You never know what you’re going to come across in old books. Stephen Jay Gould once noted that he learned that dogfish hides (with their naturally scratchy scales) were once used as sandpaper because of a tossaway line in an old document.
I’ve been reading Ralph Milne Farley’s The Radio Beasts an old science fiction novel somewhat resembling Burroughs’ Mars stories. Farley wrote at least three of these in the mid-1920s. And I stumbled across this line:
“…The nearest that he can come (to describing the sound) is to say that it resembles the noise obtained by placing the receiver of a telephone-set over the mouthpiece, when one wishes to get even with the girl at Central for being particularly and unusually ornery. It was to prevent this that French phones were invented.”
He’s evidently talking about generating feedback in those old wall phones by taking the earpiece and putting it right up against the wall-mounted microphone. I never thought about how that would, in fact, be the logical outcome. Several thoughts:
1.) What a rotten thing to do to a poor, underpaid and overworked telephone operator.
2.) I always thought of a “French Phone” as one of those models in which the mouthpiece curves all the way toward the mouth, rather than partway there, as in what I think of as a “standard” set. Evidently “french phone” used to be one in which earpiece and mouthpiece were rigidly connected on a single handset.
3.) It’s certainly an effective solution to the problem, a problem I never even considered before.
Question – my cell phone is all a single unit, so I don’t know about this, but if you have a “flip phone” can feedback be a problem? I suppose they’d prevent it coming on if the unit is closed, but what if it’s partway open?
The flip-phones don’t turn the mic on until the phone is open all the way. Even if they did, it almost certainly has a filter to cut the mic in the case of a really loud noise. Of course, microscopic integrated circuits were not a feature of 1930s telephones.
That’s right. AT&T resisted the “French phone” for years. They wanted just one phone available for home use: the candlestick model. Eventually, they gave in to pressure and added their own version of the “French Phone,” which did not have a curved mouthpiece. After a decade or so they got really bold and introduced the Princess phone.
(Remember, up until around 1974, you did not own your phone. It was property of AT&T* and you could only use phones they provided – and charged a monthly rental for.)
The account in the book you quote is a bit tongue in cheek. People would also do the feedback thing to others (there’s a scene of Barbra Streisand doing it in “Funny Girl”), but AT&T didn’t particularly care – at least, not enough to provide a new style of phone.
I just got bac from my parents’ house. They have an antique wall-mounted phone wth the separate earpiece, and I find that the original lead connecting the earpiece to the wall unit is too short to allow you to place the earpiece right up against the mouthpiece, thus preventing feedback. Looks like you can thus achieve the same resul as “French” phones just by the strategem of keeping the wires short.
I lived in France for several years in the 80’s. One thing that struck me about phones there (which might exist in other countries, but which I’ve never seen in the US) is that it was common for telephones to have a second receiver. Not only household phones, but pay phones, too. The extra receiver was usually stored on the back of the phone, but could be picked up and held to the ear by someone who wanted to listen to the conversation that was going on with the regular handset.
However, in reading this thread, maybe it was a way to get around the French phone restriction on putting the receiver over the mouthpiece…
