The Telephone

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.

~ Alexander Graham Bell's notebook entry of 10 March 1876 describes his successful experiment with the telephone. Speaking through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room, Bell utters these famous first words.

first black telephone



During my lifetime I’ve certainly seen many changes with telephones. In my youth I could have never ever imagined one day having a small, portable phone I would carry around in my pocket.

The telephone in the first house my parents lived in sat on a small table at the bottom of the stairs in the living room. One of the dining room chairs sat next to it for comfort when having a conversation. At that time my folks rented out a couple bedrooms and the placement of the phone was for everyone’s convenience. Of course, there was only one phone, a black rotary style. Most folks had that basic style and it was owned by the phone company. One of their renters was a mechanic who worked on cars down at the corner gas station. When he used the phone he would stand up, leaning against the wall with his greasy hand that, to my mother’s annoyance, left black hand prints.



updated rotary phone


When my family moved from Arlington to Oakton in 1955, we still had a similar black phone and a few years down the road we got a somewhat updated model in beige. In that house the phone line was in a corner of the dining room which provided some sense of privacy for those conversing. At my mother’s insistence many years later a sleeker princess style phone was added to the master bedroom. Mom says if the phone happened to ring at night, she was the only one who seemed to hear it and for convenience she wanted one on her bedside table.

Princess phone

For a few years we were on a party line with another person and had to listen for our special ring to determine if the call was for us or the other people. (Ernie recollects the ring in his rural childhood home was two shorts and a long…) Down in the boonies of North Carolina where some of my relatives lived, they always joked that you better be careful what you said during a phone call because with party lines, everyone in the countryside was listening. When Herndon was a tiny town where my grandfather lived for a while, he joked that a black man on his party line used to say, “Who’s dat say who dat when I say who dat?”

Long distance calling was expensive and only done out of necessity. When I was in college from 1969-1973 I actually wrote letters to home and rarely called. When I was a senior and had a car, I would always beat the system to let my mother know I got back on campus safely after being home for the weekend. I would call home collect or person to person to myself, then mom would answer and say I wasn’t home. In an underhanded way she got the message all was well. Sorry to cheat you, Ma Bell!

Sometime during the late 1970s or early 80s the telephone company decided homeowners should own their phones. Electronics stores began selling phones -- quite a new concept! Push button phones also came into vogue and seemed very modern.

The first phone Ernie and I had in our newly wed apartment was indeed a red a red push button model which sat in the living room. We also had an extension in the bedroom, a princess model. At our first townhouse we had a beige wall phone in the kitchen and a second extension upstairs in the master bedroom with a light blue princess phone. New houses in the 1970s began to be pre-wired for phone lines which did away with those old fashioned phone lines that previously lined the baseboards. Both of our successive homes were prewired and we had several extensions in each. What a far cry from my mother’s childhood when people maybe had one phone and those who had two were considered to be the well-to-do folks. As a matter of fact, my grandparents didn’t even have a phone until Mom was in her mid teens, about 1945.

Phones eventually became cordless. Gone are the days of long, twisty cords that we would stretch to their capacity while chatting. The handsets on those first cordless ones were heavy with an antenna. With time and modification they became more light weight and slender. When the internet came into being many folks had two separate phone lines so one could be dedicated to computer dial up. And what did we do without caller ID? What a great invention that has been and now I can’t imagine doing without it. In the old days we never knew who tried to call us when we were away from home but now with answering machines and services, we can have our callers leave messages if they so desire. That can be both a blessing and a curse!

Cell phones have made phone calling possible any time, any place. In fact, public pay phones have just about ceased to exist. The first cell phone Ernie had for work purposes came in a big, bulky zip bag. With time those, too, have become streamlined and smaller so that they can be carried around in purse, pocket or clipped to a belt. Even kids have phones which can create quite a problem in the classroom. And then there’s the bigger issue of people talking on their phones while driving which has, in fact, been outlawed in some locales. Cell phone etiquette is quite a hot topic in society since their use is so pervasive (almost non-stop and annoying...) Technology has advanced so much that our cell phones now have more memory and function than our first home computers! Cell phone functions include (but are not limited to) accessing the internet, sending text messages, snapping photos, recording movies, and downloading music.



pay phone -- a relic!


Last but not least, phone numbers have changed over the years. Mom says their first phone number in Washington, D.C. was DI (meaning District) + 4 numbers. In Oakton our first phone number was DU (for Dunkirk) 5-8932 which was then changed to all numbers 385-8932. My aunt and uncle’s number in Falls Church was JE (for Jefferson) 2-5984. Then 3-digit area codes were added to make the numbers here in Northern Virginia prefaced with 703. Our favorite home phone number of all times was in Fairfax on Ellenwood Drive -- 703-280-2222. Our friend Aubrey Minyard worked for the phone company and helped us acquire that number when we moved into that home in 1977. Fast forward to 2010 and give us a call at 703-938-6364. Hi, you've reached the Myers. We can't answer your call right now, so please leave a message and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a great day! (If you can't reach us at home, give us a call on our cell phones -- Ernie 703-655-1198, Bonnie 703-655-1200.)



evolution of the cell phone