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Posts Tagged “

Telephones

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retro futurism

How to Dial a Phone, circa 1930s

For all you whippersnappers out there who never had the experience, here's a primer on how to use a rotary dial telephone. Produced by Big Brother ... I mean, the telephone company ... in the 1930s, the film explained the dial tone and busy signal to consumers used to having the operator connect their calls. Fun fact: AT&T installed the first "automatic phones" in 1915 in Norfolk, Virginia, and removed the last manual phones from the system in 1978.

12:37 PM on Wed Apr 23 2008
By Lynn Peril
2,602 views, 20 comments

Latest by Klebert L. Hall: @flaneuse: Or you could take the bottom off, and put an elastic band around each of the two bells. There are lots of ways to mute the old phones. -Kle. more »

retro futurism

A Failed Answering Machine from 1919

Behold the "Telephone That Registers Calls in One's Absence." It sounds like something from the Onion, but it's an actual invention from the pages of Scientific American in 1919. The brainchild of a nameless "California inventor" (so much for his fifteen minutes of fame), the device was a recording telegraph made to be installed in "the base of the telephone instrument." It sounds ingenious, but there were two major drawbacks. More »

12:45 PM on Wed Jan 30 2008
By peril
1,146 views, 12 comments

retro futurism

Bell Telephone Indoctrinates Teens at Seattle World's Fair

Two peppy, Aryan teenagers learn how tomorrow's communication technology will help us live happily ever after in "Century 21 Calling," a Bell Telephone promo film shot at the Seattle World's Fair in 1964. After disembarking the monorail, the kids run through the fairgrounds, gawking at foreigners and passing up the peepshow (add Elvis and essentially this is the plot of his 1963 movie, "It Happened At The World's Fair"). More »

12:40 PM on Tue Jan 8 2008
By peril
655 views, 12 comments