The Humble Telephone

Peter Wu

17 Sept 2010

One of the world-changing objects which were invented is the telephone, by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Everyone one including school kids knows that. But one thing which remains largely unknown is the distinctive ringing bell that was for decades the invariable part of every phone call made. Ringggg…Ringggg, Ringggg…Ringggg…Remember our scrambling to pick up the receiver when you hear that distinctive sound?

That was invented by Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson. Before it, the only way to know if someone was trying to get through to you was to pick up the phone every now and then and see if anyone was there.

Short of picking up the telephone every five minutes or however more frequent you wish, there was no way of telling whether there is a call waiting or you may have missed an important call.

Desperate time calls for desperate measures. So telephone owners resorted to one of two ways to let people know that a call is coming through or they are about to be called.

The first one was to send the people they wanted to call a telegram first, like ‘Mr Chan, please pick up your phone. I am going to call you in 10 minutes.’ You know and I know that the old telegrams were not in words, but in a series of codes. They need to be translated into words using a code book. So the person who received the telegram had to trot down to the Telegraph Office and asked for it to be translated. They then had to rush home to pick up the phone. By then, they may have missed the call.

The second was to send a servant (affluent households had numerous servants in those days) to the call receiver’s house to tell him that a call is coming in say 10 minutes. You may ask: ‘why the hell can the servant not deliver the message to the call receiver, or tell him what the phone call was all about?’ Well, there are good reasons for this. Society etiquette at the time dictated that the servant was not allowed to say anything, or told anything, other than delivering the message the master wanted them to deliver. The other reason is that the call-maker and the call-receiver might like to discuss matters of considerable sensitivity, or secrecy, or juiciness, or national importance.

The third reason is the most obvious. Telephone owners wanted to use and be seen to be using a state-of-the-art gadget which was not common and whose ownership was synonymous with their status, like owing a 747 now. Despite having to send a telegram or dispatch a servant to alert the call-receiver first, they still wanted to use the telephone.

Had it not been because of the ringing bell, the telephone we take for granted today could well be consigned to history as another piece of junk. So next time you pick up the phone or receive a call, say thank you to Thomas Watson.