100 Objects #19: Western Electric 500 Series

99% Invisible

Roman Mars and Adam Savage explore the history and design of the Western Electric 500 Series telephone, a ubiquitous device that defined Amer

Key takeaways

• The Western Electric 500 series was produced in over 92 million units by AT&T's manufacturing arm over a 50-year period.
• Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss applied a philosophy of 'reducing friction' to create the highly intuitive 300 and 500 series handsets.

Main topics

• Western Electric 500 Series history
• Industrial design philosophy of Henry Dreyfuss

Notable quotes

There can be no friction between the use of a tool and its utility.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how the loss of robust, low-latency communicati

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This episode of 100 Objects is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need. Custom calculators, data visualization dashboards, even prototypes. all without writing a single line of code. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai. That's claude.ai. Speaker 2 (0:41) 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. Speaker 3 (0:58) It was in the front foyer of our house. There was a table devoted to it. This is Adam Savage. I am a former MythBuster, current YouTuber, science communicator, and maker of things. Speaker 2 (1:11) And breaker of things. And Speaker 3 (1:13) breaker of things. You have to break enough things to learn how Speaker 2 (1:17) they go back together. 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. Speaker 3 (1:27) 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. Speaker 2 (1:38) This phone was the Western Electric 500 series, and it was kind of just an ordinary telephone. In fact, it was the ordinary telephone. Speaker 2 (1:48) So ordinary that, at the time, you would have found some version of it in pretty much every home in America. So I'm an elder Gen X, Speaker 3 (1:57) born in the late 60s. We had one telephone in our house for my entire childhood until I went to college. And Adam still remembers everything about it. Everything around the phone, from the tactility of dialing it, the zicka, zicka, zicka, 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. Speaker 2 (2:24) Yeah. I Speaker 3 (2:25) remember really loving the dial tone, the sort of the comforting sound of the dial tone. Speaker 7 (2:30) You'll hear the dial tone. Speaker 3 (2:33) 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. Speaker 2 (3:00) 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. Speaker 3 (3:08) I remember having fights with my best friend in high school in that chair, talking to my girlfriend in that chair. Then I felt like I could hear the whole inside of her house, Speaker 6 (3:16) right? Speaker 3 (3:17) And it is a machine that gives me a presence in the other person's space. That's what it feels like. 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 Speaker 2 (3:35) hours. It wasn't unheard of to be like three, four, like you just were, you hung on the phone. Speaker 3 (3:41) 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. It's Speaker 2 (3:52) 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. I think the Bell Telephone, the 500 series, Speaker 3 (4:05) 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. Speaker 2 (4:25) 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? Speaker 2 (4:47) 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. Speaker 2 (5:20) The history of the telephone is really the story of how America became connected. Speaker 3 (5:25) So let's back up. Could you Speaker 2 (5:27) describe, like, before the phone shows up in our lives, what are we dealing with? Speaker 3 (5:32) Well, for normal people, getting a message a great distance, the main thing people could use was Western Union. There were telegraphs and teletypes. The telegraph Speaker 2 (5:42) 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. Speaker 3 (5:56) A telegraph along with the trains compresses the world so quickly that it's one of the reasons we ended up with the International Time. Speaker 2 (6:04) Because Speaker 3 (6:05) people were talking across great distances Speaker 2 (6:07) and it got everyone really cranky. But despite being able to send messages across the ocean, telegraphy had a pretty central flaw. You were very limited in terms Speaker 3 (6:17) 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, Speaker 6 (6:26) It's from London. Oh. Mr. Gower cabled you need cash. Stop. My office instructed to advance you up to $25,000. Stop. Speaker 3 (6:34) Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stop. Because that was smaller word than period for communicating. Really? Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:42) Yeah, stop is the shortest word that means period. Huh, I had no idea. 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. Speaker 3 (7:08) 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, like people finished their days writing, you know, half a dozen letters to people. Yeah, Speaker 2 (7:22) yeah. In fact, the writing was really expansive. Like you get huge letters about people's days. Speaker 3 (7:28) It's crazy when you read about these folks like reading Washington's letters, like every day he finishes spending two hours just. hand calligraphing, 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. Speaker 2 (7:49) But writing the 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 $1 million 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. You know, the creation of the telephone is highly disputed. There's many claims and counterclaims about its invention. You don't say. So what is the simplest story to explain the invention of the telephone? The story we were all taught in schools that Alexander Graham Bell Speaker 3 (8:37) was working on the attempt to make a mechanical way for transmitting sound, figuring out a way to transmit sound through wires. Speaker 2 (8:46) 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. The basic mechanism I believe Bell was Speaker 3 (9:12) working with was a magnetic coil with a membrane and using your voice to vibrate that membrane to create an electrical signal. Then that gets converted into mechanical movement at the other end of the equation and converted back into sound. Speaker 2 (9:27) Yeah, yeah. Speaker 3 (9:28) 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