What Life Used to Smell Like & How the Telephone Changed Us

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1:29So go to shopbeam.com slash sysk now. That's shopbeam.com slash sysk. Today on Something You Should Know, why do certain people and things give you the creeps? Then, the fascinating history of smells. and do other animals really have a better sense of smell than humans? Actually, that's not necessarily true. We are capable of picking up thousands and thousands of different smells with our noses. It's just that we often don't think about them or indeed we wouldn't think to sort of get down on all fours and track a smell in the way that we might expect a dog to. Also, why paperclips have that peculiar shape and the remarkable story of the telephone and all the ways it has changed the world.

2:18Within the first five years of telephone history, every telephone company in the world had somehow agreed, without anybody announcing it, that women needed to be telephone operators and men were not suitable for the job. All this today on Something You Should Know. I imagine most of us shop for clothes online, at least some of the time. And there's always that little mystery. is what shows up at your door actually going to look like what you think you ordered. We've all had that experience. I know my wife has ordered dresses that look beautiful in the pictures, but when they arrived, not so beautiful.

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4:27And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. You ever get the creeps? You know, something or someone just sort of creeps you out and you're not sure why. Well, we're going to explore that as we begin this episode. I'm Mike Carruthers and this is Something You Should Know. So you meet someone and they seem pleasant enough, but somehow they give you the creeps. Or you walk into an empty building and immediately you feel uneasy, even though there's nothing obviously wrong. Psychologists have actually studied that uncomfortable feeling, and their explanation is fascinating.

5:12It seems that feeling creeped out often comes from uncertainty. Your brain detects something unusual, a person's behavior, an unfamiliar sound, a strange-looking doll. But your brain can't decide whether it's harmless or potentially threatening. So instead of sounding a full alarm, it keeps you on edge and paying attention. That may explain why things that are almost normal can sometimes be creepier than things that are obviously frightening. A doll that looks almost human, someone who stares just a little too long, or a perfectly ordinary hallway that seems strangely deserted can all trigger that uneasy feeling.

5:55The interesting takeaway is that feeling creeped out doesn't necessarily mean something is dangerous. It may simply mean your brain hasn't figured out what to make of it yet. Sometimes the creepiest thing isn't knowing something is wrong, it's not knowing whether anything is wrong at all. And that is something you should know.

6:19The world smells. Some smells are wonderful. Some are disgusting. And most, we hardly notice. But think about how certain places have their own distinct smell. A hospital smells like a hospital. A library smells like a library. And what's interesting is that the world hasn't always smelled the way it smells today. A city street that once smelled of horses and animal waste now smells of car exhaust. So why do we find some smells pleasant and others revolting? How much of that is instinct and how much of that have we learned? It turns out there's a fascinating story here, and to explore it is Will Tullett.

7:02He is a historian and senior lecturer at the University of York, and he has spent years studying the history of smell. He's author of the book Sniff, A History of Smells. Hey, Will, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. Sure. So we smell things all the time. All day long we're smelling things, And most of the time we barely notice unless it's a very strong smell, good or bad. But it just kind of goes on in the background. We're always smelling things. And I'm wondering, why do you study it? Why do you look at the history of it? Why is this important? Well, I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head with your question, right?

7:43So smells are around us every day. They're a central part of our daily experience. And yet we often take them for granted. We often only notice smells either when we lose our sense of smell, as many people did during the COVID-19 pandemic when they had forms of temporary anosmia, for example. Or we only notice smells when they're unusual, right? So if there's a kind of particularly smelly form of pollution nearby or when smells disappear, right? So if our favourite perfume gets discontinued or suddenly the world doesn't smell the way it should do. so my kind of call is for us to to pay attention to this sense that is so central to our everyday experience but also i think to life's pleasures it gives us the pleasure of of wine and food and engagement with nature and flowers and plants it warns us of things so kind of gas escapes and and rot and things that perhaps we we shouldn't eat or drink um and it also binds us together with our communities as well right smells of things we share with other people and the number of talks I've given about the history of smell where I've kind of given people something to smell.

8:48And it's often very difficult to get them to shut up because when you give somebody something to smell they haven't smelled before, they instantly want to talk to the person next to them about it. So smell has this great kind of social quality to it that I think is really important. So when we smell something, what's going on? What is it that smell is? i mean essentially smell is lots of volatile organic compounds um these sort of molecules that are given off by all of the things around us they float around in the air we breathe them in um or sniff them up through our nose and they pass on smelly information to us really when we talk about smell what we're talking about are all of these all these compounds around us in the air and all of the things around us so if you think about something like pine for example pine itself is made up of loads and loads and loads of these different volatile organic compounds and some of those are more significant than others so there is a compound in pine that's called pinene which is kind of one of the central things that give pine its particular smell but pinene can also be found in rosemary it can also be found in camphor so one of the reasons that when we smell something we often feel that it has an echo or a rhyme with another smell right we smell something it reminds us of something else it's because often those two things the thing that you're smelling and the thing it reminds you of often share some of those volatile organic compounds so when you smell something a smell is made up of of hundreds and hundreds sometimes thousands of much smaller smells basically and that's what we're sniffing are there an infinite number of smells or can the human nose like the human eye can only see certain colors are i don't know how we would even know the answer to this but are there only certain things we can smell and are Are there things that have odors that we cannot detect?

10:35So the human nose can detect a very large number of smells, but there are also many odors that the human nose is kind of very bad at detecting or cannot detect as well. And similarly, dogs, right? Dogs can smell lots and lots and lots of different smells, millions of smells. But some of those smells that dogs cannot detect, but humans can. So we live in a world where different animals, including humans, are able to detect some smells that other animals can't and vice versa. And one of the kind of assumptions that we have is that humans are perhaps less able to smell well than other animals around us.

11:12But actually, that's not necessarily true. We are capable of picking up thousands and thousands of different smells with our noses. It's just that we often don't think about them. Or indeed, we wouldn't think to sort of get down on all fours and track a smell in the way that we might expect a dog to. But when I think of it, and I want to understand the distinction here, when I hear that like dogs have a much better sense of smell than humans, I've always assumed that that just meant they could smell things better, not that they could smell different things. Yes, and I think to a certain extent that idea that dogs can smell things better, i.e.

11:49that their noses are more sensitive, for example, they're more capable of picking up a scent and tracking it, for example, is partly due to the fact that we wouldn't take on the same position as dogs. We wouldn't get down on all fours and try and track smell like a dog does because we would think it beneath us. Right. So that's why we enlist the help of tracker dogs or sniffer dogs, police dogs to sniff out things for us. But the reality is, if we actually got on all fours and tried to do that, we would be quite good and quite sensitive to following a smell. So you write about and talk about the history of smell.

12:24And my sense is that the past didn't smell very good. I don't know why I think that, but I just sense that today with modern sanitation and better sewer systems and people very concerned about cleanliness more than in the past, that today things smell better than they used to. Is that a fair statement? there's a sort of curdle of truth to it right in the sense that clearly the past did smell different and some of the smells that were around people in the past would probably be offensive to modern noses but when we think about that question really we're thinking about two different things one is who's doing the smelling right so the past you know if we transplanted you mike to a 16th century european city there would probably be plenty of things in the street that would offend your nose but similarly i think if we took a 16th century nose and transplanted them to kind of modern america they would probably be offended by i think they would be perplexed by you know the smell of a mcdonald's fast food restaurant or the smell of kind of petrol and diesel pollution coming out the back end of a car so one thing is the nose is doing the smelling but the other is there is this idea again that the past was smellier materially speaking there were just simply more smells and that we've deodorized our world, particularly since the 18th century onwards.

13:48So from the Enlightenment onwards, and then you've got sanitarians and sanitary reformers in the 19th century. And also this idea that we've cleansed our bodies more, right? That now we wear deodorants and we wash regularly. But the reality is that people in the past washed very regularly. They used soap. They cleaned their clothes regularly, as regularly as they could. They bathed regularly. so i think the sense that the past smelled worse i think is probably um a little bit of a self congratulatory myth the reality is that what's really happened is we've moved smells around and intensified them in particular locations so my classic example of this is pigs right so like in cities all the way into the early 20th century in fact you would often find families that might have a pig.

14:36It kept in a stye near their home and pigs were useful. You could get bacon and pork products from them, but you could use their hair for bristles, for brushes. You could melt down their trotters and use them for glue and things like that. So people liked having a pig around. But sanitarians in the 19th century and early 20th century did not like it. They thought that pigs were smelly and they should be ejected out of cities. And by and large, that did happen so that by the second half of the 20th century, there are no longer any pigs in cities, but there are plenty of pigs in these intensive livestock farms you know hundreds or thousands of pigs in quite cramped conditions and if you happen to be unlucky enough to have one of these big hog farms built near where you live the stench is like nothing you would have ever experienced in kind of the 17th or 18th or 19th centuries right it's like different in quality it's different in degree and so it's not necessarily that our world has become less smelly in total but rather that we've moved some smells to some locations and of course the people that are forced to experience those smells who are forced to live next to hog farms for example are often the people without the power or money to either move or to stop the hog farms being built in the first place so this is also kind of a story about who gets exposed to smells in the present which is often linked to questions of inequality as well.

15:54So one pig may not be so bad, but you put a couple thousand pigs together and now you've got a smell problem. Precisely, precisely. And even it's funny because when you read people writing about this in the 80s or 90s, you know, you have these farmers in like in the United States and they'll say things like, God, you know, we've been able to send somebody to the moon, but we still can't deal with the smell from a pig farm. You know, like we modern society should be able to deal with this. But unfortunately, the problem had just become, you know, of such a different degree, the sheer amount of porcine waste, you know, that was kind of located in lagoons, outside these farms and stuff was just so great that it became really difficult to actually deal with it in a way that would get rid of the smell.

16:42So we're still like the idea that we've become less smelly, this idea that we've become more deodorized, is actually a It's a bit like a mirage, right, that kind of goes into the distance. And all we end up doing is just moving the smells around and they reappear eventually. I want to talk about how we adapt to smells, how a very strong smell, either pleasant or unpleasant, we get used to it fairly quickly. And we'll do that when we come back after this. This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of.

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20:02we're talking about smells and how the world smells and how the world smells have changed my guest is will tullet author of the book sniff a history of smells and so will one of the things about smell and my example would and i've used this before is you know when i was a kid i used to go to a farm a dairy farm in new hampshire and they had lots of cows and it smelled like you would think it would smell because there were so many cows but it's amazing how quickly you get used to it and you don't really smell it anymore i mean you smell it but somehow you don't smell it absolutely and the nose has this amazing kind of capacity to either be kind of like exhausted and fatigued or to become habituated to smells.

20:52I mean, the example that some listeners may be familiar with as well is kind of when you go on holiday, you go away for several weeks, you come back and you realise that your house maybe has a sort of distinctive smell that you didn't quite realise was there before, right? And it's because you've been unexposed to that smell for long enough that you've become sensitised to it again. So that question of kind of which smells we become habituated to and which smells we become more sensitized to also kind of has a role in thinking about historical change as well so like in the 19th century in london people might be familiar with the great stink in the 1850s when uh one summer the thames stink so so badly that mps have to come up with a plan for a whole new sewage system um and that's partly because people had to a certain extent become used to the smell of the Thames and how smelly it was because of all of the waste from new flushing toilets and from the industries that lined the banks of the river.

21:51But during that summer, the smell became a completely different thing. It was so bad. It was so intense. It was so foul that it became unlike anything that they'd experienced or become used to before. So that kind of interaction between habituation and sensitization is often the one of the things that kind of causes changes in attitudes to smell across time as well i would imagine my and knowing very little about this so i'm glad you're here to set the record straight that one of the the big changes was when transportation shifted from animal drawn vehicles to engine powered vehicles because the smell of animals you when you have lots of horses in a city street, the smell of the animals and the waste they leave behind has to be very overpowering.

22:43And when you eliminate that, doesn't that create a much less stinky environment? Oh, I mean, it's a really interesting point because when people are first advising the motor car, right, and people are arguing for more people taking up automobiles in the early 20th century, one of the arguments that they're making is that motor cars will be less smelly than horses right because what had happened over the course of the 19th century is that the sheer number of horses required in cities for transporting people about in cabs and buses or for you know transporting carts around laden with goods was of such a high degree just because of the amount of business and the amount of people that they were starting to experience a bit of crisis when it came to horse dung um and so the motor car was kind of advocated for as a way of getting rid of some of those smells but of course the problem is that once the horses disappeared um and cars became more popular particularly once you got into sort of the 1950s and 1960s when more and more people are buying second-hand cars as well um what's happening is that the cars themselves are becoming a smell problem you know the kind of exhaust smells from diesel and petrol cars which for those who are kind of only aware of how they smell now you know many of these cars smelled a lot stronger the exhausts in the 50s and 60s because the filters were not the same um and that becomes a real problem in many cities i mean in amsterdam there are huge protests in in the netherlands in the 1960s and 70s um over both the danger from cars but also the smell of the pollution from cars in the city center so it's a bit like i always like to say it's a bit like pubs in britain where you know we had a smoking ban that was introduced in in uh in the early 2000s and one of the things that that smoking ban did was it got rid of the smell of smoke but what of course that meant is that the smoke was no longer blanketing out all of these other smells like stale urine and stale beer and people's body odor and they just meant that you could smell those instead so it tends to be that we get rid of the horse smell and instead we get the smell of cars so it's a kind of it's a no-win situation i mean electric cars maybe they won't smell so bad we'll wait and see so talk about the good smells i mean do people generally agree on i mean i know there are differences some people like the smell of this or not like the smell of that but generally pleasant smells are pleasant smells yeah i mean i think there's a degree to which that is true i think there are you know lots of people like the smell of flowers and kind of floral smells in general for example um but i think there's also a degree to which attitudes to what has smelled good have changed over time right like so for example in the 16th and 17th century civet which is a kind of excrement that's taken from the civic cat it's it's scraped from its perineal gland and used in perfume if you smell civet like raw civet it smells very very fecal but in the 16th and 17th century it was described as smelling sweet which i'm not sure is a description that many people would use on first encountering it today so like our kind of our language and our descriptions for smells have changed and i think our appreciations of which smells are pleasant and which smells are perhaps less pleasant has changed over time and that's partly also to do with things like shifts in perfume fashions for example so you know at the end of the 90s we had the beginnings of like gourmand perfumes and there was a real fashion for for perfumes that smelled like like vanilla and other edible things um and that was quite new in that period so i think our perception of what the nicest smells are has has changed over time but there's probably to some degree some underlying agreement of course you always get the people who are like really really love really smelly smells right i mean people who love like the smell of a particularly pungent cheese right or to give one final example wintergreen which is a compound that's in well in the u.s um it's in the 1960s and 70s wintergreen was held to be one of the most loved smells and in britain in the same period surveys showed it was one of the most hated smells and the reason for that was that in the u.s wintergreen is a compound that's in root beer and it's in sweets and candies whereas in britain it's a compound that was often found in ointments and stuff for skin and for injuries so people had just developed these completely different associations with the same smell that had then lately led them to judge it as either kind of pleasant or negative so i think there is a degree of cultural changeability sometimes even with smells that we might think within our own culture are quite pleasant so something that that the The answer may seem obvious, and you'll tell me if it's obvious, but I've always been interested in the fact that you can go into certain places and they have a smell.

27:45Libraries have a smell. Churches often have a smell. Doctors' offices, hospitals have a smell. Is it just because of the stuff that's in there, all libraries have books and books smell, or is there something else going on? oh i think it's absolutely the smell of these different spaces and i think libraries and churches and hospitals are all really good examples you know they all have distinctive smells just simply because of the different materials that people use within them right so as you say libraries are full of books and so the smell of libraries is partly the smell of of aging paper it's partly the smell of the kind of glue and the bindings that are used in books as well um it's also sadly in kind of some libraries also just the smell of like the carpets off gassing for example and the kind of smells of the furnishings and things as well um and likewise with hospitals right i mean when we think about hospitals what we're often smelling is that is the smell of various disinfectants and cleaning products and things that are used and that what that smell is doing is partly signifying to us that this is a space that is being kept clean that is being kind of kept in a state that is is fit for people to practice medicine in and for people to be cared for in so i think it's definitely just bound up with the materials that that are used within them and churches again are an example where partly the smell is also the smell particularly in catholic churches like kind of older european uh and american catholic churches you will find that part of the smell is just the kind of you know a century or more of incense being used in masses and the way in which that smell has kind of gradually seeped into the stonework and into the furnishings over time.

29:23And so what you're getting is in some ways the lingering scent of sometimes a century or more of worship. Well, this has been a whole different way of looking at our sense of smell, how the way the world smells has changed over time and how we adapt to smells and what smells we find pleasant and unpleasant. I've been talking with Will Tullett. He is a historian and senior lecturer at the University of York, and he's author of a book called Sniff, A History of Smells. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Will, this was fun. Great. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much, Mike. It's been a great conversation.

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31:58It's hard to imagine life without the telephone. But think about how much our relationship with it has changed. I mean, there was a time when the phone was attached to the kitchen wall, and when it rang, everybody wanted to know who was calling. Today, your phone goes everywhere with you, and when it rings, there's a good chance you won't even answer it, because it's probably spam. We used to pay by the minute to talk on the phone, and now calls are practically free, and people would rather text anyway. In just a few generations, the telephone has gone from an amazing invention that connected people in ways never before possible to something we can barely put down.

32:41And the story of how that happened is filled with fascinating twists, unexpected consequences, and some remarkable characters. Here to tell the story is James Glick. He's an acclaimed science and technology writer, a former reporter and editor for the New York Times, and author of several books, including The Telephone, A New History. Hi, James. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. I'm happy to be here. So for reasons I can't really explain, but I have long been a fan of The Telephone. I have enjoyed reading about and seeing the innovations and the evolution of it over time. and it's such an important part of people's lives.

33:25The telephone is fundamental to everybody's recollection of their entire life from beginning to end. And I should say, right at the outset, when we talk about the telephone, we're talking about very different things depending on how old you are. I don't know how old you are, but I'm pretty sure that your sense of the telephone is like mine. And that is, it's an object that started as a big, clunky, plastic thing. I mean, in my case, my parents had it on their side table in their bedroom. Or it might have been hanging in the kitchen. So, most of us have heard that the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.

34:09And, you know, there's kind of a folklore story to how it happened and all that. Is that essentially true? No. No. I mean, yes and no. It is essentially true in that Alexander Graham Bell patented the thing that later became the foundation of a global empire, AT &T, the Bell system named after not the thing that rang, but named after him. But it's not true in that the telephone had a lot of inventors. I tell the story of a German named Philip Reese who invented a telephone long before Alexander Graham, well, long before, 10 or 15 years before. And nobody's ever heard of him. And there was another guy, Elisha Gray, who was sort of in competition with Bell, and they were both inventing things.

35:01And Bell's claim to the telephone, it turns out, rests on a really sleazy episode in patent history where his lawyers literally bribed a patent clerk to get his patent approved and Elisha Gray's patent disapproved. Well, the rest is history, but it took a long time. After that, there were 20 years of patent wars in the courts, which the Bell system won. But by then, Alexander Graham Bell himself was long out of it. He didn't stay with the company even after it got started. So when you say it was a sleazy, was he a sleazy guy or was it just? Well, no, no. I don't want to overstate the case. He was, I want to say contradictory things about him because, and I don't want to minimize his contribution because he was a visionary.

35:58The thing is, he didn't really invent the object. He didn't know anything about electricity. He was an expert in sound and speech. That was what he loved. He taught deaf children how to speak. That was his main profession. And kind of as a sideline, he started tinkering with electrical stuff, but he didn't really have a good foundation in the science and was just stumbling along, finding his way. What I want to say his vision was, was not the invention of the object, but an understanding of how it was going to transform the world and how it would work, which was so not obvious. I mean, it's hard for us now to subtract everything we know about what the telephone is and what it does from what they knew at the time.

36:54But imagine, you know, Bell and or others have invented this object and you attach it to another thing like it via a wire. And the wire at first stretches from one room to the next room. And then one of you talks into it and the other one listens. And that is a telephone. And that's what Alexander Bell had and his assistant Watson. And, you know, the story everybody knows is that he said, Watson, come here. I want you. And Watson could hear him from the other room and came running. And so that's a telephone. But then what? Then what do you do? What's it good for? That was the fundamental question.

37:36It's been 100 years. Can you, and we only have 20 minutes, so can you just run through the 100 years and hit some highlights of the evolution of the telephone? The story of the telephone isn't just the story of a technology, an object that everybody at one time had in their houses and that everybody now has in their pockets. I mean, you know, I guess we should acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that 99 % of the people listening to us right now have a phone in their pocket. And some percentage of them actually are listening to us on this object. I'm getting away from your question. Because what I want to say is that what's interesting about the story of the telephone isn't just that.

38:26It's also how it transformed the way we lived. So, it started spreading 150 years ago. Little networks arose in individual towns and cities. And then these networks expanded and got linked together until there was a national system and an international system and a global network that's the one we know today. But meanwhile, the telephone did more than any other invention to get women into the workforce. The essential reason is that people who created telephone companies discovered right at the beginning that they needed to invent a new profession that didn't exist in the world, which was a person who would connect a telephone caller to the person they wanted to speak to.

39:15And this person was the operator. And the person sat in the little room and had a kind of switchboard with plugs and jacks and would connect callers and receivers. And at first, the people who started phone companies hired teenage boys to do this job because it was so boring and trivial. And very quickly, meaning within a year or two, they discovered that boys couldn't do the job because boys were essentially, pardon the expression, goofballs. And so they switched over to girls. And I know this is hard to believe, but it's really true. Within the first five years of telephone history, every telephone company in the world had somehow agreed, without anybody announcing it, that women needed to be telephone operators and men were not suitable for the job.

40:12And so, eventually, there were a million women working as telephone operators who had previously not been allowed to work in offices before. Wow. And is it true that the original or the accepted term for answering the phone used to be ahoy? It's true that Alexander Graham Bell and Tom Watson, his assistant, at first started saying ahoy to each other. And other people did that too. And I find it sort of fun to think about how, you know, those early days of the phone. Again, we have such an embedded mental image of how the phone works. We understand that the phone rings and you pick it up. But it didn't ring at first.

40:59It was just two objects connected. And so one of them would pick it up and they would listen to dead air. And another person at the other end of the wire would pick it up and listen to dead air. And so Alex would say to Tom, ahoy, ahoy. And, of course, it's essentially universal today in many different languages to say hello. But hello was hardly a word that was even in the dictionary. I mean, now it's standard. It's just so many of these things seem to arise spontaneously. And afterwards, you think, well, it had to be that way. Of course, you would say hello. But people didn't even say hello to each other on the street the way they do now.

41:43And again, that's because of the telephone. I think people forget or younger people never knew that the telephone, the old way of doing the telephone could get really expensive. If you were making anything other than a very local call, you were charged by the minute. The first three minutes were this much money, and then there was a charge for every minute after that. And if you were one of those people, and there were lots of us who wanted to talk for a long time on the phone, it got really expensive. And I remember, you know, my father coming in and saying with the phone bill, because you would get a bill in the mail where all the calls were itemized by number and how long and how much.

42:29And he came in and said, what the hell is this? And if you were a kid that went away to college, your experience of the telephone changed so much over the years. Right now, I think kids in college are expected, if not to talk to their families, to text with their families more or less every day. When I was in college, at first I didn't even have a phone in my dorm room. There was a sort of shared telephone out in the hallway. And as you say, it was expensive. And so my parents couldn't possibly expect to hear from me every day, which was sort of a different world. Well, one of the reasons it was so expensive was that it essentially was a monopoly or something close to that.

43:16And then that all changed. And I don't think I remember exactly how that all changed. It was not just a monopoly. It was the world's biggest, most powerful, richest monopoly. The Bell system, AT &T, the collection of all the local Bell telephone companies, and the long-distance company, and the scientific research lab, this enterprise was more powerful than many governments. It started to break up in the early 1980s. All along, it had become so powerful that some people hated them. But they kept prices, well, by our standards, they weren't low. It was very expensive, as you were saying, to make long-distance calls, especially.

44:03And you had to worry about how much telephone calls cost. But a lot of people didn't mind because the telephones worked. and everybody's telephone was essentially exactly the same. You didn't have any choice of what kind of model to get. Eventually, they came in different colors and then eventually there was a princess phone and you could get a model that was on your wall as opposed to your bedside. But really, all the telephones looked alike and it was just ordinary. But technology started to advance and the possibilities arose of having wireless telephones, which everybody had always dreamed of.

44:43And rivals to the main phone company started to push their way into the business and try to offer long-distance calls for cheaper than AT &T could, which they could do because of new technologies of microwave signals sending wireless calls from one city to another. So eventually the government started to investigate and it broke up finally with gigantic political controversy and then court case, the giant bell monopoly. And competition arose and everything broke wide open. And before we had the smartphones that everybody has now, there was the era of competition for mobile phones, which you remember got smaller and smaller.

45:31They turned into flip phones. And then at the same time, and this is essentially the most important part of the modern story, the internet arose. And that was also at first a telephone technology because people used telephone wires to connect the internet from place to place before they used wireless and before they used cable TV wires. And at first the internet was like a footnote to the telephone story and now it's the other way around. And the telephone is essentially a footnote to the Internet story. And it is so interesting how it has evolved into this thing that people carry around with them that, as you pointed out, it's called a phone.

46:14But few people use it or people use it not as much as a phone, but for a million other things, but not for making phone calls. And there is this kind of anti-phone call thing where people would rather text and, you know, who is it? The comedian that does that whole thing about how it used to be when the phone rang, it was, oh, this is exciting. You know, is that for me? And now when the phone rings, you think, oh, it's some spam, you know, telemarketing thing and nobody wants to answer it. And our attitudes towards the whole technology have really changed. Yeah, that's another really key part of the story.

46:56You know, first, it would just ring in an empty house. And if nobody answered the phone, you would call back later. You would call back later. I mean, there was no reason to think that anybody would know you had called. And if they did answer the phone, of course, they had no idea who was calling. It was just a ring. I remember the time when telephones started to display the number of the caller and how controversial that was. There were people who thought that was wrong, that that shouldn't be allowed, that, you know, I want my call to be secret. And there were other people who felt just as adamantly that if you place a phone call, the person at the other end has the right to know who you are before they answer.

47:35All these habits changed. I mean, I remember the feeling that when the telephone was ringing, you had to answer it, which I think has vanished. You know, the obligation to answer a phone, at least for me, that's gone. If I don't want to answer it, I'm not going to answer it. Well, as important as the invention of the telephone has been, it does seem to be fading. I mean, it seems very nostalgic. But the telephones of today, the smartphones of today seem to bear very little resemblance to the telephones of yesteryear. And it makes you wonder what the future of the telephone is. Well, this is where the story becomes two separate stories.

48:15There's one piece of our history that we can see rapidly vanishing behind us that we're forgetting. You know, we're forgetting about telephone booths. They're obsolete. Superman has no place to change his costume anymore. We're forgetting about the giant telephone books that used to be delivered once a year on your doorstep with a big thump. I mean, telephone books, we don't have them anymore. And yet when we had them, they were absolutely essential. They were the ruling guide to people and companies. We're forgetting about party lines. We're forgetting about collect calls. But on the other hand, we have this new thing that has brought us a kind of connectivity that our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of.

49:02And to have the power to be connected to another person, the beginning of the story was by voice. Now it's also by text and by video. But just to have that power is something we shouldn't take for granted. And we may have mixed feelings about it. It may make us feel sometimes we wish we could just shut it all off and be alone. But it prevents the kind of social isolation, the kind of loneliness that used to be everybody's lot. Since you've really studied the history of this technology, is there something about the telephone that we haven't talked about that you think is really interesting or important or anything like that?

49:46You know, one episode in the history of the telephone that I just loved, and in a way it was my starting point, is what happened when there was a fire in a New York City switching station in 1975 that cut off telephone service for hundreds of thousands of people in a wide geographic area of Greenwich Village in the Lower East Side for a month. Now, you would think, well, you know, we have blackouts. It's not that big a deal. But it was absolutely extraordinary how it changed. It made people, first of all, aware of what they were missing. People said they found themselves reaching for the telephone, even though they knew that it wasn't going to work, and picking it up just to listen to the deadline.

50:33And they also found themselves leaving the house and knocking on their friends' doors because that was the only way to get to their friends. When you think about it, what's the last time a friend of yours has just shown up at your doorstep and rang the bell or knocked on the door unannounced? For me, it's been years. That's not polite anymore. But that's how everybody lived. So this telephone fire in 1975 threw everybody willy-nilly back to a kind of existence that they had never experienced before. That was their grandparents' existence before the telephone had arrived. You said something at the very beginning of our conversation that I hadn't really thought about before.

51:19But depending on how old you are, your view of and experience with the telephone is going to be very different than somebody who's younger or older than you because of how the technology has evolved over a very short period of time. But nevertheless, regardless of your view, for pretty much everybody, the telephone has been a very big part of our lives. I've been speaking with James Glick. He's a science and technology writer, former reporter for the New York Times, and author of the book, The Telephone, A New History. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Great, James. This was fun. Thank you.

51:59Thank you, Mike. It was so much fun talking to you.

52:04Take a look at an ordinary paper clip. It's just a piece of wire bent into a couple of loops. But why that particular shape? Well, it turns out getting the design right was surprisingly difficult. During the 1800s, inventors experimented with all kinds of ways to hold paper together. Some clips damaged the paper, others didn't grip it tightly enough, and some were too complicated or expensive to make. Then, in the 1890s, a design called the gem appeared. It's two overlapping loops that create just enough tension to hold the paper securely without punching holes in them. It was inexpensive, easy to use, and could be manufactured by the millions.

52:49And here's the interesting part. The familiar design was never actually patented. Although a Norwegian inventor named Johan Waller is often credited with inventing the paperclip, the design was quite different from the one we use today. More than 130 years later, and despite countless attempts to improve it, the same basic shape is still the standard. Sometimes a simple invention works so well that nobody can figure out a way to do it better. And that is Something You Should Know. Our producers are Jennifer Brennan and Jeff Havison. The executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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