S03 - E10 - Jan 27, 2019
The Phone Book
The Directory
- Most adults grew up during a huge technological shift from landlines to cell phones
- Then that evolved into smartphones and phone numbers available online wherever your phone gets service
- However, many of us remember the landline and the directories that came with it
- There were two: the white pages and the yellow pages
- White pages were residential, listing the names and phone numbers of the people living in the area
- Yellow pages were commercial, listing business numbers and filled with ads
- Distributed yearly by being left on each and every doorstep
- Many old books, instead of being recycled, were used as step stools or booster seats at dinner tables
First Directory
- Alexander Graham Bell awarded patent for telephone
- But the telephone seemed inconvenient to the populace
- To use, you had to buy at least two and connect them together with wires
- That’s a lot of work when you could just send a letter
- George Coy sees a demonstration of Bell’s telephone making a call between Hartford and Middleton, Connecticut
- He sees the possibilities and collects financial backers
- Using their money, he opens the first franchise to license Bell’s phones
- Opens first commercial telephone exchange in the US, allowing people to get phones without having to hook them up themselves
- Switchboard was pieced together with "carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire.”
- “According to the company records, all the furnishings of the office, including the switchboard, were worth less than forty dollars.” (about $972 today)
- Could connect up to 64 customers, but only two separate conversations could be had at a time
- Six switches had to be hit for every call
- Opens with 21 subscribers and charged $1.50 per month (about $37)
- Physicians, business, police all early subscribers
- By end of first month, has 50 subscribers
- Publication of first phone directory by Coy’s New Haven District Telephone Company
- Listed 11 homes, 38 businesses, and the police
- Printed on a single sheet of cardboard
- No phone numbers
- Switchboard operators directed calls
Explosion & Growing Pains
- First phone book printed (not just a page)
- Directories are everywhere
- Had directions on how to use a phone
- People would often yell into wrong end
- How to start a conversation
- 7,000,000 phone numbers across the US
- Increased by sixfold
- Requires 500 delivery men
- Uses more than 500 rail-car loads of paper and 100 tons of binding glue
- Saturday Evening Post publishes “Sixty Million Headaches Every Year”
- Full of facts and tidbits regarding the creation and maintenance of phone books
- “Otherwise civilized people have a deplorable habit of tearing out pages at booths and in hotel rooms instead of copying down the numbers. A staff of inspectors roam such busy centers as railroad and bus stations to see if directory replacements are necessary. At New York’s Grand Central Terminal fresh books are required every forty-eight hours. And nothing much can be done to stop people from tearing pages out of the directors for use as confetti when a parade is staged for some returning hero. A record was chalked up on Gertrude Ederle’s triumphant arrival to New York after she swam the English Channel in 1926. The shredded pages of 5,000 directories were showered on her at a cost, in those inexpensive days, of a couple of thousand dollars. The New York Telephone Company, which had to supply new books, still shudders at the memory.”
- Rats, not mice, would eat the adhesive that bound the books until the adhesive was made too disgusting to rat taste buds
- Know the directory is important when it becomes embroiled in social issues
- This happens as early as 1906
- Threaten boycott of Bell by Jews in Trenton, NJ over listing for a resort advertising “Free From Hebrews and Tuberculosis Patients.”
- North Temperance groups fought to ban brewery ads
- Southern directories were segregated
- Women’s rights
- 1967 - New York - first listing for birth control counseling
- Fights into the 1970s for women to have equal billing in household listings, Bell company arguing against it because it would require too much paper and ink
- Not all uses were so social
- Used to hide money and press ties
- Chiquiri Land Company ordered two tons of directories to create additional layer of protection for their armored payroll cars
- Bell and AT&T divorce
- Leaves the directory territories up for grabs
- Regional Bells are vicious
- Some California homes ended up with 10 volumes of directories in one year
The End?
- No secret that information has hemorrhaged to the internet
- Some states fighting for opt-out options to reduce paper waste
- North Carolina, Minnesota, Maine, and New York
- Yellow Pages does have an opt-out option online
- For the most part, the companies still make too much money to quit and there will always be rural areas in need of physical copies of numbers
References