Western Electric 500: Monopoly phone

Hey, David Pierce here, last episode of the season. So this is the last reminder from me for a minute. Please go subscribe to atversionhistorypodcast on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram. That's where we're putting all of our social clips. It's where we're going to start to do more and more interesting stuff in between seasons. We have big plans for what we can do with version history that isn't just make this podcast. I love this podcast and I'm very proud of it. And I think it's super fun. And I also think you should watch it on YouTube because it looks great. So keep it locked atversionhistorypodcast. And for now, please enjoy the season finale of season three of version history. Way back when, once upon a time, phones were actually mostly for making phone calls. And way back then, there was only one phone that you would find in just about everybody's house. It was called the Western Electric 500. And it was borderline illegal to have anything else. From the Virgin Vox media, this is version history, a show about the best and worst and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce. And today we are talking about AT&T and the monopoly phone. What's up, y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven time WNBA All Star, Olympic gold medalist and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Amm Mom, a community for athletes, gamechangers and moms of all kinds, dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey, it's Francis Lam, host of the Splendid Table podcast. Every week on our show, we celebrate the intersection of food and life. And this month, we're releasing a new series called Culinary Masters. It highlights some of the most iconic people in the food world. And we're visiting conversations with people who have fundamentally changed how many of us cook and think about food. People like Jacques Papin, Claudia Rodin and Tony Bourdain, the name of you. You can listen to this special series now. Just search for the Splendid Table in your podcast app. All right, we're back. It's time to talk landlines. Joining me in the studio, Neil Epitle. This is my dream episode. This is my whole career is wrapped up in this little, this little gadget right here. Also with us joining us remotely is author and Columbia professor Tim Wu. Tim, welcome. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm also very excited about this topic. So you, we should say, one of the reasons you're here is that you wrote a book called The Master Switch that is the basis of my research, frankly, for a lot of this episode. You also recently wrote a book called The Age of Extraction, which is very good and about the internet. And it's like, there's a lot of this story that bleeds right into that story. And I should say, we're here to talk about this phone, the Western Electric 500, both on its own merits, but also as a way to get into the history of AT&T and Western Electric and the way that this monopoly took over America in a really unusual way. And if you've never seen a landline phone, which a remarkable number of people watching and listening to this may not have, let me just describe to you what a landline phone in 1950 looked like. It's this big brick of plastic that weighs, frankly, more than you think, and it has two main things on it. There is this big handset that you hold against your ears. It has it. There's a microphone and a speaker. And then on this one, there is a rotary dial, which is this huge wheel that you have to stick your finger in at the right number, spin it all the way around, let it go back and then do the next number. It made dialing a phone take six and a half hours. And this is what we did for decades. And Tim, you have a Western Electric 500. Is this, is this true? Yes, I do. You are the proud owner of a landline phone. I didn't bring it with me at this exact moment, but yes, I have that phone. Why? Same one. Well, partially when I was writing the book, I was like, I can't just write this thing. I have to live it. And partially because I believe to some of the 18 T propaganda that the quality of the connection would be good. So I wanted it for radio interviews back when radio interviews were on the telephone. So yeah, and I just like the way it looks. I mean, there is really something about like, Neil, I encourage you to just pick up this phone and hold it to your head because there is something astounding about how good it feels in your hand. This move where you can pick up the base and walk around with your, with the handset on your ear and you're just holding the base. This is power. Whatever this feeling is, pacing back and forth in your office, doing deals. Just holding this thing. Oh yeah. And then you're like, get out of my face. Like, I don't know, we got to bring this back. How much heavier is that thing than you remember? I mean, that's where that's where the power comes from. It's like, this is weighty. You're making a decision to hold this thing. 100%. Okay. So let's actually sort of start the history here because it turns out we have to start at the civil war, which means we have a fair amount of work to do before we get to this phone. When we started this show, I did not expect to tell this many stories about the immediate aftermath of the civil war, but here we are. And so the, the thing that was happening in the civil war was the telegraph was a huge deal. This became a revolution and how people shared information. And in particular, for our purposes here, I'm interested in this company called Gray and Barton at the very beginning of all of this. Which was a manufacturing partner to Western Union, which at the time was the telegraph company. I had for a long time, Western Union was the biggest company in America. It was the most important information company. Anywhere. Gray and Barton made a lot of stuff for a lot of companies. They were just like a contract manufacturer. Um, but their best business was with Western Union and in telegraphs. And in particular, I learned after the great Chicago fire of 1871, Western Union's headquarters burned down, but Gray and Barton didn't. So they just basically leaned on them even harder and they became like a crucial part of the telegraph ecosystem. One of the founders of the company, Elisha Gray, I think is how you pronounce it. He's the, the Gray of Gray and Barton, uh, decides that he wants to sell his part of the company to Western Union. But he also says there's this amazing thing that I've just done. I've invented the telephone. Um, he didn't call this at the time, but he, he had, he was in this patent war. It turned out to invent the telephone. And this becomes this incredibly long legal saga that Tim, you, you write a fair amount of about in the master search. Can you walk us through it? Well, I think most of us learn in elementary school that Alexander Gray and Bell, you know, this, uh, the kind of eccentric living in, in a attic invented telephone, but if you look a little more carefully, the fact is a lot of people invented the telephone all at once, uh, one of them being gray. The Germans to this day believe that they invented the telephone. There is another kind of anecdotal account of somebody else inventing a telephone even earlier, but not doing anything with it. So there's a lot of people who kind of arrived at the same, you know, invention point at the same time, which is they realized you could carry voice over a wire and then amplify the signals on the other side. It really came down in terms of who was, quote, the inventor, uh, to the question of who won the patent battle. And at some level, who reached the patent office first, there was, um, some of this history is a little anecdote or, you know, mythical because I want to say that Bell and AT&T had a pretty effective propaganda department. And in fact, a history would have been very different if, if they had lost that patent battle, but in the end they, they want it. Yeah. So this patent becomes like the thing that builds AT&T, like for, for decades, it, it uses this patent to win every fight against everybody else who wanted to do this kind of thing, because I think the everybody invented it all at the same time is sort of a constant story in the history of science and technology. Like there are so many things that seem like just an idea whose time has come. And the telephone just seems like it was an idea whose time has come. And a bunch of people all around the world at roughly the same time came to that idea. I found so many salacious allegations in this patent warfare where like, there, there's some allegation that Alexander Graham Bell's lawyer had some leverage on the patent office. So that they got secrets about what was in Gray's patent in order to redo their patent and it becomes this whole like patent drama. And at the end of all of this legal drama, that becomes a huge piece of what happens here because they, this fight between Bell and Western Union, which had bought a lecture grace company. And so it picks up this fight on his behalf. Western Union essentially agrees to get out of the telephone market. They're like, this, this is, we don't care. Leave us alone. We're going to go do our thing. You do yours. Let's just sort of split the market here. You, you go build the telephone, knock yourself out. And there was this sense of like, we actually, they, they saw it as somewhere between a interesting lark, maybe for someday, if, if a bunch of things happened and kind of a waste of time. And their, their interest was doing better telegraphs, not cannibalizing telegraphs. And they actually saw the telephone in the best case as a problem. And so they're like, well, we actually, we're happy to just get out of the market. Yeah. So anyway, so at the end of all this, the other thing that happens is, uh, Bell buys a majority share of Western Electric, which is the company that, uh, Gray and Barton had turned into. This is the, the manufacturing arm. So just to clarify, Western Union is the old telegraph company. Western Electric used to make parts for Western Union, but now they make parts for Bell Western Electric at this point becomes the sole supplier of Bell's telephones and equipment. Uh, this, this becomes a very big deal. This is a small deal at the time because Bell is still a new company. It's growing fast. There's a sense that this is onto something, but this becomes an enormous deal. Western still made stuff for other companies, but over time it becomes basically the supplier to AT&T. These two things are, are not the same company, but boy, are they the same company. Yeah. Which again becomes very much the story of AT&T. This is a pattern that exists across the telecom industry, right? Like Samsung is the preferred supplier to so many cell carriers today. There was a time when LG made every phone for a handful of cell carriers. Nokia was the supplier. Blackberry famously in Verizon had this kind of relationship. Yeah. Only recently has that changed. Okay. So Tim, I, here I want you to do something impossible, which is just absolutely blasts through about 50 years of history. Okay. Walk us through just very quickly how we get from Bell Labs, upstart to AT&T, absolutely utterly dominant player in telephony in the course of just a few decades. Okay. So believe it or not, it turned out the telephone was popular and people thought this thing is pretty cool. Eventually Bell's patent expired and there came a period that can only be compared to like the 1990s internet where everyone was starting a phone company. There were suddenly thousands of phone companies across the United States and people were using all kinds of wire. Like there's some vaguely anecdotal accounts of people using like barbed wire fences to rig parts of their, their phone networks together. So the idea was young man, go west and build a phone network. And so there they were all going. And there was this period of extraordinary, both opportunity, hope, you know, interesting inventions, different ideas, but also a lot of chaos and non-interconnected networks. Because obviously a phone is a network. Its value is how many people are on it. At some point, Bell got new leadership, a man named Theodore Vale. He was a fellow who kind of took Theodore Roosevelt as his role model, although he probably thought he was better than Theodore Roosevelt. He was like the big man, the like empire building, the visionary kind of person. And he said something along the lines that like America needs one film network. And this was his one network philosophy. And so in service of that vision, he commenced what can only be described as industrial warfare. Actually, not entirely unlike a John Rockefeller, who's another figure, you know, active in this era. He went to every place and convinced the independence to either sell to him, the independent phone manufacturers, join up with him on some kind of turns or face their destruction. There's at least one account. Now people, 19th century, as I said, there's a lot of propaganda on both sides. But there are at least stories of Bell, you know, demanding everyone sell out to them, join the Bell network. And those that refuse have their equipment put in the middle of town and lit a fire to giant bonfire as a horrible lesson for all those who resist the Bell system. So he had kind of a simple message. He said, we're better together. You know, join me, maybe be bought by me, certainly, internec on my terms and join the one system. So this spreads. Bell begins to invest heavily in long distance, which is obviously an important technology and is also pretty expensive and hard for all of these little barbed wire phone companies to. Yeah. Yeah. Although to their credit, you know, some of them are smaller, some of them are more efficient in a way they could coexist if they agreed to interconnect, you know, to and those days interconnect is a physical wire that, you know, switches that between them. But yes, there's a lot going on. Important here is you have AT&T, the growing monopoly, and eventually this attracts the attention of the Justice Department because then and to some degree now, the idea of, of attacking your competitors, emerging them into a giant trust is considered to violate the Sherman Act. So the Taft administration begins an investigation after Roosevelt and pre Wilson, the Taft administration, which actually is the most aggressive antitrust administration begins an investigation of AT&T for the crime of monopolization. And, you know, they begin the lawsuit, the two parties are, are, you know, getting ready for a big fight. And at some point, this is in the 1910s, they begin to negotiate and they announce a deal, which is known as the Kingsbury commitment. And the deal roughly goes like this. Bell will interconnect with everybody. So on its side, it's going to agree to support everybody, but sort of more or less subtly, the United States agrees that Bell will be the monopoly, regulated monopoly for the United States. So we strike this, this deal at the time, I should say, all the independent phone companies see it as a, as a victory because now they have interconnection. What they don't fully realize is that the gem or the idea of one monopoly for the nation has one out. And, you know, there is some logic to the idea that one network makes more sense than a thousand networks. Right. That is, to me, the most interesting thing about this growth story. And I, I felt it doing the research. I felt it in your book, Tim, you go through and it's like, okay, AT&T is waging industrial warfare. It is this ruthless growth oriented company trying to connect everybody. And then you listen to Theodore Vale, I'll be like, well, actually this whole thing is better if we're all on one network and we can all talk to each other. And you're like, oh crap, you're right. You're super right. Neela, you're, you're Mr. Free Market competition over here. What do you, what do you make of all of this? I am always struck by the character of Theodore Vale of Rockefeller, of Carnegie, who all were brash, extremely aggressive monopolists. But I mean, they're the monopoly guys. Yeah, literally. That's who they are. And at the end, they all accepted the notion that they should run regulated monopolies. And I think Vale makes that case pretty directly to the government in the context of all, all of the Sanatris battle. He says, you can be in charge of this network, but I have to build it. Right. I will accept your price controls on this network. I will accept what we would come to call common carrier rules where I have to connect to everyone and I can't monkey with the, the, what's going across the network. You look at a telecom company today and the idea that the government can tell them anything to do with their network is out the window. Right. Like that is battle after battle. And so there's just this, the literal character of these figures, there's something about their, like, like their patriotism that actually balanced out their, like, viciousness. And that's the argument that they made so often. Yeah, there's a real sense of no bless obligé that, that I think is important here. I mean, he's an industrialist Vale and AT&T is a rapacious company, but he, you know, comes and basically speaks to the public, to Congress, to the administration and says, I shall serve as a public servant. I agree and will kidnap myself to connect every American at low cost. I accept rate regulation. I accept, you know, being more or less like the post office in many ways. That time the post office was admired for its efficiency. I should point out. And, you know, so he undertakes these duties. He offers a big deal and he said, we will all be better together. And I think that is the seed of the age of regulated monopoly, which ends up lasting roughly 70 years. Yeah. So, okay, so that was, that was an excellent catch up, by the way. Good job, Tim. So we, this brings us to this, this like enlightened monopoly phase for AT&T, which is the phrase that, that is used kind of all over AT&T was basically like given the ability to do whatever it wants. And then in 1921, there's this thing called the Willis Graham Act that essentially just tells AT&T that it's, it's cool. Like don't worry about it. We have all these other monopoly rules. You are exempt from them. No problem. And also, by the way, the Kingsbury commitment, which AT&T made big win for all of the, the like little companies that didn't have to risk dying. So this, this works for everybody for a long time. And the network continues to grow. AT&T continues to become this massively giant company. So we go through, we go through the, the First World War, we go through the Depression, we go through the Second World War. And then there are just a lot of political changes during that time. But then we get to the late 40s and the US government sues AT&T again. Oh, we're doing, we're just doing monopoly stuff again. And in this case, the goal is to separate AT&T from Western Electric. This is where we start to get into landline funds. Because what the government wanted was to force AT&T to buy from other manufacturers. AT&T obviously was very happy to buy from its own subsidiary. And to your point about a lot of these regulations, there was an, an understanding that you could regulate the cost of service by regulating the cost of service. But actually AT&T had a bunch of other ways to make as much money as it wanted. And one of them is by controlling the hardware, by doing the price of the hardware, the services, the leasing fees. Like people didn't own their phones. You didn't buy a phone. You leased one from AT&T, which is like a, just a bonkers thing to think about. But it's also kind of what we all do with our iPhones now. Like to some extent. You can't kill AT&T. We've tried so many times. It will come back in exactly the same form. This idea just never goes away. But so at the time, again, this is, this is in the late 1940s. Just some of the numbers I found, the government alleged that Western Electric manufactures and sells more than 90% of all telephones, telephone apparatus and equipment sold in the United States. And that a substantial part of the remaining 10% is produced under the direct control of Western Electric. This is the only company making phones for all intents and purposes. And it is wholly owned by AT&T. I just want to point out, and it's, it's like, you can look at history through a variety of ones. There was a lot going on between, I don't know, 1910 and 1940. I would say there are plenty of priorities for the nation as a whole to pay attention to and rank higher than the phone system. There was almost zero innovation in the phone system during the time of AT&T's monopoly. Except it grew. Except it grew. Which is a huge innovation, obviously very important. But the experience of like making phone calls pretty much stagnated. I can't think of a particularly meaningful upgrade in that 30 year period because the monopoly was like, we're going to run the monopoly and extract our profits. And growth is the thing that we've promised you. So there will be growth. But user experience is not a thing that we need to compete on. So we will stop. The thing is, inside, from inside an industry, if you talk to any industry, they're always convinced that they're extremely innovative. It's just they measure it differently internally. You know, so a big, there was one big innovation during that period, which is they got rid of operators, human operators, and replaced them with electric switching. Right. So that was one, but you know what I mean? Like the product was the same. But I don't, I'm not disagreeing you. I'm just amazed at the ability of any industry to be convinced that they have made enormous strides. Yeah. Like sometimes I talk to people in the airline plane industry and I say, you know, it's basically the same 50 years. So like, what are you talking about? And then they talk about a whole bunch of things that no one on the outside experiences as real changes. And all of them, I would point out, even in the case of the operators is reducing labor cost. Yep. But like Tim, what you're saying, this is, I do think you're right that that probably counts as a meaningful innovation. The idea of like you giving people this kind of control. It reduced labor costs. It made things a lot easier for AT&T because you didn't have to have these centralized offices connecting people, especially as the network's got bigger, the operator system became like huge and complicated and being able to just let people dial into the network was actually really valuable to everybody. But the other thing that's happening here is that AT&T is actually going out of its way to prevent anyone else from doing any kind of innovation. Tim, you covered the story of the Hush-a-phone. Do you remember the story of the Hush-a-phone? Oh yes, I do very, very well. So you're right. AT&T, in some ways, as we've suggested, they're an admirable company that I want to point that out in some ways. It's true that we're not improving the product at all, but they were trying to get the product to everybody. Sometimes I must confess, anything you spend a lot of time with, you end up with a mixed, some admiration. And AT&T monopoly in some ways reminds me of the Roman Empire in the sense that I do not approve of feeding people to lions or gladiator contests or massacring villagers, but there is still something mighty and exciting about building roads to every part of Europe. So I have the same kind of feelings about AT&T. One of the things I will say about AT&T is it was very controlling. They had the idea that they had to own every part of their system from top to bottom. And that meant you should not attach your telephones. One thing that people may not realize, there was not a phone jack back then. It was just a wire coming out of the wall. So it wasn't like, if you wanted to hit up your own phone, you needed to be able to splice wires or something like that. Anyway, a bunch of people in the 1950s invented something called the Hush-a-Phone. And the Hush-a-Phone was this plastic device that fit over the receiver and made it so that people around you were not bothered by your phone calls, if that makes sense. It really is just a gigantic piece of plastic. This big piece of plastic that came out was actually originally invented in the 1920s. They did an advanced version of it. They consulted with this fellow named Leo Branik at MIT, who was an expert on acoustics. He later went on to help invent the internet. They invented this sort of improved model and Belle freaked out and said, we cannot have foreign attachments on our network. They went and they began threatening that they would disconnect the service. So they didn't have the power to sue people, but they did have the power to threaten to disconnect the service of anyone who used this foreign attachment. And ultimately it went to suit the FCC, the first one along and they went back and forth. So grudgingly they ended up having a hearing over whether the Hush-a-Phone actually interfered with phone communications. And ultimately it didn't. It all went all the way to the DC circuit. And it came down ultimately to a landmark decision of the DC circuit where they said, an unwarranted interference with the telephone subscribers right reasonably to use the telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without being publicly detrimental can't be interfered with. So AT&T finally had a little bit of pushback on their entirely encompassing control freak nature. Yeah, but that takes a while. Crucially that takes a long time and it about ruins the life of the Hush-a-Phone creators trying to do this. But they did. They decided basically we have to fight this fight all the way out because we think it's important and they do eventually win their day in court but it takes them a long time and an awful lot of money. And in that space actually while AT&T is fighting this fight is when this phone comes out. And so let's get to this phone, but first let's take a break and then we're going to talk some hardware. We'll be right back. Hey I'm Matt Bichel, comedian, writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page and I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like A Lot as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning you read three headlines and you immediately think oh that sounds like a lot I can't deal with all this but guess what I can deal with it and I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying. Maybe an actor. They go, feminism has gone too far. You go why because the Sadie Hawkins dance happened. Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show I'm challenged to sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. You're the one with the charmed life. Could be a politician, basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio so yes you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news but it is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Complex and unprecedented the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hantavirus stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees American and French have since tested positive for the virus and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early early this morning and we assess that individual. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today Explained drops every weekday afternoon. Alright we're back. Let's talk about a designer named Henry Dreyfus who is somebody I had never heard of before but turns out to be a bit of a legend in the design world. So this guy he's a New York guy he's a designer he works on Broadway plays he eventually opens a firm to do industrial design and ends up designing some truly iconic stuff. This guy is in like the the 20s and 30s and 40s and 50s doing work and his big idea is what if we made things that were human centric. What if the design was useful to people and also looked nice and so he ends up designing a bunch of like truly iconic things. One of them is the this vacuum called the Hoover 150 one of the first vacuums to have basically be all sort of all contained like this and cleaner and simpler and less designed. He also designs the Honeywell T87 thermostat which is like the iconic yeah shadow of a thermostat. So he this guy is like doing big important work and he eventually at the end of all this goes to work for AT&T. So at this point in the 1930s Bell Labs had released a phone called the Western Electric 300. It's a bit of an icon in the annals of landline phones. They're making this transition away from the old they called them candlestick phones which is it was those are the two pieces you hold the one up to your ear and the other one down here when as you talk into it that had been the design of phones for forever and right before the Great Depression Bell Labs had done this big design reboot of all of its phones. There was still a second box like you were talking about there's a there's the phone on the desk and then there's a thing stuck to the wall basically that is where a lot of the actual equipment is and also is how you connect to the network. The wars happen and the Great Depression happens and so there's this giant pause in a lot of development but then this stuff comes like roaring back in in the 30s and into the 40s and again Tim like you were saying earlier about kind of ideas all happening at once everybody thinking about this kind of device around the world right because AT&T is not the only company in the world doing telephony. Everybody starts to think about you know plastics which are becoming a thing and new kinds of transmitters and new things are being cheap to manufacture so everybody starts consolidating on this idea of like how do we make something a little smaller a little simpler and how do we put it all into one device rather than the phone being sort of this like big wacky system that lives in your house they're like how do we just make it a thing. The other thing about the Western Electric 300 was that it was like really really really nice to hold. Bell Labs and others had done a lot of ergonomics research and people were starting to make more and longer phone calls so the idea of like making this a nice experience was really important so they're like how do we make this more and more pleasant so they come up with a bunch of little things like the fact that when you pick it up the speaker actually covers most of your ear but it has this sort of concave thing so that it actually puts a cup around your ear that it makes the sound better it puts your mouth right on the microphone by design like you kind of can't put the microphone anywhere else so that makes it sound better. They understood the phone as a physical object for the first time which I think is really cool this is like the end of doing it because it is what the technology requires and into like actually we have a bunch of options how do we make this a lifestyle object yeah which I think is very cool and leads to a lot of these a lot of these changes if you go all the way back on AT&T's YouTube channel a thing that I had occasion to do they uploaded a bunch of like old archival basically infomercials like AT&T would make these long movies explaining to people how things would work and they would play them at the beginning of like movie theater movies to help people understand how phones worked can I just play you a couple of them to give you a sense of like what innovation looked like at this time it's delightful. For convenience in dialing the letters go around the dial in alphabetical order and the numbers are in numerical order from one to nine and all and in the center of the dial appears the number of the telephone you are using with dial service telephone numbers consist of a central office name and five numbers like this main two nine nine seven oh this is like there was a time not that long ago that you had to explain somebody that the numbers go up in order by the way straight line from here to those first videos that Apple produced about the iPhone yes where they're like here's how you unlock it very much we've gotten away from this yeah so in 1946 is all this is going on AT&T starts working with Henry Dreyfus's company they spend a couple of years sketching ideas they test with customers and eventually this thing starts to hit in 1949 this is the western electric 500 this is a big giant deal of a device and they launch it as such they like they understand that they have done something important and powerful and there are a bunch of new things inside of this so like one one way I would I would think about it is uh you have the base plate inside of the phone there's a lot of like really complicated mechanics and actually we sent Andrew Marino our producer to the Long Island telephone museum where there are actual honest to god old phone experts who did a much better job of explaining it so let me just play this video that Andrew made for us okay I'm here at the Long Island telephone museum and I'm here with the curator historian John Stallone hi John hi how are you I'm great welcome we are gonna take a demo look at the western electric 500 we're gonna actually open one up and take a look and see how it all works exactly all the inner workings and how the magic occurs okay great so in 1954 it's a huge pivotal year for the telephone company this is the first time that the 500 set now is available in a variety of eight different colors we have a pink one in our office actually very nice a pink one is rare it would have been special ordered oh okay cool this new type of telephone has a thing called a varistor inside of it so the varistor is a combination of two words it's a varying resistor and this now allows that phone to be placed at any distance from the central office whether it's close where it would have a more powerful current coming to it well the further away where it would have a less powerful current from it got you and normally when you're making a call or somebody would bang the phone down and hang up on you you'd hear that loud click in your ear that varistor prevented that from happening it also now for the very first time allows you to make your ringer louder or lower can we also talk about the plug here in 1954 you could actually move your phone about your house wherever you might want it if you wanted an outdoor jack on your patio you were able to have that installed and then take your phone from inside and plug it into this little four-pronged jack on the outside prior to that your phone was hardwired to the wall right so strangely enough if you had one of these even back in those days you'd be able to unscrew it very simply from underneath two screws but now we're going to uncover and look on the inside of all where all the magic happens so we spoke about the bell earlier and here's where you could be able to actually see it moving closer and further away from where the clapper is that's in the center there just to pause really fast this is such a perfect example of like the simplicity of the system that you're talking about it's just how far are the bells from each other yeah they found so many like little tiny ingenious things to do here that make all of this sort of complicated stuff actually unbelievably simple yes and they can just fix it yeah it's very clever very good this is a giant magnet and basically what's happening when the phone rings 90 volts ac is being applied across the line and it's exciting this magnet where it's actually right changing polarity to make that ringer be pulled back and forth right and so that's the only way it's getting powers through the phone line correct it's actually coming through the regular wire that's coming in from the outside the telephone works off of a thing called negative 48 volts nisi the ringer actually works off of 90 volts ac okay so how does that get power then so that power is coming from the central office with a big generator that was inside there a ringing generator and when you were going to get a call it would send that ringing current across the line excites the ringer now you're hearing okay so at that point the circuits closed this is your switch hook you're gonna it's actually open and you pick it up so yeah when you pick up the phone this yeah it's closed in and then boom you're answering your call hello who's there can you walk through the dialing mechanism so i didn't disconnect it but i could show it to you actually you can do a little work here and take this off cool all right so now we can kind of see the back of the dial so every time you're making a call this governor is spinning creating an opening closing of the circuit creating pulses for each number that correlates to what you spin so if you were to do nine of course it would open and close the circuit nine times if you go to zero that's 10 so that would be 10 times opening closing every time the magic that happens behind the scenes after you spin that little wheel on your phone is translated all the way back to the central office a building that's approximately a quarter a mile away from probably where your home is and when you pick up your phone and you're dialing your number this is going to register in the central office the number so when we saw the the clicks in the phone it's kind of relaying that same signal to here right so every time the those contacts open and close it's registering a click inside the central office until you reach the number of clicks for your telephone number seven numbers at that point you're calling within the scene area of your central office and now it's going to translate it to the phone that needs to be getting ringed so now if phone's ringing at the other location you hear that ring you pick up the phone and now you're able to have your conversation when you hang up it resets and it waits for the next time or the next person who needs that line finder to be able to go and make the next call well thank you john i really appreciate it yeah this this was so fun i learned so much back to you david say hi to david hi david okay thank you first of all john is my hero that that did rules yeah i aspire to that kind of knowledge about literally anything but i think it's it's there's so much of that that is exactly this thing that we've been talking about that a it's this whole system that is the point right like tim you and you and nil i've both been talking about the the bell system yeah this is the system it's all those parts it's all mechanical yeah it's a it's a big mechanical system and it all has to work together exactly right and i think that's where they're like weirdo control freak nature came from like there's no slack in the system right you can just like knock the thing out of alignment and then the phone's broken and you can see how you would make a compelling argument that actually if we let somebody else into this system they'll screw it up yeah it is very complicated and put together but also they should work so all of this stuff is is some of it is new and some of it is just vast improvements over how all of this stuff works the fact that you can control the volume the fact that you can like you like you were doing earlier you can pick it up and carry it around is like meaningful to people's experience with these funds this becomes i think crucial to how people think about their relationship with their phones for decades yep right like this is in so many ways the like iconic moment of phones were already mainstream but this changes people's relationship to them in a way that i'm still like wrapping my head around because this is this is the phone in so many ways yeah it is the picture of a phone it was the icon of a phone on cell phones for years and years and years the idea that you would have more than one of them in your house that arrived with this device the the idea that it's in colors yeah and that it is a consumer object made of plastic i mean it really just changed everyone's relationship with the phone in serious ways they fixed a bunch of the things in it to make it more serviceable a huge part of the goal of all of this for at&t is to make these phones easier to service because it's this is all still at this point kind of brittle technology yeah and so they're spending a lot of mechanical right and so they're spending a lot of money and a lot of time like going to people's houses and they have these huge repair shops that people are repairing the phones in like this thing is a lot of work so anything they can do to make it easier to get inside and fix is a huge deal so this one like you you can literally just lift this cover off with a couple of screws and see all of the internals right there and that is that's a big deal right like there's a real repairability aspect to the thing there are a couple of other little design things i just want to point out one of them is that on the dial here before the numbers had been inside of the dial so when you would put your finger in it would obscure the numbers so it was actually hard to see yeah so on this one they put the numbers around the outside and then they're actually part of the plastic but then in testing they discovered that people didn't know where to put their fingers anymore so they put these dots inside the dots are for in order to just there those are like places for your finger to land because people people didn't know where to where to actually put the thing because it was hard to navigate from the number to the circle i want to play maybe the most iconic and most lasting thing that happened from this device which is um travis our producer can you call this phone oh it's good oh it's good i cannot describe to you how like visceral reaction i have to that ring and it's mechanical there's a bell in there that's being struck by a striker and it you can feel it's vibrating the table it's so good where does that take both of you i just immediately become a kid again like yeah i'm i'm home in the 80s and i'm running down the stairs because the phone was in the kitchen right and again this is like eventually there are more phones in the house and this stops being such a thing but that sound is run to the kitchen yep same can i just say the word operator here printed on the side it's so jaunty like this thing has whimsy to it it's good it's true it's lovely you know kind of reminds me design wise a little bit of like the portion on 11 yeah or the Volkswagen bug it has kind of a you know it's roughly the same era you know a kind of rounded design that really lasted and became classic yeah it's got that jet age feel right we're we're we're entering and we're going to streamline everything totally we're going to cut through the water with the greatest of ease a lot of rounded corners yeah i think there's also a case to be made that this is the best sounding phone of all time like it's it's useful to remember for many people watching and listening to this you've never heard a good sounding phone call never like it it's honestly true but there was a long time where phone calls sounded awesome yeah they had we had these super high fidelity lines that were able to carry almost uncompressed speech like it sounded amazing and there there was something meaningfully like emotionally different about a phone the phone companies used to compete on the quality of their phone calls yeah this is this is long since gone yeah i mean i mean i guess that's the thing about the the story of innovation which you know i've been very critical of at&t but to give them their credit they just in some ways innovate in different ways like they innovated in terms of trying to have the perfect perfect like phone quality and the perfect reliability like the big deal for them was that every time you picked up the phone you get a dial tone you know not like nine out of ten times or five and you know on our current even our current networks pretty advanced occasionally a phone call just fails and to them that was you know that should never happen right so they were going for a different ideal let's just put it that way well it's actually it's an interesting incentive match up right because if you're if you're at&t and you have in your western electric because of the way your business works because you lease these phones to people every one of their incentives was to make these things awesome and last forever yep because it was it was much cheaper in the long run for them to do that than to make crappy things that broke like if they could make great things that didn't break they would ultimately be vastly more successful collecting rent forever right which is like yeah feel about that however you want but it did incentivize them to make the phone great yeah and they did yes tim politically and and business wise what's happening through this phase right is this phase of the western electric 500 also sort of the the dawn of the end of the enlightened monopoly of at&t here that period of the 1950s is sort of remembered i think by people you know sort of man-men kind of era a lot of big business but it was also the most active period of antitrust enforcement maybe in us history 50s and 60s they were extremely aggressive and one of the reasons is they were reacting to world war two and the the sense was that the nazis and the japanese empire had been built on the back of monopoly and there was a lot of worry that you know somehow monopoly and over monopolization of industry was going to start to bleed into fascism in the united states in some way and so there's this aggressive thing and and it spills over into at&t and they say hey we have this company it's huge it's really powerful it's politically connected they're sort of dangerous let's take a run at them this is the justice department talking in the 50s and you know this is crazy how is it that they own the western electric company those obviously could be two different companies around the same time they had just broken up the film industry into producers and and theaters they said you know film they just changed the the the film industry so that the big studios couldn't own everything in a vertically integrated fashion so they they took a run at it and you know i think this is one of the most important periods in us technological history period not just this telephone because eight the justice department takes a big run at at&t they have them on the ropes they're going to break them up and in those days breakups were relatively common and at&t pleads and frankly gets a defense department involved in this whole decision-making in the federal government and the defense department says you can't break up at&t they're too important to national defense they help us operate our nuclear laboratories they do the early warning system against soviet missiles spare them so they intervene and they arrive at this agreement which as i keep saying might be one of the most consequential for us tech history the 1956 concept decree because in that at&t agrees to stay out forever of computing they're like let us have our monopoly let us you know continue to provide wonderful service for the american people and own everything but allow us to keep and we'll stay out of everything but telephony and the other most important thing is they force them to license every single patent they own for free and one of those patents is the transistor patent and a whole bunch of people then quit bell labs at&t and start transistor companies including shock lee and a few others eventually intel and so the there's two industries that are born in that exact period in this fight over the telephone the us computing industry gets a big boost by getting the phone company out so ibm gets its real start and the us semiconductors industry so there that little phone on your desk has some rule in birthing um two of the most important us industries and actually some of the guys in that patent end up writing unix there's a whole bunch of things can be linked just to that moment and just to that agreement where they let bell keep his telephone but let uh but freeze up the rest of the tech world where we can talk about carter phone i want him to talk about carter phone before he has to go it's like the heart of the whole game to me amazing about this device and tim has mentioned several times now is it's hardwired into the network well eventually you just want to plug a modem directly into the phone network eventually we get to rj11 connectors and we're plugging all kinds of device we have 1980s cordless phones all of that was the fight like when i think about the history of this device what undid it was a ecosystem of other phones that at&t had to be forced into allowing to connect to their network and once they were forced into allowing other phones they had to be forced into modems and then you just then it's all over and that's a decision right tim that's a fight can you talk about that fight yeah sure so it was actually similar to the hush a phone fight but with longer lasting consequences so carter phone made an acoustic coupler that connected to a radio which was you know a way of connecting the phone to the radio network at&t as usual freaked out and said that's a foreign attachment it's dangerous to our network it cannot be allowed and a carter phone had enough resources and you know times were changing there it is and they they fought it out and it went all the way to the dc circuit the fcc now had switched sides and was on the side of the innovators and so eventually through a court order by the dc circuit at&t was forced to acknowledge the possibility of things connecting to its network now that sets into event a whole string of events that i think are very important the fcc at this point is starting to wonder about this paradigm of regulated monopoly and thinking that well maybe we can keep the monopoly but allow a little bit of competition in long distance and a little bit of competition on the handset or the attachment side and they do something pretty radical but with extraordinarily long lasting consequences which is they come out with a rule that compels at&t to install phone jacks in people's houses right you know the phone jack is one of those things in daily life along with electric plug that is so radically essential to the history of technology uh that it's surprising we don't wonder at&t more often because think of what it is it is an interconnection and interface that costs no money to connect with and is universal and totally permissionless so suddenly people can plug stuff in the mid-fifth seventies into this phone jack and you know doesn't spread everywhere at once that is what in some ways sets off the modern telecom revolution along with long distance and the first net neutrality rules and it comes from just this you know humble device and if i'll say one more thing about it at&t they're like this grumpy old man at this point who just keeps doubling down because they go on a tear and even though they're forced to have this phone jack they still insist that it's a danger to the phone network i had a a judge i worked for richard posner uh who went to consult for at&t during this time and they hired him to try to prove that all these attachments were going to be a danger to the at&t system and he said well what's the you know what what's it going to be and they said well um you know someone could attach something to the phone line that would send an electric current and then a repairman who was up on a pole that gets shot yeah and go falling to his death this argument works for a while by the way yes it does and i remember he said he said does that ever happen no no but there's always the first time so there's always a first time and you know they had all these other things dangerous unhygienic um you know spread disease they insist and they they refuse to comply with the FCC rules they do all these things they insist on people having what they call a protective coupler so it's something you you attach between the network and their devices they're refusal to deal with and and i think this is you know kind of the endpoint they're refusal to obey the FCC's rules on attachments is a big part of what leads to the final antitrust lawsuit that leads to their total breakup into nine different companies so the end of the bell empire the old bell empire is on the back of their refusal to let consumers attach you know whatever they wanted to their own walls yeah and it came just out of this you know kind of control freak mania that eventually led to a total breakup and i bring it back to this phone right this phone represents the enlightened monopoly we're going to hire the designer he's going to look at how people are actually using the stuff and we're going to gently curve the inside of the handset so your ear can fit into it and we will deliver unto you the perfect phone and it shall remain unchanged for 40 years and then you're like or you could have a phone jack and now sony can make phones and panasonic can make phones and like let a thousand flowers bloom and the you fight against it so hard you kill yourself and then you reform yourself like the terminator which is what the agency fully did but that's for another day that version of att killed itself over not letting people compete with this device and i think that is just so fascinating because again this thing is fully mechanical it is obvious how it works if you wanted to make a phone that connects it to att's network and worked exactly like this one all you have to do is open it up which is very easy to do look at it and say well this is how it works i can make my own and it wasn't you know cryptographic signatures or drm or secret passcodes or whatever it was we're going to take you to court and kill you yeah and they were just really really good at that to keep people from using their network you know i mentioned ancient rome but there's certainly something of a greek tragedy to the whole story about it there was something beautiful and admirable about the att empire but ultimately they're hubris their desire to you know be the one perfect network to control everything that ultimately led to their downfall this has been terrific topic i can't i wish we had another couple hours to talk about the you know workings of att the good news is we'll have more chances but for now tim we should let you go you've got you've got you know fancy government things to do but thank you again tim hope all goes well appreciate it hey guys it's been great i enjoyed it goodbye all right we gotta take one more break and then neil and are gonna come back and do the version history questions we'll be right back ready to launch your business get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs shopify is specially designed to help you start run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand marketing tools that get your products out there integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale ups online in person and on the go shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you sign up for your one dollar a month trial at shopify.com slash setup security program on spreadsheets new regulations piling up an audit dread it's time for vanta automate security and compliance brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82% less manual work clearer visibility faster deals zero chaos call it compliance or call it calm clients get it join the 15 000 companies using vanta to prove trust get started at vanta.com slash calm all right we're back it's time as always to do the eight version history questions the question we ask about every product nil it's just you and me yeah we will carry on tim's legacy the first question as always is is the time matrix a concept everyone loves and has no questions about this is this is we're plotting ideas against time was this the right idea at the right time the right idea at the wrong time wrong idea wrong time what's the most this can be i want this is the most right idea at the most right time you think so yeah this phone in particular so what i want to do is i want to i want to divorce like the bigger picture everything from this and i want to specifically talk about like this phone in 1949 and 1950 yeah i'm saying it's the most ready at the most right time imagine if like mark suckerberg had your best interests in heart do you know what i mean like this is the product of enlightened monopoly in that post war period like america's that it's fullest flower and this phone exists i will say it was the single most interesting thing about researching this whole thing was uh we talked about this a little bit is like i think i believe theodore veil when he said he actually cares about people and wants to do a good job and make a nice thing for everybody i also think he made a lot of money on the way but i also think like a lot of this our whole country is premised on the idea that you can do good and make a lot of money and that those two things can exist together and these are the guys who are like getting out of their weird like streamlined limousines and like kicking nickels to the street urchins right yeah it wasn't all great but i think the idea of like we we want you to regulate us but we think we can build the best network in that actually everybody benefits from the network being fully connected i buy that whole theory all at once in in ways i did not expect you coming into this but what i think what i wonder about where this goes on the matrix i think right idea is very clear right like this thing was this this represented like the absolute maximum vision of something i think if you take away all the stuff you're talking about in like the 20s 30s and 40s right where there were other priorities there were there was this huge sort of stop in innovation because of the great depression could at&t have gotten to this idea 20 years sooner and ben had had something even more powerful happen as a result could we have like sped up a century of innovation if at&t had gotten to this thing sooner no i i really don't think so i mean this thing is a marvel of plastics engineering it's true right it's a marvel of like electronic miniaturization like there's a whole bunch of just world war two era defense spending embodied in this phone yeah and maybe maybe if the whole of all of history is different you know but like in the in the timeline we live in i'm saying there it's this is the right product culturally it represents i think tim called it no bless au lige like it represents a different attitude towards the responsibility of billionaires across the board and it hit at a time when all the people in the post-war period were interested in new ideas in new connections in new ways of like it just doesn't get better than this moment i don't think yeah i think i agree this might be the most up into the right we've ever had on this show yeah the way you describe it all right right idea right time i feel good about it all right question number two was this peak anything i think this more than most has it has the chance to do a lot of things and i want to offer you several okay was this peak phone ringer i just want like i want to point out this was you can still andrew merino our producer pointed out to me this morning this ringer exists on the iphone today it's called old phone yeah you can make your phone sound like this now and you should it it's because it it's not going to come through because you know it's microphones the internet youtube compression in person that physical bell ringing sounds so good it does it is just a remarkably good sounding thing even though it still provokes in me the sense of panic that i need to run downstairs and answer the phone before my mom talks to my girlfriend were you instructed on how to answer the phone like as a as a kid did you have i was told very specifically that i was to say pierce is this is david when i picked up the phone that was how i answered the phone by whole childhood no i think we were just we were all just freestyle you were just like what up it's your boy need life well so my parents are doctors so the hospital was always sure and so like the only thing that ever really happened was somewhere asked for doctor hotel and i would have to say which one baller thing to say both of them yeah that was pretty good that is very good okay so i think i think pink ringer is yes for sure um was this peak handset just like the feeling of holding a phone i think the yeah that's pretty good it's very good i think it's possible that the the trim line the one that came after was a little more sort of comfortable to do the like snuggle it between your shoulder the trim line was the one where they started selling this big foam attachment yes that you would lean up against i don't know i think this this one has a strong a strong case to be made i do think the fact that you just immediately picked it up in one hand put it to your ear in the other hand and felt powerful is like there's something there's something to the trim line never made anybody feel powerful no it didn't the trim line made you feel like you were trying to reschedule a flight the trim line it was that or it like you're a high school girl like lying on the ground kicking your legs in the air like that's the trim line you know what i mean yeah and then okay one other one that i was thinking about that i'm curious if you have any others was this peak at&t like does this thing represent enlightened monopoly at&t that that version of like yes at&t at its absolute most powerful is this phone that moment yes and i think the argument of this episode is this phone represents the beginning of the end i think that's right the only case against it i think is like by now the there is an antitrust fight started that will like the the extent to which all of this stuff happens in like 18 months is nuts right this phone comes out and sort of establishes at&t in people's houses in a new way there's an antitrust fight that comes out hush a phone is going on so like all the cracks are coming even as at&t is flexing its power right that's right this is the beginning of the end this is yeah if if you are at&t and you're the enlightened monopolist you've made this product because this is your prompt that you're this is you keeping your promise yeah and then all around you is your downfall right so everybody is like creeping up the mountain towards it but this phone just sits alone at the top of the mountain yeah okay i agree i think that's right did you have anything else peak anything no i mean i fundamentally i think this phone just represents like peak america in that way like it's pretty good it is a symbol of a particular kind of america and this is like everybody in today's america like longs for for i would say many incorrect reasons a moment in history that was this moment yeah like there's so many people who were like life was better in the 50s yeah we did it in the 50s there are a lot of people who correctly disagree with that assessment but there is there is a very particular kind of like america americana america that is tied up in in this all right question number three if you could travel back knowing everything we know now and develop it yourself could you make the product more successful and for you i want to say not at&t to this product i'm not asking could you fix at&t could you could you make this phone a bigger hit and i want to offer you one idea okay that i don't think is true but i think is an interesting sort of counterfactual if at&t had embraced the idea of this as a more open ecosystem allow the hush a phone allow the carter phone like buy into the idea that actually we want to be the center of a larger gadget ecosystem around your phones maybe this oh mine is so much done okay it's so much dumber you're like you're off in the weeds you know see the cord the cord is fixed on these phones you would just make it longer this is the big problem with these phones is this cord in particular was quite short which limited where you could put it eventually when the you know the phone jack came out and everything was sort of modular in that way like a long phone cords or an innovation oh yeah you would see them places i remember you have the one on the that was like high up on the wall and the cord would touch the floor exactly you have like 15 feet of room yeah exactly that's my one innovation for this device that's pretty good i'm very much in favor of rotary dials i think like just the idea of the the work required to make a phone call is a good thing and i think we should bring that back you should have to know someone's number and do it for one whole minute before you're allowed to make a phone call yeah that's the thing i believe question number four will the youth ever make it cool again and i the broadest version of this question is is there a landline revolution upon us because i would like to very briefly make the case that it is like in very small ways kind of happening yeah there's this company called tin can that has built these sort of closed networks for neighborhoods and friend yeah this is the hottest that's a big hit for the seven-year-old girl this is like a thing that is is happening but i wonder is there a phone as a object for phone calls and be dedicated phone call making device is there a is there a possibility of a comeback for that i feel like all of this runs into the reality of how the networks themselves work but tin can is like its own little weird wi-fi calling service yeah they actually want to make phone calls like the best way to do it is like be a like a weird bluetooth handset for a cell phone yeah and all that sucks i would love it if landlines may come back and we were all made more intentional phone calls and we would like schedule the calls the way that we used to do with my family but it's like because the there's no way to build that without a cell phone right now right or no efficient way or cost effective way to do it and you're kind of like well i'm just bluetooth thing into my cell phone over there i might as well watch tiktok so i think that the tin cans the world and this is this stuff is really you know i've got an elementary school daughter like they all want these products yeah because we won't let them really like tin can is cool it was also that for christmas really yeah so you can just see that there's something else happening there but i think that's because the parents are so opposed to giving out cell phones so you were basically just shoving them back into the atn t-code that's fair this does kind of bleed into question number five which is what feature of this product should every current version have to me the answer is blindingly obvious it's good sounding phone calls yeah obviously that's like no other question and i think if the answer is good sounding phone calls that bleeds back into the other thing like i was thinking about this in with video chat right there is there's an argument to be made that there's no going back to phone calls because video chat has just eaten it alive and if you're a young person you associate calling somebody with looking at them yeah those sound like shit too yeah because you're either you're holding your phone far away from your face so that you can see which kills the sound quality you're talking into a laptop from far away which kills the sound quality like there is no version of this thing that is set up to make anything sound good because we sounding good is not important yeah but i honestly do believe that if you could bring back the actual fidelity that we've lost over the decades it would make it more compelling for people to do it more often oh i absolutely know so you guys are awful when it changed oddly was the pandemic i really people got so used to zoom and they got used to this huge quality degradation because the point was just to communicate right so you would accept almost anything as long as you could get the bare bones of communication across before that you know i would do like tv hits and you know if you would go on the radio or tv all the producers would say can you get to a landline oh yeah that's true they would ask you every time can you get to the landline they would they cared about the quality and then the pandemic hit and everyone's like yeah zoom sorry and we just have it that's like a little marker it's obviously not everyone's having that experience but to me it was when the radio producers gave up on sound quality like it was like there's no hope for anyone else like these are the last people in america who truly care and like it's gone i'm a nihilist about people caring about audio quality as you know i don't know i don't know if that one's coming back i think you're right but i i wish it would yeah and i think a lot of things would get better if it did all right now we have three questions left these are the version history hall of fame questions a product has to pass all three of these tests to make it into the version history hall of fame question number one did this product do something truly new again not at&t this is the western electric 500 about which i actually think this question is harder than a lot of episodes yeah this is very difficult i would say yes uh to your point about design right this is a designed consumer product in a way that the previous generations were driven by the technology instead of the user interface i think i agree i think there is a case to be made that the answer is yes for the one before this that actually this is the the iteration on a brand new idea that is ultimately what makes these things successful but i think there is some combination of like you could control the loudness of it the dialer was simpler there's just a lot of like little bits and pieces that i do think added up to something genuinely it's the refined version of the big idea yeah which is that we're fine for me that refinement counts for a lot yeah i think i agree yeah we can't give it credit for being pink we should say like like andrew learned in his video this is a limited edition one and we're very proud of this but we don't get credit for being pink because it wasn't at first but that was also a big deal the idea that there were new colors they did lots of different designs there was one called the princess like lots of new ideas about what a phone should mean in people's lives that i think did start here question number two was this either remarkably good or remarkably bad it's remarkably good that's the answer i think it was i realized about halfway through the episode i had not expected this thing to get into the hall of fame and it just obviously is obviously like this thing is very important it's like why we're here but also i think i think it's not only is it very important like we picked this to sort of mark a moment in a bigger story but i do think this thing is more of a moment in that story than i realized when i started this process i mean also they you know the ship that unchanged before you i know like you're just kind of like well it goes in yeah imagine if you were still using an iphone one because it was good enough it did the thing like that's crazy what's funny is we never got to test the theory because like there was no competition there it wasn't useful to compete with this nobody tried because you couldn't get into the network connection the network yeah there was only one company making this and and like we said they had incentives to make it good they had incentives to make people like it and use it there were lots of reasons that it is as good as it is but it is a fun sort of counter history what if there had been honest to god free market competition much sooner would somebody have done a much better job than this much sooner and maybe you can see that the second that the phone jack hit like all that's rough yeah but you want a weird cordless phone like we'll send you one it's almost a shame that we didn't get a longer run of the telephone before it became all these other things because like telephone innovation essentially sort of dies at the hands of all these other new things that are being invented and everybody goes and finds more exciting things to work on like computers and televisions and all these so it's not like there is some multi-generational fascinating new kind of telephone over the years which i think is one of the reasons this thing lives as long as it does is that even when other stuff comes along it's not like there are a hundred brand new ideas about it i don't know man i feel like we could we're gonna have to do the entire episode on that one panasonic answering machine that they used in the movie sneakers like i made sure that my family had that answering machine yeah it was overshadowed i agree with you it's overshadowed it's a good way but it did continue for quite a long time yeah i agree all right and then question number three and i think this is this might actually be the easiest one of the three did this thing have a lasting impact did it capital m matter you know what on this answer it's like no really it did it but you know it was like forced on the the american public and so i i think matter is when it impacts the culture on its own merits yeah yeah the way we've been describing it is like is there is there a world before this in a world after it yeah and you don't think so no i mean it was just like this is a phone like you know like that's the moon like it's just there it is like does it matter like yeah it's pretty important sure but like it doesn't it doesn't warp the culture around it in a way that the iphone like is like paramount on this list right yeah like the culture warps around the iphone in like a very specific interesting point i think this was just like given to america like here it is right and i think that's actually a really interesting point because not that long before this we were still in the this is a growth phase this is a new thing people don't understand like we're in this sort of steady march of this technology into people's lives but i think you're right at this point this was this was ubiquitous the things i'm saying about it that are very important right this is when it became a consumer product this is when people would have more than one of them in their house this is when you could pick it up by this handle which i am just addicted to doing like all that stuff is very important but it's not my relationship to the phone has changed or i'm changing my behavior around this phone i still think it goes in the hall of fame but like the to me the matter question is always it centers around did the culture change noticeably after the thing and we've done a bunch of episodes about things where we talk about it so directly we don't even notice that's what we're talking about the culture changed around the tivo that we have sitting over there it changed around the iphone did the culture change around this like it's in a bunch of movies but the way that we all use the phone remained essentially the same until the network was opened up what's an interesting design fact of it right and this goes back to like i spent a lot of time reading about henry drive this who i find totally fascinating and maybe that was his great achievement right was what he did was discover what people wanted and what culture was was and hand them the perfect thing to do that he didn't deliver some brand new idea about how everything was supposed to work he just like nestled this thing perfectly into your life which is itself a huge achievement but is not that kind of like there it doesn't create an inflection point yeah it just immediately makes this thing feel completely natural in your house yeah which is a very different way of thinking about innovation but is i think in many ways just as innovative like to build a thing that immediately feels like you've had it forever is very hard to do yeah what it reflected was the power of the network like yeah the network obviously matters right and this is the way to access the network that att is instructing you to do like because you're not making a choice i think the matter's question gets very difficult yeah so okay so just to be clear you think the answer number three is no but you still want to put it in the hall of fame yeah absolutely yeah this is like what do you want from me listen i'm not here to make your job simple the people out there who say the hall of fame needs stricter rules are going to have a field day with this one it's obviously in the hall of fame i'm just the the point that i'm making is that the element of choice makes the matter question so much different you can obviously make the argument that this thing matters capital M sure my rubric is that it's when everyone's behavior changes by choice yes that's when you win yeah obviously goes in the hall of fame okay i think this thing represents like every idea we've ever had at the verge i know i'm with you we're going to put it in for that reason and also because i keep looking at the shot that we're doing here and we've done a lot of these episodes now nothing has ever looked as good on the desk as this phone you see what i'm saying like as as just an object yeah i am in love with this thing yeah everything else like a black rectangle yeah that's what i mean it's it's yeah so for that reason alone it gets in uh we're we're bending the rules sick yeah fourth secret fourth category this is why hall of fame rules are famously secretive because it's just a bunch of bunch of men with bad ideas yeah five months western logic 500 in bill bellichick out yeah feels good to me yeah all right nilai thank you this is this has been a delight nothing like having a reason to talk about monopolies for an hour and a half thank you again to tim woo for being here read the master switch read the age of extraction follow him in all of his many internet travails if you want to support all of this that we're doing the best thing you can do is subscribe to the verge the verge.com slash subscribe it's how we get to do all of this it's also how you get all of our podcasts including this one ad free thank you again we'll see you next time version history is a production of the verge and the vox media podcast network it's produced by victoria barrios river branson eric gomez oan grove brandy keifer travis larchuk andrew marino and alex parkin our editorial director is kevin mcshane studio support from matthew heffrin and joe nebris our theme music is composed by brandon mcfarland you can follow the dedicated version history podcast feed for all of our episodes as soon as they arrive and you can watch full episodes on our new youtube channel at version history podcast and to support everything we do and get access to this and all of our other podcasts ad free become a paid subscriber to the verge thanks