Bill answers the phone. The operators drop off the circuit, their work done. You have a brief conversation. Remember, long-distance is actually expensive, so you can’t afford to talk for too long. Your ten-minute call costs $5.90, about $48 in today’s dollars.
As it happens, you’ve just experienced the best-case scenario: the breaks were all in your favor and everything worked just like it was supposed to. But lots of things could have gone wrong. All circuits could have been busy between Miami and Atlanta, or Atlanta and Denver, in which case the long-distance operator would have arranged to call you back when a circuit was free. Even if you got through Bill might not have been home. If his phone just rang and rang, that would be one thing; you wouldn’t be charged a cent. But the worst would be if Bill wasn’t home but his mom was.When she answered the phone, you’d get charged for the call, and you didn’t even get to talk to Bill! Given how expensive this could be, that might be enough to scare you into not calling him at all.
The phone company doesn’t like it when its customers are scared to make phone calls—it’s bad for business. To avoid this, AT&T offered something called a person-to-person call. With a person-to-person call, you tell the long-distance operator not just the number to call but the name of the exact person that you want to speak to. If that person isn’t home, you pay nothing. But the telephone company has just become a casino. If the person you’re calling is home, AT&T charges you an extra fee—in some cases up to twice the cost of an ordinary station-to-station telephone call. This double or nothing scheme made long-distance calls more palatable for many, especially when calling places like dorms or boarding houses with lots of people and only one phone. Of course, person-to-person calls also created an opportunity to cheat the telephone company. Say you’re a businessperson traveling across country and you want to let your spouse know that you’re okay, but you don’t want to pay for a long-distance phone call to your home. You and your sweetie agree on an imaginary name (“Josefina Q. Zoetrope”) that means you’ve arrived and you’re fine. When you arrive at your destination, you ask the operator for a person-to-person call to Josefina at your home telephone number. Your spouse answers and says that Josefina isn’t there. The call was free and your spouse is relieved.
If Bill wasn’t home but it was really important to reach him, you could have the Denver operator leave a message for him to call you. Of course, long-distance calls being expensive, Bill might not want to spend the money to call you back. That’s okay, you can have him call you on your dime. The message left for Bill with whoever answered Bill’s phone would be something like, “Please call Operator Eight in Miami, there is a long-distance call for you.” When Bill got home, he could pick up his phone and ask to speak to Operator 8 in Miami. Long-distance cordboard magic would ensue and, when he finally reached Operator 8, he would give his name and ask if there was a call for him. Assuming she found his name in the pile of toll tickets on her desk, she would reply, “Yes sir, there is, let me connect you,” and then would complete the call back to you in Miami. That call would cost you money but it would be free to Bill.
Darkness fell. It was time to test the modified Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute.
Condon took his whistle to a pay phone. He dialed 0 and asked for Operator 6 in Kansas City. He knew his local operator didn’t have direct trunks to Kansas City so she’d have to route his call through an intermediate operator in Chicago. He listened patiently as she set up the call.
Operator 6 in Kansas City came on the line. Condon gave a name—not his own—and said he had received a message that there was a call for him from Kansas City. The operator checked her toll tickets but couldn’t find any record of such a call. Both parties expressed the requisite puzzlement—genuine on her part, feigned on his. Operator 6 in Kansas City disconnected.
The moment of truth had arrived. He put his Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute up to the mouthpiece of the telephone and blew it several times in quick succession. “Brrrrp! Brrrrp!” He listened to the hiss of the trunk line as moments ticked by.
A different operator’s voice came on the line. “Chicago,” she said.
It worked!
It did just what he felt so sure it would do. He had modified his Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute to generate the special “ring forward” signal—brrrrp!—used to get the attention of a distant operator. This was the signal that made the lamp light up on an inward operator’s switchboard, the one that signaled an incoming call from another operator. Because it wasn’t just a pure tone—it was 1,000 Hz modulated by a 20 Hz warble—he couldn’t produce that signal with an ordinary whistle. The flute’s warble was what had caught his attention in Woolworth’s. The warble was what made the whistle so perfect.
With this whistle, he figured, he would be able to make free calls anywhere in the country. All he’d have to do was get a pair of long-distance operators on the line, get the distant one to disconnect, and then blow his whistle. That would get a new, different operator on the line at an intermediate city. And since she could be reached only by other telephone operators, he figured she’d pretty much be willing to connect him anywhere he wanted.
Although the term wouldn’t be invented for more than a decade, David Condon was a phone phreak, that is, someone obsessed with understanding, exploring, and playing with the telephone network. In 1955 he was the only one. He was on his own and would be for years. Eventually others would follow, and among a select group of them his whistle, and his discovery, would lead to his phone phreak nickname: “Davy Crockett”—the original explorer, the King of the Wild Frontier.
Condon’s hearing the Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute that day in Woolworth’s was chance, of course. But somehow his mind made the mental plug-and-jack connection that linked it with the operator’s ring forward signal the instant he heard it. As the old saying goes, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
Condon’s mind started its preparations early, as early as three or four years old. “I was fascinated as a very young child by the fact that there was a switchboard somewheres, and when you picked up the phone, a voice said, ‘Number please.’ My mother used to tell me that that was an operator, that she was connecting you to other people.” Young Condon was mesmerized by the idea that there was something “out there”—a whole network, in fact—that could connect him to others.
Born in Philadelphia in 1931 he gravitated toward science. “Mother had a first cousin who was a science teacher. I think she first got me started. One of my presents that she brought me for my birthday was a dry cell.” That is, a large 1.5-volt battery, something that he could use to do basic science experiments—to make motors spin and lightbulbs light up. “That thing lasted me for years,” he recalls.
His father was a banker and his mother, eventually, was the principal of a four-room school in rural Pennsylvania. Technical interests ran in the family; his dad was a ham radio operator. Condon recalls being eleven or twelve years old and listening to shortwave radio with his father at night during World War II. They could only listen, since ham radio transmissions had been outlawed during the war for fear of use by enemy spies. This listening could sometimes turn chilling. Every so often they heard the most famous rhythm of Morse code: dit-dit-dit, dah-dah-dah, dit-dit-dit—SOS distress signals from Allied ships in the Atlantic under attack by German U-boats.
His first telephone—at least the first one that was his own—came from an elderly couple who lived next door. “I used to go over there and empty the ashes from their fireplace and bring them a bucket of coal. They had no running water in their house except in the kitchen,” he recalls. Despite their lack of modern conveniences, his neighbors had something he didn’t. “They had two magneto telephones in their barn,” he remembers, that is, telephones with cranks that you turned by hand to generate a ringing voltage. They were wall mounted, with a box in the bottom for wet-cell batteries, the kind you put sulf
uric acid in, like tiny car batteries. When the elderly couple passed away he inherited the phones. He took the magnetos apart and used them as generators, amazing his school chums by making lightbulbs glow.
It will come as no surprise that chemistry and physics were his favorite subjects; reading, less so. When a book report was due he would make the trip into the central library in Philly to borrow a summary of the book and use that to write his report. Foreshadowing his extraordinary future efforts with plastic whistles, he recalls, “It was more trouble to do that than it was to read the book, but I thought I was getting away with something.”
In 1950 he left for college in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he majored in chemistry and mathematics. There he discovered the school library subscribed to a magazine called the Bell Laboratories Record. Every month it summarized Bell Labs’ latest innovations, from the invention of the transistor to upgrades to the telephone network. Intended for a general audience, it was easier to read and more accessible than the engineering-focused Bell System Technical Journal.
The Record provided Condon with a great education, one that had been difficult to get up until then. “How you gonna find out how the telephone works?” he asks. “The operators didn’t have time to talk to you, they weren’t allowed to get into conversations with customers.” Sure, you could make friends with a repairman and learn a lot—and he did, pretty much every place he lived—but the Record was like a topical college seminar devoted to discussing the telephone network, one that was extraordinary for its breadth, depth, and currency. “They were proud, they tooted their own horn,” Condon recalls.
If it seems incredible to you that a company would publish the details of its technical achievements and how its internal systems worked, if it seems as if today these would be stamped confidential and locked away and used to crush competitors, you’d be right. Indeed, many telephone company documents were deemed confidential—or, AT&T’s highest classification, restricted. But remember too that AT&T didn’t have any serious competitors. It wasn’t just any company: it was the telephone company, a government-regulated monopoly, a national institution. For reasons of corporate pride, national service, and, of course, public relations, AT&T felt an obligation to share its latest and greatest feats with the public.
Armed with his Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute, Condon set about exploring the telephone network. He was living in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the time but quickly found the perfect place to carry out his experiments: the town of Oak Ridge, some twenty-five miles away. Oak Ridge was a strange place, one that didn’t appear on maps until just a few years earlier, despite having a population of more than seventy thousand people. During World War II, Oak Ridge was a secret town built by the Army Corps of Engineers and guarded by the military. Known at the time as the Clinton Engineer Works, Oak Ridge was home to three uranium separation and processing plants used for the Manhattan Project, America’s crash program to develop the atomic bomb. After the war, the town gained its name and its freedom, unlocking its gates to the outside world for the first time.
Two things made Oak Ridge ideal to Condon. First, Oak Ridge had its own long-distance trunk lines. He figured the long-distance lines would be routed through Knoxville, the closest big city, “but no,” Condon recalls, “the Defense Department didn’t want that.” For security reasons, he believes, “They wanted Oak Ridge to be autonomous in its access to the network.”
The second part was even better. “They did not want the possibility of people listening to secure calls, so they didn’t give the operators monitor keys,” Condon says. In most cities operators had the ability to listen to a telephone call in order to monitor its progress. But not operators at Oak Ridge. “As long as you didn’t flash”—that is, push the telephone hook switch up and down—“and didn’t leave any indication that you were through, she would leave you alone! It was wonderful!”
The only fly in the telephonic ointment had to do with Condon’s chromosomes. He was a man, in other words, and men weren’t operators in the 1950s. This presented some problems, since his whistle hack revolved around the idea of getting an operator on the line and convincing her to do something for him. Fortunately, men were employed to do engineering and troubleshooting work on the long-distance lines. He quickly learned to pretend to be a test board engineer—“Oak Ridge number one test” was his standard dodge when challenged by an operator. “That sounded good,” he says. “I don’t know if there was such a thing as a ‘number one test board’ but they were happy to help me, once I made it sound like I was with the telephone company.”
Still, there was nothing like a female voice to lull an operator into carrying out your bidding. Condon’s solution: girlfriends. “I would train them on what to say. We’d go out to Oak Ridge and we’d get on a phone that wasn’t monitorable, a pay station. You call an operator in a distant city, they don’t have a call for you, and when the operator releases you, you ring and hand it to the girl! She knew what to say. I had written it down for her.”
With a girl and a pair of pay telephones in Oak Ridge he was set for an evening of fun. Talk about a hot date! “You could even call back to Oak Ridge if you wanted,” he recalls. “If there were two pay stations and you had a girlfriend with you, you’d call her back to Oak Ridge. You could ring back to Oak Ridge and talk to the person next to you over this circuit to New York, no ticket, no nothing!”
But why? What would motivate a person to do such a thing?
“Just to be able to do it,” Condon recalls with glee in his voice. “That’s the thrill of it, isn’t it?”
Four
The Largest Machine
in the World
WELL BEFORE DAVY Crockett was taking his girlfriends on hot dates to trick operators into making long-distance calls, the engineers at Bell Laboratories were working hard to get rid of long-distance operators. In fact, they were working hard to get rid of operators altogether.
It wasn’t because they were concerned that people like Crockett would come along and imitate the ring forward signal and trick operators into making free calls for them. It was simply that they realized, early on, that the telephone network was going to grow to a point where it could no longer be supported by human beings plugging cords into jacks. In the 1920s Bell employed about a hundred thousand operators—a big number but one that could be made to work. By 1965, however, they figured the company would need closer to a million operators if it stuck with manual switching. An AT&T historian later noted that this was not a very meaningful figure because “the population could not have supported such a work force.” Besides, even if AT&T could find enough women to staff a million operator jobs, the cost of paying them would be heart-stopping.
Just like Almon Strowger before them, Bell Labs researchers realized that automation was the way forward. Significant inroads had already been made for local calling. By the 1950s the Bell System had thousands of automated telephone exchanges using switching systems based on Mr. Strowger’s step-by-step design, a Bell-developed system called “panel,” and a new arrival—a switching system developed during the 1930s called crossbar. Dial switching systems were becoming smarter and able to handle more calls, automatically, even among multiple exchanges within a city. And while manual switchboards, with their operators and cordboards, were still in existence—indeed, in 1955 some 15 percent of telephones were still older models that didn’t even have dials—it was clear their days were numbered. The machines were coming.
Long distance was the big holdout, the largest bastion of human switching. Even as late as 1960 operators were still used for about 70 percent of long-distance telephone calls. Automating it presented some huge challenges.
First, it took human intelligence to figure out how to route a call from place to place. Remember your call from Miami to your friend Bill in Denver and the gyrations that multiple operators had to engage in to get your call through? That was for an ea
sy case. God forbid, what would happen if Bill had lived in the tiny town of Gerlach, Nevada, way off the beaten path? Figuring out the route for that call would be a much harder problem. It might have required a consultation with the experts at rate-and-route, who would have told your long-distance operator the four or five cities she needed to connect through in order to make Bill’s telephone ring.
Now imagine trying to build a machine in the 1930s or 1940s that is smart enough to solve this routing problem in a few seconds. Given a starting city and a destination city, the machine needs to figure out how to get the call from here to there. While it’s at it, the machine should come up with an alternate route in case the first route doesn’t work. But before you go off trying to build such a machine, please remember that the computer hasn’t been invented yet; heck, the transistor hasn’t been invented yet. The tools at your disposal are what Star Trek’s Mr. Spock dismissed as “stone knives and bearskins,” that is, vacuum tubes and relays and mechanical switches.
Second, even if you had magic switching machines that could figure out how to route a call across the country, your customers had no way to dial each other directly. Remember how, when you wanted to make a long-distance call, you told the long-distance operator the city name and the telephone number of the person you wanted? Well, the words Denver and Miami—to say nothing of the names of all the other cities in the United States—don’t appear on telephone dials. Just as it took a while for AT&T to come around to the idea that telephones needed telephone numbers, and then to figure out that telephone exchanges needed numbers, it also took a while to realize that cities needed their own numbers too: area codes, they would come to be called. AT&T wouldn’t have this so-called national numbering plan worked out until 1945.
Even with switching machines and area codes there was yet another problem. The switching machines would need to communicate with each other over long distances, just like operators did. Say you’re in New York City and you want to call a number in San Francisco. The switching machine in New York first needs to be smart enough to know that it should get to San Francisco via, say, Chicago. Then it needs to connect to Chicago and communicate the digits of the telephone number you want to call in San Francisco. Chicago then needs to connect to San Francisco and pass the destination telephone number to a switching machine in the city by the bay. This was all information that human operators would have passed along by voice. AT&T researchers needed to figure out a way that switching machines could tell each other what number to dial and some other information, too, such as whether the person called had answered the telephone. In fact, they needed to build something resembling a computer network, a network over which switching machines could pass signaling information to one another. It’s just that they needed to do it well before computers and modems and the Internet had been invented.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 5