(Roughly) Daily

Einstein’s observation seems obvious in these days of Wikipedia and Google. But as Alex Houston reminds us, it wasn’t always so. She explains how telephone directories– and the people who used them– helped invent “information” as we know it…

For over a century, the physical phone book could be found everywhere, yet seemingly belonged nowhere: a book without a genre, at once mundane and mysterious, raising questions that vexed courts and corporations alike. In print, it’s all but vanished, though it lingers in the names of the websites and search engines that replaced it, the data they were built from, and the way we’ve learned to interact with information.

Southwestern University’s collection of Georgetown, Texas directories—eighteen volumes spanning 1913 to 1959—charts the evolution of the phone book in fine print and shows how it helped shape a vision of something new: networks people could not merely connect to, but could also ask things of.

The phone book is nearly as old as the phone itself. The telephone was born out of a mid-1870s race to improve upon the telegraph, which required trained operators at both ends and dedicated wires between them, and still wasn’t fast enough for an increasingly global market. The directory followed soon after to encourage its adoption and use.

In retrospect, the competition to top the telegraph ended on February 14, 1876, when two men filed competing U.S. patent claims for a method of transmitting speech electrically. Courts would eventually set the course of the American telecommunications industry by naming Alexander Graham Bell the sole inventor of the telephone and his Bell Company the sole holder of rights to electronically transmitted speech. At the time, though, there was real doubt about the business value of the so-called “talking telegraph”—enough that when Bell offered Western Union his patent, the telegraph company declined. The refusal reflected the verdict of the “practical telegraph men,” which Elisha Gray—the loser of the patent battle—put plainly: “In a business light it is of no importance. We can do more . . . with a wire now than with that method. And speed is the only thing we are after.”

The public, too, “had to be educated,” as the Bell Company itself put it, “to the necessity and advantage of the telephone.” Advertising could turn people into customers, but helping phone owners form what Bell called a “telephone habit” required a different tool. A 1941 article in the Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, “Business and the Telephone, 1878: As Illustrated by Early Directories,” links the telephone’s rapid adoption by businessmen to the equally speedy evolution of its instructive paper counterpart. Printed in New Haven in February 1878, the first phone book was not a book at all but a single page, with fifty-odd names listed in no discernible order. Boston and New York issued improved versions over the following months, with added attention to organization…

[Houston further unpacks the history of the telephone directory, explores the role of (mostly female) “operators,” and the emergence of “information”…]

… Given users’ demonstrated penchant for pushing the limits of acceptable use, it’s remarkable that telephone companies would hand them a word so obviously open to interpretation. But they did, and people interpreted it in its broadest sense almost at once. One consequence was a drop in directory use–why look up a number when you can ask someone for it? The result was notices like the one in the 1932 Georgetown directory, which scolded subscribers with the observation that “Nearly half of the numbers asked of information operators are correctly listed in the directory,” and implored them to “save time” by looking first.

But the bigger problem was what else people asked. As a Boston Daily Globe reporter observed in 1907, the telephone user had “learned that the telephone company maintains what is known as an information desk . . . and so when he has yearned to know something which would require the consultation of a dictionary, a directory, or a gazetteer, or in some cases the application of ordinary common sense, he adopts the easier method of stepping to the telephone and calling up, ‘Information’.”…

… Telephone companies began rescinding the offer of “Information” almost as soon as it was introduced. But just as the rollout of the word itself differed by region and exchange, so too did its withdrawal. Bell engineers studying operating methods concluded as early as 1904 that “the giving of information which is contained in the directory should be discouraged.” The Georgetown directories show that conclusion being carried out decades later through a new form of mechanization: the dial.

The 1940 directory featured a two-page spread on the dial—not for Georgetown, which remained manual, but for Jarrell, which converted first. Here, the information operator could be reached not by asking for her, but by dialing 00, though she would still—tantalizingly–“give you every possible assistance.” Georgetown followed in 1954, and “Information” went with the switchboard: subscribers were instructed to “Dial 11” for “Numbers Not in the Directory.”

In 1968, more than a decade after “Information” disappeared from Georgetown’s telephonic vocabulary, Bell officially retired the term and renamed the service “Directory Assistance.” Publicly, it maintained the personal framing—one ad observed that “When she was called ‘Information,’ people kept calling her for the wrong reasons”—while privately acknowledging an intentional shift toward mechanization. Nearly a century after the public had to be educated into the “habit” that built the telecommunications business, AT&T’s chairman, Frederick Kappel, said there was now a need for “public understanding that without mechanization, without automation” companies “couldn’t come close to giving the quantity and quality of service that customers today require.”

While, as one op-ed writer put it, the change to “Directory Assistance” meant the loss of “something warm and reassuring” found in “a friendly voice say[ing], ‘Information,’” a look back at the history of the telephone reminds us that intimacy was never the point. The phone’s invention sprang from a search for speed, and the insistence on its efficient operation had produced the very “human” function now being withdrawn for the same reason. Yet what the directory had taught, across all those years, was a habit in two parts: look it up, and when the book fails you, ask somebody.

In 1991, the Supreme Court held that a white-pages listing was “devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity” and therefore not copyrightable, overturning a century of doctrine that had protected directories as a reward for the labor of assembling them. In the Court’s view, the listings were raw fact, free for anyone to use. The value lay in what could be made of them, which was precisely the business of a fledgling tech industry inventing new ways to connect information and the people who used it. By the mid-1990s, companies were building online city directories using directory data, reducing the print versions to relics.

Two decades earlier, in 1969—a year after “Information” became “Directory Assistance”—a conference at the University of Chicago had taken up the future of information. In a keynote speech, psychologist and computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider called the decisions ahead “truly a crux for our civilization,” leading either “down to a mindless complex of electronically stored and retrieved facts” or “up toward a realization of the potentials of human creativity and human cooperation.” The stakes, he said, came down to a distinction: “It’s a choice between data and knowledge. It’s either mere access to information or interaction with information.”

Helping birth the Information Age: “How the Phone Book Taught America to Ask for Answers,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.

* Albert Einstein

###

As we look it up, we might send imaginative birthday greetings to a woman who helped shape modern telephony: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; she was born on this date in 1914.  Better known by her stage name, Hedy Lamarr, she became a huge movie star at MGM.

By the time American audiences were introduced to Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr in the 1938 film Algiers, she had already lived an eventful life. She got her scandalous start in film in Czechoslovakia (her first role was in the erotic Ecstasy). She was married at 19 in pre-World War II Europe to Fritz Mandl, a paranoid, overly protective arms dealer linked with fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany. After her father’s sudden death and as the war approached, she fled Mandl’s country estate in the middle of the night and escaped to London. Unable to return home to Vienna where her mother lived,  and determined to get into the movies, she booked passage to the States on the same ship as mogul Louis B. Mayer. Flaunting herself, she drew his attention and signed with his MGM Studios before they docked.

Arriving in Hollywood brought her a new name (Lamarr was originally Kiesler), fame, multiple marriages and divorces and a foray into groundbreaking work as a producer, before she eventually became a recluse. But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Lamarr’s life isn’t as well known: during WWII, when she was 27, the movie star invented and patented an ingenious forerunner of current high-tech communications…

Read on for the story of the movie star who invented spread-spectrum radio, the secure signal technology that helped the Allies avoid having their radio communications intercepted by the Axis forces, and that lies at the heart of the cellular phone system that we all use today: “Why Hedy Lamarr Was Hollywood’s Secret Weapon.”

“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid” – Hedy Lamarr

source