First, it required the operator (remember her?) to plug "the telephone receiver out," then put the telegraph into the circuit if no one was there to answer the call. Next—and this was perhaps the fatal flaw—she had to translate the caller's message into Morse code, which was "recorded on the [paper] tape in the base of the telephone." So, when you returned home, all you had to do was decode any messages "with the aid of the code card supplied with the apparatus." Of course, human agency meant that simple miscommunication or a lack of Morse code literacy turned "Bob says to call back" into "Babs says the caulk's bad" in the wink of an eye, which is probably why successful early answering machines were the ones that recorded messages verbatim onto a magnetic wire.

The United States Science Exhibit is chock-full of giant rotating molecules and trained pigeons. Finally, the kids jump line at the Bell Telephone pavilion and we learn about the Bell Boy, a brick-sized beeper for "doctors, salesmen, deliverymen" (you know, important people), as well as a slew of other phone services that are portrayed as making life easier for housewives: autodialing, call waiting, and conference calling—all of which came to pass, but not for another 15 or 20 years. Cell phone technology is curiously absent. Who wins the dialing race between brand-new push button and old-fashioned rotary model phones? Click over to the Prelinger Archives to find out!