Time for Olde Tyme Techcitement, where we take a look back at technology relics. It’s basically your grampa talking about the good old days, but sooner and totally more reasonable than dumb boring stories about how all this used to be farmland.
This time around we have some techcitement that really is old.
You know what’s weird? There was a time when people didn’t know how to dial a telephone. The phone company had to convince them that the whole self-dialing system was a good idea and then had to teach it to them.
One of the ways they taught the American citizenry about this new-fangled kind of telephone was with educational films. AT&T subsidiary Western Electric Company released this undated film Dial Comes To Town in the 1930s for just this purpose. They really spent a lot of time on a whole play (such as it is) with a plot, real actors, and everything.
Here it is in all its public domain glory, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
It’s worth noting that this film was made a good decade or so (it’s undated) after the first dial telephones were installed in the United States back in 1919, so Gramps’s complaints were almost certainly based on actual consumer feedback. I like to think that the gigantic model of a telephone dial (below) was included because old people couldn’t understand the numbering system.
Two important side lessons, just from the first two minutes:
- Old people are terrible.
- “That’s yummy” is the correct response when receiving good news.
Expect to find me using that last one quite a bit. It’ll be downright yummy.
[…] global mobile phone usage. Similar stories exist from the mid-twentieth century when the telephone was reaching maturation. For example, my mother’s family was one of the few in the area that didn’t have radio […]