ROMAN MARS: It’s the 1970s, and we’re in the peaceful bliss of suburbia, in a family home, pretty indistinguishable from any other family home. But for one curious child, it was in these four walls that there lived a precious, almost mythical object.
ADAM SAVAGE: It was in the front foyer of our house. There was a table devoted to it.
ROMAN MARS: This is Adam Savage.
ADAM SAVAGE: I am a former MythBuster, current YouTuber, science communicator, and maker of things.
ROMAN MARS: And breaker of things.
ADAM SAVAGE: [CHUCKLES] And breaker of things. You have to break enough things to learn how they go back together!
ROMAN MARS: But one of the few things Adam was never quite able to break was what sat on that table, in the front foyer of his home.
ADAM SAVAGE: Picture–you know–the classic picture of a telephone in the encyclopedia, this black phone with a metal dial, letters in each hole of the dial, and a handset sitting on top.
ROMAN MARS: This phone was the Western Electric 500 series, and it was kind of just an ordinary telephone. In fact, it was the ordinary telephone–so ordinary that, at the time, you would have found some version of it in pretty much every home in America.
ADAM SAVAGE: So I’m an elder Gen X, born in the late ’60s. We had one telephone in our house for my entire childhood until I went to college.
ROMAN MARS: And Adam still remembers everything about it.
ADAM SAVAGE: Everything around the phone, from the tactility of dialing it–the “zick-a, zick-a, zick-a”–putting your finger in the metal dial, the coldness of the dial, the fact that it kind of rang slightly as you moved it around… It was all part of this ritual of conversation. I remember really loving the dial tone, the sort of comforting sound of the dial tone.
DIAL TONE: You’ll hear the dial tone…
ADAM SAVAGE: One of my earliest memories is sitting there with my friend, John Massaro, and we took the phone handset off this phone and we put a banana in its place on the phone and then the phone rang, which… We did not expect that that was possible! And the fact that the phone still operated with a banana on it was twice as funny as the funniest thing that ever happened to us.
ROMAN MARS: But most of Adam’s memories of the phone revolved around the object’s true purpose: to connect you with people who were far away.
ADAM SAVAGE: I remember having fights with my best friend in high school in that chair, talking to my girlfriend in that chair, and I felt like I could hear the whole inside of her house, right? And it is a machine that gives me a presence in the other person’s space. That’s what it feels like. I’m not just hearing a voice, I’m hearing the environment they’re in and I’m feeling like I’m part of it. And we would talk for, like, two and a half hours–three hours.
ROMAN MARS: It wasn’t unheard of to be, like, three, four… You just hung on the phone.
ADAM SAVAGE: Yeah. And what I really remember was the feeling of immediacy of that conversation. And it didn’t matter what we were talking about. It felt like we were together in the same room.
ROMAN MARS: It’s a feeling we don’t really feel anymore–the feeling of sitting on a phone line, hearing the whole inside of somebody’s house, like you’re actually there with them in person.
ADAM SAVAGE: I think the Bell telephone 500 series is arguably the best consumer product ever built. They make 92 million of this one phone over 50 years, and for 50 years it is the best device ever for talking to other people at a distance. And we no longer have that.
ROMAN MARS: This one model of telephone became ubiquitous across the continental United States for 50 years. And then it just disappeared completely. What does that say about what kind of human connection we prioritize and what we let fade away?
From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I’m Roman Mars. Today, the Western Electric 500 series, and how one device, which was once near omnipresent in every single household in America, created a level of interpersonal connection and intimacy unlike any object ever had before–and why, over time, we decided to give that up.
The history of the telephone is really the story of how America became connected.
ROMAN MARS: So let’s back up. Could you describe, like, before the phone shows up in our lives, what are we dealing with?
ADAM SAVAGE: Well, for normal people getting a message a great distance, the main thing people could use was Western Union. There were telegraphs and teletypes.
ROMAN MARS: The telegraph was a fairly rudimentary system that involved wires and tapping out messages in Morse code. And very quickly, Western Union realizes this technology can carry messages across an ocean at unheard of speed.
ADAM SAVAGE: And the telegraph, along with the trains, compresses the world so quickly that it’s one of the reasons we ended up with the international time because people were talking across great distances and it got everyone really cranky.
ROMAN MARS: But despite being able to send messages across the ocean, telegraphy had a pretty central flaw.
ADAM SAVAGE: You were very limited in terms of the language you could use. It was very expensive. Every word cost you money. So this is where you see those old movies where they’re like.
ERNIE BISHOP: It’s from London. Mr. Gower cabled you need cash, stop. My office instructed to advance you up to $25,000, stop!
ADAM SAVAGE: “Blah blah blah blah, stop,” because that was a smaller word than “period” for communicating.
ROMAN MARS: Oh! Really?
ADAM SAVAGE: Yeah! Yeah, “stop” is the shortest word that means “period.”
ROMAN MARS: Huh. I had no idea.
ROMAN MARS: This brevity was necessitated by the fact that early telegraphy cables could only carry a single message at once, and time was money. Couple that with the fact that a professional operator would need to be reading your whole message at the other end, whether it was private or not, meant that telegraphs weren’t exactly conversational.
ADAM SAVAGE: But you had technology helping them communicate across greater distances, but there was nothing really personal about it. So this is also a time when people were writing– People finished their days writing, you know, half a dozen letters to people.
ROMAN MARS: In fact, the writing was really expansive. You’d get huge letters about people’s days.
ADAM SAVAGE: It’s crazy when you read about these folks, like reading Washington’s letters. Every day, he finishes spending two hours just hand calligraphying often two copies of everything. He’s writing every letter twice so he has a record. These guys were writing thousands of words a day sometimes. I get really tired thinking about how much they were handwriting.
ROMAN MARS: But writing a letter was a painfully slow form of communication compared to the telegraph. It would take weeks to reach somebody. And so people were trying to find a way to marry the conversational, personal qualities of letters with the spontaneity and ease of the telegraph. Western Union offered one million dollars to anybody who could develop a multiplex system, which would allow for multiple telegraph transmissions simultaneously. But around this time, something else emerges–something that will threaten the domination of the telegraph.
ROMAN MARS: You know, the creation of the telephone is highly disputed. There’s many claims and counterclaims about its invention.
ADAM SAVAGE: You don’t say.
ROMAN MARS: So what is the simplest story to explain the invention of the telephone?
ADAM SAVAGE: The story we were all taught in school was that Alexander Graham Bell was working on the attempt to make a mechanical way for transmitting sound, figuring out a way to transmit sound through wires.
ROMAN MARS: Despite many claims and counterclaims, Bell’s invention would secure the patent, meaning he was the only one who could legally make a telephone. And everybody wanted one–well–everybody but Bell himself, who famously refused to have a telephone in his own study for fear of distraction. He was a smart man. And Bell’s design was both a stroke of genius and actually fairly simple.
ADAM SAVAGE: The basic mechanism, I believe, Bell was working with was a magnetic coil with a membrane and using your voice to vibrate that membrane to create an electrical signal that gets converted into mechanical movement at the other end of the equation and converted back into sound. So this is an analog process where the vibrations of my voice are moving a small membrane and those movements transmit small amounts of difference of an electrical signal that can then be just picked up as an analog signal on the other side and converted back into the same mechanical movement so you hear sound.
ROMAN MARS: The miracle of this invention–what is absolutely amazing about it–is that the time it takes for this analog system to work is nearly instantaneous, milliseconds, almost impossible to detect for the human ear. Now, a single telephone is a triumph of engineering. But for the invention to truly matter, you need to get as many phones out in the world as possible and connect them all via copper wires. You need to build a network.
ADAM SAVAGE: So, he creates Bell Telephone. It matriculates into AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph, in the early 20th century.
ROMAN MARS: While they’re not exactly the same thing, people generally use Bell Telephone interchangeably with AT&T.
WHAT IS THE BELL SYSTEM? Bell Laboratories, Western Electric, Long Lines, the local telephone company, and finally AT&T, the parent company. Five parts, but known collectively as the Bell System…
ROMAN MARS: In reality, they are all facets of one massive telecommunications company.
ADAM SAVAGE: And it is the most rapaciously capitalist enterprise you could imagine.
ROMAN MARS: At this moment, in the early 1900s, Bell has the patent for the telephone. But it doesn’t have the patent of the miles of copper cables that are required to make that phone work. And other companies realize this. They figure out they can lay down local wires and get in on the telephone boom. Bell doesn’t like this. While there’s nothing they can do to stop local providers connecting people, Bell does have a couple tricks up its sleeve. They refuse to let these local lines interface with their national network.
ADAM SAVAGE: And they are buying up every possible competitor as they arrive because they have the monopoly. And they use the money they make from their monopoly to just keep on eating more small companies that show up in the space. It’s a classic perfect model of what a monopoly does with its monopoly power.
ROMAN MARS: But a classic model of monopoly was also a classic target for the government to break up. The government had just broken up Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company, and now it was starting to eye AT&T. But the president of AT&T, a man named Theodore Vail, came to the government with an offer.
ADAM SAVAGE: I feel like he must have had an epiphany because, around about 1913-14, he starts reaching out to the U.S. government and offering a non-adversarial relationship. He starts saying, “Look, I know you guys think that we’re a monopoly, but please don’t break us up. Please don’t subject us to antitrust laws.”
ROMAN MARS: This was the deal. They would build a telephone system so incredibly large that it would provide every single possible American business and home with a telephone signal. And they would supply this infrastructure for universal coverage, completely free of charge. But in return, they wanted a monopoly over the network. No more having to buy competitors out. No more fighting for permits to lay cables in any given neighborhood.
ADAM SAVAGE: The reason Vail, I think, gets the U.S. government to agree is he makes the case that what AT&T needs to do is so large and so complex that it will happen faster and ultimately be better for the American public if one company is able to maintain a consistent standard across that whole network, rather than different companies having different standards of quality. And the U.S. government agrees.
ROMAN MARS: It was a massive win for AT&T. But now, the difficult part started. They needed to make sure every home or business in the country was connected by wire to every other home or a business in the country.
ADAM SAVAGE: This becomes the thing that once you start to unpack it makes what Bell Telephone and AT&T did so insanely incredible. It is such a massive engineering project, getting actual copper wire to every last person in the United States.
ROMAN MARS: That isn’t an exaggeration. AT&T wanted to connect the whole country, and they’d have to lay tens of millions of miles of copper cable to do it.
1954 BELL SYSTEM AD: You may have noticed that lots of work has been going on, new cable pulled into place and other types of construction…
ROMAN MARS: And making the telephone system was not cheap. Usually the most expensive part was connecting the last mile, the part where the wires branched off from the main cables and wound their way into individual homes.
ADAM SAVAGE: Starting in 1925, AT&T starts Bell Labs.
A MIRACLE FOR MRS. SMITH: Bell Telephone Laboratories, the largest single organization in the world devoted exclusively to communications research…
ADAM SAVAGE: And the origin of Bell Labs is literally just to keep on making the network better and helping to design out how to get a phone to every last mile.
ROMAN MARS: Before long, Bell Labs came to a key realization. If they were going to painstakingly connect America with millions of miles of copper wire, they ought to create the perfect interface with which to use those wires. Bell Labs needed to create the perfect telephone.
The man who would ultimately step up to the plate was Henry Dreyfuss, who started his career as a prolific designer of Broadway sets before branching out.
ADAM SAVAGE: He designs a movie theater where he puts an audience in a giant round room with four screens at the four corners of the room and one soundtrack. They’re all watching the same movie, but they’re able to fit way many more people in the room with no balconies and no obstructions. That increases both the audience satisfaction and the amount of money the theater owner can make. And I love this because Henry Dreyfuss, really early on, is considering both the rules of commerce, i.e. “we’ve got to make some money,” and also the experience of the people spending the money that’s going to be made.
ROMAN MARS: In 1929, at the age of 25, Dreyfuss started his own design shop. And his design philosophy was clear from the beginning.
ADAM SAVAGE: Dreyfuss was saying there can be no friction between the use of a tool and its utility. He wants to reduce the friction of using anything that he is building to the lowest possible common denominator. His shop designs the Honeywell thermostat, the default thermostat for the entire United States for decades. And this is the simplest tool there is. You turn the dial to the temperature you can see. There is nothing to know.
ROMAN MARS: But unlike the thermostat, there wasn’t one perfect telephone that nearly all America used.
ADAM SAVAGE: The history of the design of the telephone is sort of a constant evolution. The first phone, the earpiece was separate than the handset. You had this old-timey little tube you held up to your ear while you spoke into this, like, tulip. And then there was a handset that put the microphone and the speaker in the same piece.
ROMAN MARS: But when AT&T wanted to make another evolution, they didn’t go directly to Dreyfuss to solve the problem.
ADAM SAVAGE: So, AT&T has a contest to design the 300 series phone. And they put a call out, an RFP to design studios. Henry Dreyfuss refuses to compete. He’s like, “I like to talk to the designers.” And they’re like, “That’s not part of the competition.” He’s like, “Then never mind.” But after that contest yields no designs they like, they just hire Henry’s firm to design the 300 phone. He just waits them out.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, that’s amazing. For people who don’t know, the world of spec work and design is an extremely fraught world where you have to endure all these sort of design contests and do this work for free. And the fact that he had the confidence in his own self and his own research to just wait it out is amazing.
ADAM SAVAGE: The waiting it out just blows my mind to smithereens.
ROMAN MARS: In 1937, Bell introduced the 300 Series model designed by Dreyfuss. He used thousands of measurements from the, quote, “average American” to determine the size and shape of the handset. And the result was pretty successful.
ADAM SAVAGE: They built millions of the Series 300 phones, and they learned a tremendous amount from them. They learned they needed to put the ringer inside the body because–I didn’t know this–you could buy early phones where the ringer was extra. I don’t even know how you would get a call. You just wait until you hear someone yelling and you pick it up?
ROMAN MARS: Before long, Dreyfuss and his shop refined the design. And he came out with an updated version, the 500 Series. There must’ve been a 400 in between there, but you can just forget about that. Dreyfuss’ team improved the microphone, made the phone prettier, but maybe most importantly, in terms of its reliability, they made it possible for the 500 Series users to fix their device at home.
ADAM SAVAGE: It was also built for repairability. Nothing was attached to the body of the phone. Two screws pulled it off the chassis. Now you had access to all the electronics of the phone and it would still work and be testable so you could troubleshoot it much faster. This was the object designed to allow them to repair these things to keep them operating. And the parts of the 500 Series phone were compatible from 1949 to 1984.
ROMAN MARS: Oh my God.
ROMAN MARS: Western Electric, the hardware manufacturing division of AT&T, made over 90 million 500 Series phones in just over 30 years. And the internal parts were almost entirely interchangeable. That meant if you bought a phone in 1950 and you broke it in 1960, the newest parts would still fit your old phone. And then if you broke again 15 years later, the pieces on the market would still slot right in. And all of this–the interchangeability of parts, the ease of repairability, and the intuitive troubleshooting–were all conscious decisions made for a specific reason.
ADAM SAVAGE: Actually, maybe people don’t realize this, but people didn’t own those phones. All 92 million of those phones were the property of AT&T, and they were rented to the customers. This is probably the most important fact actually.
ROMAN MARS: Regular Americans–Adam’s family, my family, your family–did not own their telephones. We rented them from AT&T.
ROMAN MARS: And in this fact, it really changes the things that you build because they’re rented. Like, they do not want to make these things disposable.
1968 WESTERN ELECTRIC COMMERCIAL: Western Electric builds rugged phones and tests some of them beyond endurance. Chances are, the phone your Bell Telephone Company installs will never need repair…
ROMAN MARS: They want them to last decades because they do not want to replace them.
ADAM SAVAGE: Yes, that’s the thing! The end user was not the customer. That’s kind of amazing to me, right? It is so beefy.
1968 WESTERN ELECTRIC COMMERCIAL: You can take your Bell phone for granted because we don’t at Western Electric, manufacturing and supply unit of the Bell System…
ROMAN MARS: It is so sturdy that when it shows up in pop culture, it is clear that this thing is nearly indestructible.
ADAM SAVAGE: In the movie Get shorty, Gene Hackman is a Hollywood producer who tries to front to a genuine mafioso, played by Dennis Farina, who proceeds to beat the ever-living crap out of him with the handset and body of a 500 Series telephone.
HARRY ZIMM: Look at me, Ray.
RAY BARBONI: I’ll tell you what, Harry. Why don’t you take a look at this?
ADAM SAVAGE: And every blow hurts because I know how strong that thing is. You cannot break the handset. I have tried.
ROMAN MARS: A lot of people have. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Angelina Jolie’s character gives it a go.
BENJAMIN DANZ: Can I get a soda or a juice or– Ow!
ROMAN MARS: In American Hustle, Bradley Cooper’s character gives it three goes.
STODDARD THORSEN: Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey. What are you doing? What are you doing? Ow!
ROMAN MARS: And in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…
[SCREAMING AND FIGHTING]
ROMAN MARS: I mean… It’s pretty grim. If you see it, you know what I’m talking about. The 500 Series is both incredibly sturdy and it shows up everywhere.
NIXON: Hello, Neil and Buzz, I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House…
ROMAN MARS: In what might be the greatest moment of his presidency, Nixon used a touch-tone version of the 500 Series to call the Apollo 11 astronauts as they walked on the moon.
NIXON: I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow…
ROMAN MARS: And when it all came crumbling down with those telephones being bugged at Watergate, well, those were almost certainly 500 Series telephones too. Chances are, if a phone call was made in the United States between 1949 and 1984, it was most likely on a 500 Series telephone. All this to say, the 500 Series was a gigantic success. It was such a success that they also added different variants of the Bell phone to appeal to different users.
ADAM SAVAGE: AT&T released the Princess Phone, a phone literally built for a teenage girl’s hand.
PRINCESS PHONE AD: It’s little, it’s lovely, it lights, the new Princess Phone…
ADAM SAVAGE: And the Princess Phone is the one, you know… Every home in America in the ’70s had a Princess Phone and a curly cord that was, like, 25 feet long where you could get to kind of any given corner of your house for a private conversation. But everyone else was doing the limbo under this phone cord that was stretched across the house.
ROMAN MARS: A robust, rented Bell Telephone was a fixture of American life for over 30 years. It was omnipresent across culture and politics and the lives of everyday people. But eventually, it was replaced. In time, everything is. The real tragedy is what we lost in the process.
[AD BREAK]
ROMAN MARS: By 1982, the Bell System was at the peak of its powers. But its monopoly was built on a shaky foundation.
ADAM SAVAGE: When Vail makes the deal with the U.S. government in 1915 to like, “We’ll play nice if you guys let us build this thing out,” he sort of gets a promissory note for them that they don’t call in for seven decades. Like, the idea to let AT&T do what it wants to build this network out was always a compromise and a compromise that had to come due.
ROMAN MARS: The government began to rethink the monopoly they had allowed Bell to run for so many years. Things had changed. The country had been connected. Bell had already done the job.
ADAM SAVAGE: AT&T fulfills every ounce of its promise to build a robust network where people can talk across the country and it feels like they’re in the next room.
ROMAN MARS: And now that they’ve built the thing, they just don’t need them to be that big anymore.
ADAM SAVAGE: Yeah.
ROMAN MARS: The government broke up the Bell System into eight different companies. The Baby Bells, as they were called, controlled different regions of the U.S. New long-distance carriers were allowed to offer service on Bell Telephone lines, which was great. Long-distance prices came way down. Cheap plastic phones and cordless phones could be purchased at Kmart, none of which had the post-apocalyptic reliability of the 500 Series. But you could also buy a phone with a clear case so you could see the wires inside, and it lit up when it rang. It was so cool. Meanwhile, and over many more years, analog was being replaced by digital. And a new technology was emerging that would make having control over all of that copper wire not matter so much.
NBC NEWS: Cellular phones not only are becoming less expensive, they’re getting smaller. One piece, handheld. Not car phones, street phones…
ROMAN MARS: Enter stage left, the cell phone. Gone were the days of speaking into membranes and vibrating copper wire across an entire country. Cell phones were digital, and digital phones had a new way of doing things.
ADAM SAVAGE: In the simplest possible terms, when I speak into a phone, my voice is being broken into discreet sounds of a certain length. And the computer has a library of sounds that it describes to my voice as a code. So if I go, “Ah,” maybe it’s got that sound stated as “sound number 41.” And then when I finish with a consonant, like “t,” that’s “sound number 43.” This is grossly oversimplified. The computer takes my voice and breaks it down into numbers that equate to the sounds that then get reassembled by those numbers by the other telephone and wrapped into a simulacrum of my voice for the other person. It is not like an audio signal is being transmitted over the wires. That takes too long. The audio signal is being encoded and then decoded.
ROMAN MARS: So the pioneers who made the cell phone had to make a difficult decision.
ADAM SAVAGE: Cell phone companies had a choice to make when they were first transmitting voice. They could prioritize the lack of latency, or they could prioritize voice quality.
ROMAN MARS: Meaning, should they prioritize how quickly the audio would transmit to another phone–that’s the latency–or how clear the audio should sound when it gets there? That’s the quality.
ADAM SAVAGE: They made the choice to go for quality. And that was literally a cost benefit analysis they made about what the public would care more about.
ROMAN MARS: The delay on a call using the 500 Series, which operated on the copper wire infrastructure, was virtually unnoticeable to the human ear. On a coast to coast call, the delay would only be around 25 milliseconds. But the digital cell phone is different.
ADAM SAVAGE: It takes between 150 and 250 milliseconds. 250 milliseconds is a quarter of a second.
ROMAN MARS: So that’s 25 milliseconds for analog compared with 250 milliseconds for cell phones. Remember, the cell phone is converting voice into numbers, bouncing those numbers off a tower and then maybe a satellite in space and then back down to Earth and then another tower, and converting those numbers back into sound on the receiver’s phone. So if anything, it’s kind of a miracle that it only takes that long. But the trade off is still real.
ADAM SAVAGE: When you look up the specs on phone latency today, they will say 150 milliseconds isn’t really noticeable. And I would like to point out when you’re at the end of your day and you call your partner on your phone and it’s just a check-in call– “How was your day?” “It was great” “What do you want for dinner?” “Well, I was thinking burgers.” “Okay, I’ll pick those up.” That is a really easy call to have because, as a couple, you have a rhythm of how to do that kind of check-in. And the back-and-forth is a known quantity. But try and have an argument on the cell phone where you absolutely cannot interrupt. And 150 milliseconds makes an argument impossible because you are– “No, okay, you go. You go.” Right? You are always wanting to interrupt. The interruption happens much later than you think. You can’t get a rhythm, and now you’re both annoyed that you can’t actually communicate across this thing. That 150-millisecond delay to me is deadly in terms of intimacy.
ROMAN MARS: And if the cell phone and digital phone calls are to be considered the killer of intimacy over long distances, then there can be only one chief suspect for the crime, the heir apparent to the 500 Series.
ROMAN MARS: In many ways, you could argue that the iPhone has taken the place of what the 500 Series was in our lives.
ADAM SAVAGE: Well, the iPhone is an unbelievable, unmeasurably important invention.
ROMAN MARS: The iPhone’s amazing. Like, let’s just stipulate that the iPhone is amazing.
ADAM SAVAGE: The iPhone is amazing, and I can’t stand to have it more than 10 feet from me. That’s how amazing it is.
ROMAN MARS: When Western Electric made the 500 Series, they were manufacturing the perfect telephone that would last for decades in our home. The design brief for the iPhone is entirely different. It’s really a pocket computer, camera, and media player. The phone part of the iPhone may be its least important part. When Apple markets a new iPhone, they tend to brag about the camera or the storage. They don’t really say that the phone is better in this new one.
ADAM SAVAGE: The one thing that we call it is the one thing that it does the poorest of its tasks, which is to be used as a phone. Today, you know, cold calling is an aggressive act. And I feel like it’s an aggressive act because talking to someone you don’t know with 150 to 250 seconds of latency is non-trivial. And we have to navigate more than just the social dynamics of the call. And that means that there’s friction between the object and its utility.
ROMAN MARS: Eliminating friction between an object and its function was the driving principle behind all of Dreyfuss’ design. Modern cell phones abandoned this when it came to human conversation. And Adam thinks this abandonment plays a big role in why young people hate being on the phone.
FOX NEWS: A Uswitch survey found nearly 70% of people ages 18 to 34 prefer a text to a call…
ROMAN MARS: Adam has seen his own kids avoiding phone calls, but he thinks they have been replaced by something else.
ADAM SAVAGE: My kids were in high school and they would Zoom or FaceTime with their high school girlfriends and they’d fall asleep next to each other. And I love this. This was the same thing as sitting there talking on the phone for three or four hours.
ROMAN MARS: And he thinks the reason why they’re choosing video calls is a question of intimacy. Given high enough speed internet, the latency can be pretty good. But it’s the pictures that really help.
ADAM SAVAGE: Having a visual like Zoom–getting social cues by someone’s body language–that feels like it supplies some of the intimacy that’s lost with the latency.
ROMAN MARS: Adam also points out another fundamental change in our phones that maybe only someone like Adam would articulate, but everyone feels it in some way.
ADAM SAVAGE: The 500 Series wants you to take it apart. I think that the phone handset might be the very first machine I ever took apart because you could just unscrew these robust pieces of nylon. And you saw this little microphone element. And I noticed it was slipping on two commutators. And even at, like, eight years old when I did this, I remember thinking, “Oh, that is a really replaceable part.” There’s some aspect of the reason the phone was built the way it was that I sort of grokked. And I don’t think that’s me being brilliant. I think it’s about this object being so perfect that it, like, communicates how much energy went into making it so easy to use.
ROMAN MARS: The 500 Series used interchangeable parts for the better part of a half century. This is because Bell made the phone to sell to itself, and they just rented it to you, so they built it to last. But we’re not renting an iPhone, meaning there’s an incentive for it to change and upgrade and not be robust enough to last for years and years. Every change means we need a whole new phone, which means more money for the people who make them. Even the very design of our phones disincentivizes us from opening them up at all.
ADAM SAVAGE: I’m a big proponent of the right to repair movement, which is really catching fire around the United States. More and more states are passing right to repair legislation, allowing people the right to open up the devices they own. We are actually at a moment culturally where we are redefining what it means to own something, and commerce would prefer a subscription model for everything.
ROMAN MARS: You know, there’s kind of an irony here how much you felt intimately connected to your household phone, but you owned it less than you own anything else. But for some reason you felt more connected or felt more like you could take it apart and unscrew the mouthpiece and look at what was inside.
ADAM SAVAGE: Absolutely.
ROMAN MARS: Which is why I think Adam Savage can’t get over the Western Electric 500 series.
ADAM SAVAGE: It said, “I can communicate across the world and you are talking to a person and it feels just like language the way you know how it works.” And it did. It solved that problem. And now we have that problem again of real communication with voice.
ROMAN MARS: The 500 Series was the ultimate vision of Dreyfuss’ ideal, the frictionless device that allowed you to talk to anyone in the world. It was a device that met you on your terms, designed to mold to your hand, to be comfortably cradled in your neck, pressed against your ear, hearing someone talk as soon as the words left their lips. It also invited you to open it up and learn how it worked. It’s a vision for the objects in our life that seems to have all but disappeared. Well, except one place.
ADAM SAVAGE: The old-timey ring on your iPhone… This is probably the sound of the two bells inside the 500 Series telephone.
ROMAN MARS: Even if it’s only in a small way, the memory of the 500 Series survives in the very thing that left it behind.
ROMAN MARS: Adam Savage, thank you so much for talking with me. I had such a good time.
ADAM SAVAGE: Oh my God, this was really, really fun, Roman.
ROMAN MARS: Adam Savage is a science, technology, and engineering communicator and former MythBuster. If you want to see more of him, check out Adam Savage’s Tested on YouTube. If you have a curious mind and love to build things, there’s no better place on the internet.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It’s hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Isaac Fisher. Our other producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorph, and Ellie Lightfoot. The series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Ivor Manley. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real.
From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pill-ay and production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.
99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful… White City… West London.
If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].
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