you’d like to call your friend Bill in snowy Denver to rub it in. Bill’s number, odd as it may sound, is Race 2-7209. If that doesn’t seem like a reasonable telephone number to you, remember that you’re from the future, where telephone numbers are, well, numbers—ten-digit-long numbers, at that.
It wasn’t always that way. On the very early switchboards at the dawn of the telephone age you simply told the operator the name of the person you wanted to speak to and she connected you. Although numbers became necessary as telephone exchanges got larger, you didn’t need seven- or ten-digit numbers; the original Strowger switching system used two-digit numbers to accommodate a hundred subscribers. And since the largest manual switchboard exchanges could handle only about ten thousand people, telephone numbers stabilized for a while at four digits. But of course a given city might have multiple telephone exchanges. Exchanges were named, not numbered, and often were christened with the name of the general area or street where they were located. So Bill might be in the Race exchange and I might be in the Atlantic exchange and Joe might be in the Filbert exchange, depending on which neighborhoods and local landmarks were prominent where each of us lived.
This system worked great back in the days when, even for a local call, you picked up the phone, the operator came on the line and asked “Number please?,” you told her the number (“Race 2-7209”), and she connected you. No dialing involved. In some sense, this was the pinnacle of telephone service: as the Bell System’s official history says of this approach to making a phone call, “[The telephone] user’s operation had been reduced to the minimum effort ever achieved. He merely lifted his receiver and verbally informed the operator of his wishes.”
This business of telephone exchanges having names created a problem when the rotary dial telephone arrived on scene: how are you going to dial the number Atlantic 3-3040? Is the telephone going to have a dial with twenty-six letters and ten digits? This problem befuddled AT&T for years, until 1917, when one of the company’s engineers hit upon the system we’re so familiar with today: the letters “ABC” would be associated with the digit 2, “DEF” with 3, and so on. Callers would use just the first two or three letters of the exchange name plus the telephone number to dial a call. So Race 2-7209 would be dialed as 722-7209. “[It] seems so obvious that it is unbelievable that it took so long to invent, and it is difficult to realize the tremendous significance of this proposal when it was made,” according to an AT&T history. The result came to be called “two-letter, five-digit” dialing and it paved the way for telephone numbers made up entirely of digits.
But back to our 1955 long-distance call from Miami to Denver. By the mid-1950s the telephone system had grown into an interesting blend of humans and machines. In many areas of the country you could dial local calls yourself, but in other places you still might not have a dial on your telephone—in those places the operator would handle even local calls for you, just as at the turn of the century. And whether you dialed your own local calls or needed the operator to do it for you, in most parts of the country local calls were free or, perhaps more accurately, were paid for as part of your flat-rate monthly phone bill.
Not so long distance. It was expensive, of course, and, except for a tiny handful of cities with something called “direct distance dialing”—a newfangled service the telephone company had introduced in 1951—if you wanted to make a long-distance call you had to dial 211, where a special long-distance operator would arrange for your call.
So you dial 211 on your rotary phone to get the Miami long-distance operator on the horn. You tell her you want to talk to Race 2-7209 in Denver. Unfortunately for our operator—and for you—Miami has no direct circuits to Denver. This is not unusual; cities don’t have long-distance trunk lines to every other city. It’s economics: long-distance trunks are expensive to string from place to place and, unless those lines are going to be reasonably well utilized, the telephone company just can’t justify the expense.
Don’t worry, though, your Miami operator has connections to operators in lots of other places, and one of those places probably has trunk lines to Denver. And if they don’t, well, they�
��ll have connections to other cities that will—kind of like the hub-and-spoke system airlines use today. Just like with air travel, if Bill lived in some tiny, faraway town that most people have never heard of, the route can get lengthy and complicated and hard to figure out, requiring multiple intermediate cities to get you there. A handy guidebook at the operator’s switchboard position provides a quick memory jogger for the most common routes. For the unusual ones, Ma Bell provides a special rate-and-route operator that our Miami operator can call for advice when she’s stumped. Rate-and-route is a phone company internal operator customers cannot call directly. She and her sisters are the mavens of call routing.
Denver is easy, though, it’s a big city, and our Miami operator has that one memorized. Almost by reflex she reaches for a plug on her switchboard and jacks into an idle Atlanta trunk, connecting to her opposite number: the Atlanta inward operator. The Miami operator presses her “ring forward” button, sending a quick signal—brrrrp!—to get the attention of the operator up north. A light appears on the Atlanta operator’s board and she answers by plugging into the corresponding jack. The operators have a quick, almost machinelike exchange.
“Atlanta.”
“Denver, Race 2-7209.”
“Right.”
The Atlanta inward operator goes through the same process to move the call down field. She has a direct trunk to Denver; you can hear the hiss of the long-distance noise when she plugs into it. A similar mechanized conversation ensues.
“Denver.”
“Race 2-7209.”
The Denver operator does some quick plug-n-jack jujitsu. “Ringing.”
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 4