Play in the real world might stink, but play in the world of the telephone was fantastic. The phone had interesting things to listen to. It even had people who would talk to him! And it was challenging: it made the ganglia twitch inside little Joe’s mind. It was more than a playground, it was a laboratory, a place where a little kid could try things out and where he could conduct as many experiments as he wanted. It was a world of possibility, a world prefaced with that most intoxicating of words: if.
“The way I learned [how to dial] sort of characterizes the way I’ve learned about telephone systems all my life,” he said later. “You make a theory . . . you think something.” Then he’d try it out. He’d perform an experiment. “Had that not worked I would have either had to make another theory or see why that wouldn’t work,” he says. Not simply trial and error but guided trial and error. Although Jojo didn’t know it at the time, the adults had a name for this. They called it the scientific method. Years later, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman would write, “The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: the test of all knowledge is experiment.”
For Joe the telephone was much more than just an intellectual playground. It was a warm electronic bosom, a source of comfort. It was never too busy to spend time with him. It was never moody. It didn’t fight with anybody. “Through the years the phone has provided me so much,” Joe said. “It was like a friend and companion to me.” His sister recalls that he would sometimes just pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone, its warm drone drowning out the angry voices of his arguing parents, arguments that sometimes wound up with Esther in the emergency room. “Most people take the little old telephone for granted, but to me, it was like magic,” he recalled. “I couldn’t even describe how important it was sometimes.”
The sounds, the electronic playground, the people to talk to, a welcoming place that he could escape to—he was hooked. He remembers, “I was not quite four years old. I was crawling around the floor, running phone wire. The phone man had given me a big long piece of phone wire. Mother wouldn’t let me run it on the wall anymore with the modeling clay, it made marks and stuff. I was humming, ‘I’m a telephone man forever, I’m a telephone man forever,’ and just kind of singing it to myself in the tuneless way of a three-year-old, and thinking about it, pretending I was driving the phone truck and all that. I told Mother that. I kind of credit that time to when I first really remember saying it out loud, that I was a telephone man.”
His mother wasn’t thrilled with the news. “She hoped that I would get over phones someday,” he says. Still, she did her best to support her son. Joe amassed a collection of technical books and articles about the telephone system, documents he would ask his mother to read to him. “She hated phones, and she kind of hated to do it, but she did it anyway,” he says.
He recalls, “We met a phone man and he gave us some books and Mother was reading to me about #5 crossbar”—the electromechanical telephone switch system that was a workhorse of local phone service. “It was a big thick book from 1955 called something like The #5 Crossbar Job,” he says. “That was one of my first big, hard books.” When a telephone man visited their house to install a telephone, Joe confided how much he was struggling to understand the book, how frustrating it was. He said, “I can’t quite understand this #5 crossbar, I’m just stupid, it makes me want to cry.” The telephone repair man responded, “There’s guys who’ve been [at the phone company] twenty, thirty years who can’t understand #5 crossbar!”
The Engressias moved a lot when Joe was growing up, from Richmond, Virginia, up to Saugus, Massachusetts, then back down to Florida: Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, and finally Miami. (“Daddy hated the snow,” says Toni.) Each new place exposed Joe to new telephones and new telephone switching systems. He was constantly on the phone in each new place, listening to the sounds and learning how things worked. One of his techniques was to call the technicians in the telephone company central office and ask them questions.
“I called up when I was almost eight years old and asked, what levels on your selectors are digit absorbing ones and which ones are absorbing repeatedly?” he remembers. (Levels and digit absorbing selectors are esoterica related to the old step-by-step switching system; you are forgiven if you do not have these terms close at hand.) “The guy said, ‘Who is this, ma’am?’” Joe responded in his little kid’s voice, “I’m not a ma’am, I’m Joe, and I’m nearly eight years old!” Joe got himself a tour of the telephone central office and a trip to a football game from the delighted switchman. “I learned a whole lot [from that trip],” he remembered. In fact, he was thinking so hard about what he learned that day that he was silent during the entire drive home—an event so unusual that his mother teased him about it later.
Although he didn’t know it at the time—and wouldn’t for ten more years—two of his telephonic discoveries would turn out to be pivotal, both to him and to a generation of phone phreaks.
The first of these was learning how to dial with the hook switch, the little switch that hangs up the phone when you put the handset back in its cradle. “I remember I used to hear the clicking of the dial. You could hear the clickings of the dial way in the background . . . When I hung up I could hear this tiny click in the background. I remember thinking, I wonder if the dial is the same as the receiver click, they both click. Maybe the dial is just faster clicks than the receiver button. . . . I thought about it and I said, if the hook switch and the dial are the same, then I should be able to hang up with the dial, and dial with the hook switch. It seemed impossible. But what if I did the hook switch real fast? And sure enough, I was able to dial.” He went for his old standby, the 737 time number. Pressing and releasing the hook switch button, “I actually counted 7, and the 3, I had to do it a couple of times. But finally I actually got the time with the hook button.” Joe had discovered that dialing a digit on a rotary phone is just like pressing the hook switch rapidly and repeatedly. Want to dial a 7? Press and release the hook switch 7 times in a row. (This still works on phones today, by the way; you can confirm the results of Joe’s experiment yourself with most any landline telephone.)
Joe was far from the first person to discover that you could dial with the hook switch. But it tied into his second discovery, one that would become the basis for his future nickname. “I was seven or eight years old and I was sitting on a long-distance circuit, and I heard the background hum of the tone that controls it . . . I started whistling along with it and all of a sudden the circuit cut off!” How odd! “I did it again and it cut off again.” Fascinated, Joe started playing around with this magic tone. He found he could consistently disconnect long-distance calls by whistling that tone—seventh octave E. At the time he wasn’t quite sure why it worked, or even what exactly it was good for, but he recalls it had great potential for pranks. “[Mother and I] were walking one time and there was some guy on a pay phone and I just thought, in case it was long distance, I just whistled, it was when I could whistle really loud then, and we were like ten feet away, and he was going, Hello? Hello? And I said, I wonder why he’s saying that? And Mother said, I think he got cut off. She didn’t know about the whistling at that time. It was just amazing, that tone.”
Joe didn’t have many friends growing up, perhaps not surprising given his brightness and his very specific interests. When he was in the sixth grade he met another blind kid, Tandy Way, who shared his interests in technology, even including telephones. But, says Joe, Tandy “knew less than I did,” and Engressia wasn’t really able to learn anything from him.
Engressia got his ham radio license a year before he started high school in 1963. But phones remained his first love. Ham radio was “never as important as phones,” he says, and, as for high school, “I never got into, like, dating or proms.” He adds, “I’d much rather have a date with the pay phone than some girl or guy or anything.” True to form, he says, his high school yearbook f
eatured a photo of him in the school phone booth. “During breaks between classes that’s where I’d always hang out,” he said.
When Engressia was in tenth grade the unthinkable happened: a financial rough spot necessitated the removal of his home telephone. The high school pay phone booth became more important to him than he had anticipated. Joe began saving up money from his allowance to get his family’s phone reinstalled. “I got $2.50 a week lunch money and I did without lunch twice a week for nearly two years and saved up $1 at a time,” he said. “Back in twelfth grade I called up and got the phone installed.” It was, he said, the only day he missed school in his whole senior year, but somebody had to be home to let the telephone installer in. “My parents decided that if I had that much persistence then they’d pay for it.”
After high school Engressia began taking classes at Dade County Junior College. Then, in the fall of 1968, he transferred to the University of South Florida in Tampa. He lived in Beta Hall, one of the dorms on campus. A little over a month into his first semester Engressia mentioned to some other students that he could whistle free long-distance calls. Yeah, right, was the response. Faced with such disbelief, Engressia responded with words that would change his life: “I can whistle like a bird and get any number you want anywhere. I’ll bet you a dollar I can.”
Now then, some guy offers to bet you that he can whistle you a free long-distance call, using just his lips and nothing else, it’s a sure thing, right? A dollar was wagered. Whistling ensued. Engressia emerged slightly richer, his fellow students with egg on their faces. At least they got a phone call in the bargain.
Engressia’s whistling trick combined two of the things he had learned ten years earlier: hook switch dialing and whistling to disconnect a call. Engressia knew that if he whistled seventh octave E, that is, 2,600 cycles per second, he could disconnect a long-distance phone call. But then what? Engressia figured out that by whistling short bursts of 2,600 Hz he could mimic the telephone company’s single-frequency (SF) dialing system, just like Ralph Barclay had figured out in 1961. To dial the area code 212, for example, Engressia would whistle two quick bursts of 2,600, followed by one quick burst, followed by two more quick bursts: beep beep . . . beep . . . beep beep! So the entire dance went like this. First, dial a call to a free long-distance number, such as directory assistance. Then give one long whistle to reset the long-distance trunk. Then whistle the pulses that made up the ten-digit phone number, one digit—one pulse—at a time. It was simply the whistling equivalent of the hook switch dialing he had learned as a little kid.
The trick gained him popularity. “The guys in the dormitory were calling me ‘The Whistler.’ Crowds of up to forty people would follow me around,” he said. The students “begged me to make the calls.” Engressia obliged, charging $1 for a whistled long-distance call to anywhere in the United States. Though it’s not quite a free call at that point, Engressia’s rates were still a bargain compared to AT&T’s, which were then about $2.60 for a five-minute cross-country call—roughly $17 today.
While attempting to whistle a call to Long Island, New York, he “whistled wrong” and wound up connected to an operator in Montreal, Canada. This was an easy mistake to make. Long Island is area code 516, Montreal is area code 514; screw up by just two little beeps and you wind up two hundred miles north. Nonetheless, Engressia managed to convince the operator to connect him to the New York number. But the operator “was suspicious and monitored the call. Naturally the student I put the call through for talked extensively about the ‘whiz kid’ who had placed his free call,” he said. “The operator broke in and managed to get the student to identify himself and where he was calling from.”
An investigation ensued. Word eventually made it back from Bell Canada in Montreal to General Telephone, the independent telephone company in the Tampa area. GTE contacted the university, trying to identify the source of the whistled calls. Engressia was fingered. His sudden popularity came to an equally sudden end.
Despite having a crime and a culprit, GTE sensed a potential publicity black eye. As a security officer for the company wisely put it, the firm had nothing to gain by prosecuting a blind college student. Meanwhile, another GTE spokesman used the incident to pioneer what would become a standard response by the telephone company—and, years later, by high-tech software companies—when presented with claims of security vulnerabilities in their products and services: disbelief and denial. “It could happen—but did it really?” the spokesman said. “It would take a lot of sophisticated equipment and even then the probability of being able to do this is remote.” Whether this was genuine ignorance, willful disbelief, or just a bit of misdirection to discourage would-be imitators is unclear.
As punishment for his crimes of whistling free telephone calls the USF dean of student affairs told Engressia that he would be “allowed to withdraw” for the rest of the term. If Engressia didn’t want to withdraw, the dean said, he would be suspended. Engressia declined the dean’s offer. “I didn’t want to sacrifice all the course work I had done already this quarter,” he said, and noted that his grade point average was between an A and a B.
Engressia was suspended from the University of South Florida on November 15, 1968. He appealed the decision soon after. Engressia’s sister Toni was in her last year of high school in Miami when the USF whistling scandal occurred. She recalls coming home one day and being told by her mother, “Your brother has been doing something illegal with the phone. They say he’s been whistling into the phone and making long-distance calls.” Her mother explained about the dean’s decision and Joe’s appeal and said that they needed to go to Tampa to be with Joe. Toni, her high school boyfriend, and Esther made the five-hour drive, leaving Engressia’s father home with his jobs and the family’s dogs. Asked by a reporter what she thought of her son’s telephone antics, Esther Engressia responded, “We’re going to stick right by him. Anyone who can outsmart a computer—I’m with them.”
On December 10, Engressia presented his case at a two-hour public hearing before the university’s nine-member disciplinary appeals board, where he told his story with the help of a student advocate. He noted that he had stopped making the free calls on his own initiative. “It was a mistake and I’m sorry I did it,” he said, “but not because I got caught. My action was totally irresponsible and it shouldn’t be condoned, but I don’t think I should be penalized for a first offense so severely that it practically cuts off my education.”
The appeals board handed down its decision the next day. Engressia would be allowed to remain in school but would be placed on probation. The board also ordered him to donate $25—the amount he said he had made whistling calls at $1 apiece—to a worthy cause.
“I think the verdict was very favorable,” Engressia told newspapers afterward. “I’m happy that I can stay in school.”
Engressia’s whistling scandal had another positive outcome. Shortly after his suspension back in November the press had gotten wind of things. It started when the Oracle, the USF student newspaper, did a story on him, Engressia recalls, “and then the AP or something picked it up, and then it was on the Huntley-Brinkley network news show.” Indeed, the AP newswire story was covered in dozens of papers throughout the world. Calls began pouring in for him. ”It was sort of exciting, people calling from Australia and all these places to talk with the Whistler,” he remembers. The attention amazed and delighted him; it was a far cry from his mother’s familiar shout of “Hang up the phone and leave it alone!” Of the publicity he says, “At that age I had never even thought of that, ’cause the phone was always something . . . oh, you know, ‘talking about stupid phones all the time.’ But people were actually excited about what I could do!”
Soon after the burst of media attention, Engressia received a letter in the mail with a Kansas City postmark. The writer had seen Engressia on the Huntley-Brinkley television show and wanted to introduce himself. Like Engressi
a, he was a ham operator and telephone enthusiast. Might they talk by phone, or make contact via amateur radio, and discuss certain items of mutual interest?
It was Engressia’s introduction to B. David, the mysterious correspondent Jake Locke had met via the Fine Arts 13 classified ad at Harvard a year and a half earlier. Over the next year Engressia and B. David discussed all manner of things related to the telephone. By April 1969, just four months after his disciplinary hearing at USF, Engressia was back to his telephonic games; this time he had tricked a switchman in a Miami telephone central office into wiring up a pair of telephone lines to form what was called an open-sleeve-lead conference. Essentially a cross between a cheese box and a black box, this circuit allowed two people to call into it and talk to each other without being billed. Engressia and B. David used this circuit to stay in touch between Miami and Kansas City, but they weren’t its only users. A suspicious Southern Bell employee who discovered the setup and listened to the calls on it found “a good deal of discussion that students at the University of South Florida were being supplied pairs of numbers which would allow toll free conversations.” Additional investigation revealed similar circuits had been set up in Orlando and other cities. The telephone company quietly removed them from service.
Then, on August 27, 1969, the telephone cord hit the fan. A Southwestern Bell security agent working a blue box case up in Kansas City discovered something alarming and called the FBI. Though he wouldn’t tell Bureau agents how he had learned of it, he said that “B. David and Engressia have, through sophisticated electronic equipment, intercepted and monitored telephone toll calls.” More disturbingly, he said, the two had also discovered a way to intercept calls on a “highly classified, Top Secret telephone system used only by the White House.” He reported two other people in connection with this caper: an employee of United Airlines in Chicago and a young blind man named Tandy Way—Joe Engressia’s sixth-grade pal down in Miami.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 14