Ode to the Telephone; Or, What’s Old is New Again
“Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” intoned Alexander Graham Bell 145 years ago today, March 10, 1876. Bell’s notebook at The Library of Congress, both depicts and describes the call and the instrument used. At 221B Partners, we talk every now and then of a different Watson, albeit one who also holds a place in our cultural idiom. We often also talk about telephones. And, over the past year, we have been spending more time talking about – and using! – fax machines, which have enjoyed a renaissance as a useful communications tool in our investigative quarters in the era of coronavirus. We also talk, a bit less frequently, of scanners and the mail, too (no, not email). In today’s information tools age, there is no lack of arrows in the investigator’s quiver, but 221B has survived this extraordinary time through these good, old-fashioned, if pedestrian, means that help us get the job done.
Imagine for a moment life without a telephone. No, not just today’s smartphone – our lifeline (handcuffs?) to all our contacts, our favorite cooking and social apps, our north star to navigate us from point A to B. Instead, imagine life without just a simple telephone. Depending on your age, you might remember the telephone in a wooden box affixed to the wall with a separate mouth and earpiece. Or, you might remember it sitting on a coffee table, with the round dial pockmarked with holes. It took forever to make a call if the number you were dialing was riddled with 8s and 9s, remember? Or, if you are younger, you might remember the cordless phone, the first ones of which resemble a brick and an alien’s antenna longer than one’s elbow. The first generation of texters will remember that inputting a letter v into a message required three taps of the right number on the dial pad.
As my colleague Andrew Keith and I discussed last year in our dia[b]log, the telephone was our lifeline during this pandemic. It continues to be so. In the past, we may have visited a courthouse or recorder’s office to find a copy of a lawsuit or property record that wasn’t readily available online. With some courthouses and recorders’ offices still closed to the public, we now call and request these records by telephone. In the past, we might travel to conduct an interview of a witness or someone important to our research or investigation. We now do these interviews by phone, unless it is absolutely necessary, they be conducted in person. We also use the phone to double check what we are doing online or find an answer that we can’t get online. For instance, I recently was trying to locate an arrest record and knew the city where the arrest occurred. When I couldn’t find the record, a call to the clerk saved the day as the clerk informed me that once in a blue moon the neighboring police department responds to this particular address on the city border and sure enough that neighboring police department had the records I needed.
Even in my lifetime, it is interesting to see how much the telephone – to say nothing of the way we make calls – has changed. I was reminded of this recently as I watched Welsh actor Matthew Rhys play 1930s, struggling Los Angeles private investigator Perry Mason on HBO. In the first episode, Mason directs the operator to connect him to “City of Salinas, AXminster 7-7181.” In other words, the number 7 was the City of Salinas’ area code at the time, then 297-7181. I remember the days of my parents telling me to dial an aunt or uncle across town who had numbers starting with TUxedo and SHadyside. The history of how these numbers were devised and implemented is quite interesting and could be the topic of its own blog. In short, there was the “2L-4N” or two letters and four digits like the Perry Mason example or the “3L-4N” system as reflected in the 1943 Chicago White Pages shown above which corresponds with parts of Chicago. I think now many of us don’t even know the numbers we are dialing anymore.
It will be interesting to look back in 10, 20 or another 145 years: will we still be dialing the same way and will the telephone as we know it still exist? Regardless of the method and means, I venture to say that researchers and private investigators, who pre-date Bell’s first phone call, will still need to make phone calls to obtain the salient information we can only learn during an interview or to get help answering that questions.
Photo from the Digital Research Library of Illinois History Journal.
