Originally published in Life Magazine on May 14, 1956, this Bell Telephone System advertisement utilizes the ideas of gender essentialism and separate spheres to reinforce common sexist ideals of the 1950s while selling its product.
In the foreground, Bell depicts an overwhelmed father who lacks the nurturing abilities required of a traditional housewife. The essentialist notion that women are naturally better homemakers than men justifies the existence of separate spheres. The idea of separate spheres defines a woman’s domain as the domestic space, while men belong in the corporate world.
Bell’s advertisement highlights this ideal, stating in the subtext that a woman’s office is her kitchen, while her husband works “in town.” The only instance of gender inequality Bell addresses is the absence of a phone in women’s defined workplace. Apparently, the answer to women’s lib is as simple as buying a new phone.
The concept of a cellphone existed long before you held one in your hand.
In 1963, a newspaper article from the Mansfield News-Journal accurately predicting people would be able to carry a phone in their pocket in the future. The article was published on April 18, 1963. It features a picture of a woman holding something that resembles a modern flip-phone.
The article reads:
“Some day, Mainfielders will carry their telephones in their pockets. Don’t expect it to be available tomorrow, though. Frederick Huntsman, telephone company commercial manager, says, “This telephone is far in the future – commercially.” Right now, it’s a laboratory development and it’s workable, allowing the carrier to make and answer calls wherever he may be.”
The modern mobile phone wouldn’t hit the commercial market until the 1980s, but the idea of a pocket phone had been percolating for decades. In 1953, for example, the president of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. predicted that someday in the future the phone will be “carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today.” In 1926, inventor Nikola Tesla predicted that in the future people across the world would be able to communicate instantly with one another with devices that fit inside a vest pocket.
Télévision: Oeil de Demain (“Television: Eye of Tomorrow”) predicted that some day in the future everyone would be walking around looking at personal handheld screens.
J.K. Raymond-Millet’s 1947 film may have been far ahead of its time, it seemingly predicted how we would use smartphones in the 21st century. It was not intended to be a feature length film, but rather one used for educational purposes.
In addition to showing people using miniature-television devices in public places, the full clip also showcases professional meetings conducted via picture-phones, cars equipped with television screens, and shops promoting their goods on television.
Early 1900s comic predicts the mobile phone. Calls the prospect a “modern horror.” This cartoon by W.K.Hasleden was published in the Daily Mirror in 1919 with the following title: ‘The Pocket Telephone: When will it ring!’
The accompanying text reads: “The latest modern horror in the way of inventions is supposed to be the pocket telephone. We can imagine the moments this instrument will choose for action!”
Passengers watching coin-operated TV’s in the LA Greyhound terminal in 1969. Also, take note of those space age chairs, ashtrays, phone booths, and terrazzo floors! And look how everyone is dressed. Suits and hats!
At the time, there were roughly 160 Tel-a-Chairs in operation in Southern California, including 49 at the Greyhound Bus Terminal at 6th and Los Angeles that were grossing $4,000 every month.
Ten minutes of television time cost 10 cents while a half-hour cost 25 cents.
The Tel-a-Chair was invented by John R. Rice. Each chair featured a 9-inch set connected to an apparently very comfortable chair.
By a sit-in test, the Tel-a-Chairs are more comfortable than anything else in the terminal, unless you happen to fall asleep in one of them. Greyhound spends $5,000 to $6,000 a month for security in its downtown terminal, and besides keeping drunks and rabble-rousers out, one of the guard’s main functions it to remove sleepers from the Tel-a-Chairs.
One Tel-a-Chair franchiser stated that the company was “anticipating an additional 800 chairs within the next 90 days. These hopefully will be installed in hospitals, Greyhound and Continental Trailways terminals and at International Airports”. The company was hoping to create an “instant rating system for TV network advertisers” using the Tel-a-Chair, but the idea never took off as expected.
In an April 1953 newspaper article in the Tacoma News Tribune, Mark Sullivan, who was the president of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, made an uncannily accurate prediction about the future of the telephone. He said:
“Just what form the future telephone will take is, of course, pure speculation. Here is my prophecy:
“In its final development, the telephone will be carried about by the individual, perhaps as we carry a watch today. It probably will require no dial or equivalent, and I think the users will be able to see each other, if they want, as they talk.
“Who knows but what it may actually translate from one language to another?”
The above-displayed report was written by the Associated Press and was published in a variety of papers in 1953.
While we have not been able to locate this exact clipping in the Tacoma News Tribune, folks from Snope have found this story published in news outlets such as The Spokane Chronicle, The News Journal, The Akron Beacon Journal, and The Boston Globe:
The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) – Apr 10, 1953
The Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio) – April 12, 1953
The News Journal (Wilmington, Delaware) – April 10, 1953
The Spokane Chronicle (Spokane, Washington) – Apr 10, 1953
The 1953 prediction has proved to be largely accurate. Modern phones are certainly “carried about by the individual.” Phones can also be integrated with smartwatches, perform video calls, and provide near-instantaneous translations.
While this is a genuine newspaper clipping from 1953 containing a largely accurate prediction about modern phones, we’d like to provide a little additional context to this rumor. For starters, the person making these claims was the president of a phone company and was likely privy to latest developments in the field. For instance, while it wouldn’t be until the 1960s for the first cordless phone to be invented, and the 1980s for true mobile phones to hit the market, the foundations for these products were being laid prior to 1953.
In 1946, AT&T offered the first commercial mobile telephone service to subscribers in St. Louis. Users had to have about 80 pounds of equipment installed in their cars, and the service could only handle a handful of calls at a time, but it did mark the beginning of the mobile-phone era. Video calls, too, can be traced back to at least the 1930s. While it would take decades for this technology to be refined into a commercial product, the concept of video calling wasn’t entirely far-fetched in 1953. Lastly, it should be noted that Sullivan wasn’t the first to envision a smartwatch. While this product wasn’t in development in the 1950s (as far as we can tell), smartwatches had popped up a few times in fictional content. Detective Dick Tracy’s two-way watch radio made its debut in 1946:
Sullivan would serve at the helm of Pacific Telephone until 1945. He later led another firm, Potomac Telephone Companies. As for Pacific Telephone, it would go on to be known as Pacific Bell (aka PacBell) and was part of a set of companies acquired by AT&T.
An amateur radio set installed in a car by Alfred H. Grebe, a radio manufacturer of New York in 1919, who is shown speaking into the microphone.
The bulky vacuum tube set is visible in the back seat. It used medium wave frequencies around 2 MHz, requiring the cumbersome “inverted L” wire antenna mounted on the bumpers, which could be quickly put up and taken down and stowed under the car’s chassis.
The car’s body was used as a counterpoise. The radio set was powered by a separate storage battery, with a small dynamotor to generate high voltage for the tubes anode supply.
Grebe noted that he could hear other cars approaching on the road, as the receiver would pick up the radio noise from their unshielded spark plugs.
Broadcasting began in 1920, about the time vacuum tube radio receivers became available, sparking a “radio craze” during the early Roaring 20s. Many car owners installed home radio sets in their cars.as a novelty. Car radios weren't manufactured until 1930, and did not come standard in vehicles until a number of years later.
Alfred H. Grebe (1895 – October 24, 1935) was a pioneer in the radio broadcasting field. He was born in Richmond Hill in the borough of Queens, in New York City. At the age of 9 he was given a radio set by his father, and soon came to be such an expert that his science teacher at Public School 88 in Jamaica said Alfred knew more than he did. From public school, he went to a training school in Jamaica, and a commercial radio school in Manhattan, New York City, where he conducted his own experiments. By age 15, he became a licensed commercial operator, and went to work as a ship's radio operator. After three years onboard (during which time he traveled as far as India) he returned to Long Island, where the first commercial station on the island was being built at Sayville. He got a job as an operator there. Later, because there was currently a radio craze, some friends had him make receivers for them. After making a few sets, he decided to go into commercial production.
On April 18, 1930, at 8:45 p.m., people all over Britain settled in to catch the BBC News evening bulletin. But when they flipped on their radios, they heard a soothing announcement instead: “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news.” For the rest of the 15-minute time slot, the station played only piano music.
According to Atlas Obscura, the BBC decided what was worth reporting on, and according to them, it was better to stay silent than to fail to clear this bar. Radio announcers got their stories from Reuters, the Press Association, the Central News, and the Exchange Telegraph Company, “whose ‘tape’ machines disgorge their varied treasure into the News Room all day,” as the outlet’s 1931 Review of the Year explains. They’d then pick and choose from this disgorgement. As the 1930 Review put it, “A very definite standard of quality was aimed at, and … when there was not sufficient news judged worthy of being broadcast, no attempt was made to fill the gap.”
BBC News Director Helen Bowden says it could never happen today: “You’ve got to remember that it was an age of deference... there was an accepted mode of that the public should hear about and on that day that accepted mode and convention meant that there was nothing suitable for the public to hear.”
This was how most people got their news in 1930 – listening to wireless radio; TV broadcasts started six years later. (Photo: BBC)
This ad ran on Thursday, November 17, 1910 from St. Louis Post-Dispatch – years before anyone had heard of the Spanish flu, and didn’t reference any quarantine in particular. It only takes a little perusing of early-20th-century newspapers to realize that people were highly conscious of diphtheria, smallpox, spinal meningitis, and other highly contagious menaces. Localities often enforced quarantines; AT&T (and its much smaller competitors) saw a business opportunity.
“People who are in quarantine are not isolated if they have a Bell Telephone,” the ad helpfully pointed out. “The Bell Service brings cheer and encouragement to the sick, and is of value in countless other ways. Friends, whether close at hand or far away, can be easily reached, because Bell Service is universal service.”
There was a time when shoulderpads were big, ties were skinny, and it was $2 for the first minute, $1.95 for the following.
1-900 numbers weren't just for sex lines and psychics (thought they were probably mostly used for that). They were a way of transmitting information for money in a pre-Internet world for things like jokes, music, games, and fan club information.
Most of us probably still associate those 1-900 numbers with the TV commercials we’d see airing late at night on the cable networks like USA, back in the 1980s and ’90s. The typically low-budget but usually legit TV commercials — often advertising adult phone-sex hotlines — were sometimes so hilariously awful that they were easy targets for parodying, and soon faked-up 1-900 commercials began to show up on late night TV shows, like “Night Flight,” sometimes making it difficult to tell if the commercial was for a legit 1-900 number, or not. Sometimes.
We thought it would be fun to look at some of the best 1-900 TV commercials from the 1980s and 199os that we could find — unfortunately we have to select them from the ones that have been compiled by VHS tapers and uploaded to Youtube accounts, but trust us, there were hundreds of these ads, and hopefully we’ve found some of the better ones that you can find online.
1-900 numbers were actually created in the early 1970s, and were originally part of the regional phone company services that were offered that would provide information that you would be required to pay for, but one early example that ran nationally and was not connected to any type of business or service (or was, depending how cynical you are about politics), was the 1-900 number set up in 1980, which allowed viewers at home, watching a presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan on the NBC network (partnering with AT&T, some sources say it was ABC, and perhaps it was available to all three of major networks?).
Viewers called in and they were given two additional phone numbers — they were told to dial one number if they thought Carter was winning the debate, and another if they thought Reagan was winning. Of course, this was later modified after touchtone phone pads replaced rotary phones, where you could push either “1” or “2,” but at the time, you actually had to hang up, and call a separate number to voice your opinion about your candidate’s performance — and believe it or not, voters actually did this!
Typically, though, businesses would offer a 1-900 number as an additional part of their service, but then companies started realizing that they could come up with 1-900 for just about anything, and as long as they were people sitting at home who were willing to pay for it, realizing they would split any of the profits with the phone companies who did the billing and provided the numbers.
Usually the voiceover announcer in the TV commercial would point out the call would cost a little bit more — sometimes $2.99 for the first minute and 99 cents for each additional minute, or a flat rate in the neighborhood of $3 or $4-per minute, for example — and if the ad was one that was targeted to or at least might be seen by juveniles under the age of eighteen, they were always told to get their parents’ permission before dialing the number. Most of the time, kids did not do this.
The 1-900 prefix on premium phone numbers meant that phone companies treated them the same way they treated toll-free 1-800 numbers, regardless of the area code they were calling from; the caller would be simply charged a higher-than-normal per-minute long distance-type rate for the 1-900 numbers, and those rates would apply for however long he or she spent on the call, chatting with the hot chick they’d seen in hot tubs in the commercials was toweling off, or so we’ve been told (the 900 numbers followed by 976 were always the most scandalous ones).
Bell Telephone's Picturephone went on display at the 1964 World's Fair, and it went into actual commercial use on over 50 years ago.
From a booth set up in Grand Central Terminal, a person could talk to a friend in Chicago or Washington while also seeing them on a small video screen. The friend would also have to go to a special booth in those cities to take the call. The price for the novelty of a three-minute call was $16. That would be equivalent to $121 in today's money.
Today, you can simply decide that you want to look at someone while talking to them on a phone — and do it for hours without needing to traipse to a special room downtown. The price: $0 using a service like FaceTime or Skype...
Take a look at these cool pics to see what picturephones looked like from the 1960s.
In the USA, at the start of the 1960s, telephones were generally the desk model with a rotary dial. Invariably in shiny black or possibly red, or “industrial” dark green.
Around 1962 or 1963, phone designers started thinking about the aesthetics of the apparatus itself. It was small enough to fit unobtrusively on a bed nightstand. It also came in the then-chic plastic colors of pink, sage green, shrimp, powder blue, aqua, butter yellow and others.
Around the middle of the decade, you started seeing the wall-mount telephone in people’s homes, installed usually in the kitchen. Its coiled receiver cord was often very long indeed, so the user could wander up to 50′ away from the hung chassis. By this time, the phones came in a much wider range of fashionable colors, such as tangerine, purple, chrome yellow, harvest gold, avocado, flame red, mint green and others.
Around 1968–69, many Americans switched out their rotary dial phones for the then-new “touch-tone” dialers.
A very groovy phone concept imported from Europe: originally designed by Ericsson in Sweden, manufactured and distributed in the U.S. by North Electric. These were made in numerous colors, in both dial and pushbutton models.
The Ericofon was designed in the late 1940s by a design team including Gösta Thames, Ralph Lysell, and Hugo Blomberg. The two major components of the telephone, the handset and the dial, are combined in a single unit. This one-piece design anticipated the evolution of the typical cordless phone and cell phone by several decades. Serial production began in 1954. Early models were sold only to institutions, but in 1956 production for the open market began in Europe and Australia.
As the Bell System did not permit the operation of third-party equipment on their network, the Ericofon could only be used by independent telephone companies in the United States. North Electric in Galion, Ohio manufactured the Ericofon for the North American independent market.
When it was introduced on the U.S. market, the Ericofon was available in 18 colors, but after transfer of production to North Electric, the number of colors was reduced to eight. A small number of phones with clear and metallic finishes were produced for special promotions. The most popular and widely produced colors were bright red and bright white. Other colors included various pastel shades of blue, green, and pink. The phone was never produced in black.
In an age when people are dumping landlines to rely on a single mobile phone or smartphone, it’s easy to forget that being able to talk on the phone from various rooms in the home was once a luxury. In fact, a single phone was considered a luxury until after WWII. During the war many people postponed service, and utilities were not expanded until the post-war boom.
In the 1950s the idea of living well shifted from accepting the standards to having choices. For home telephones, that meant designer colors and features, as well as convenience. Like having a telephone in the kitchen so you could talk while you cooked, and one in the bedroom so you could chat with friends while folding laundry or making the bed. Teenagers might lounge in the living room talking dirt with a friend.
The popular trend of multiple phone extensions in the home was pushed heavily by Bell Telephone System. As manual operation declined, marketing dollars were spent to convince customers to dial numbers themselves. This created a great convenience, and people were making more and more calls as a result. As the call for convenience increased, so did the desire to be able to dial from multiple places.
Extension phones meant big money for telephone companies. It generated more revenue for the equipment rental and the installed extension. And plenty of people were happy to pay for it. In the mid-50s Bell System also recommended buying someone else a phone extension as a holiday gift.
Marketing for phone extensions was long-lived. Bell System designed scores of ads that ran into the 1970s. After the breakup of the Bell System in 1984, many households dropped one or more additional extensions due to increased costs. Even when telephone companies stopped charging additional monthly fees, the installation costs for additional jacks was considered pricey.
Here’s a gallery of 26 candid vintage color photographs that capture women talking on the telephone from between the 1950s and 1980s.
The Ericofon is a one-piece plastic telephone created by the Ericsson Company of Sweden and marketed through the second half of the 20th century. It was the first commercially marketed telephone to incorporate the dial and handset into a single unit. Because of its styling and its influence on future telephone design, the Ericofon is considered one of the most significant industrial designs of the 20th century. It is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In Sweden, the Ericofon is known as the cobra telephone for its resemblance to a coiled snake.
The original phone was produced in two slightly different designs. The earliest version is slightly taller, with the earpiece at nearly a 90-degree angle to the base. A later version has a shorter handle, with the earpiece angled slightly downward. The two versions are referred to as the old case and the new case. The old case was molded in two pieces, while the new case was molded as a single piece. Both versions were initially produced in 18 colors. They used the four-prong plug common in the United States at the time.
A third version, the model 700, was produced beginning in 1976. It is easily distinguished from earlier Ericofons by its squarish design, as well as changes to the handle and plug.
Most Ericofons had mechanical rotary dials, typical of all phones made in the era. While Ericofons produced by Ericsson used miniature buzzers as ringers, North Electric introduced the electronic “Ericotone” ringer. The Ericotone ringer used a simple, one-transistor oscillator circuit to produce a distinctive “chirping” sound. This was one of the earliest uses of a transistor in a telephone; telephones with mechanical bell ringers and rotary dials did not need transistors.
North Electric introduced a touch-tone version of the Ericofon in the United States in 1967. Production of this variant was much lower than that of the rotary-dial Ericofons. A design flaw in the hook switch mechanism can cause the touch-tone version of the phone to become unusable if it is set down too forcibly. North Electric ceased production of the Ericofon for North America in 1972.
Ericsson introduced a push-button version of the Ericofon, the model 700, for the company’s 100th anniversary in 1976. The model 700 had a squarer design than earlier models. It was not a touch-tone phone. Instead, its electronics generated electrical pulses as its buttons were pressed, simulating the pulses produced by a rotary dial. Ericsson continued to produce rotary-dial Ericofons until about 1980.
In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) launched the world's first cellular network in Japan. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone.
Today's mobile phones are not just used to call, they also integrate many smart functions to meet the "all-in-hand" of the users, and called as smartphones. So before mobile phones, how did people get in touch with each other? Check out these pictures to see.
Television is the first audiovisual device that changed the way people see entertainment. It opened the realm of recreation and mass communication. It made possible for people and families to watch live events in the comforts of their drawing room. By 1950s, the aftermath of World War II had faded away. Economy was booming again and people had cash in their wallets. Prosperity was returning to America.
That's the reason why the decade of the 1950s is also known as 'The Golden Age of Television'. Even though, television broadcasting had been active since the 1930s, it was only in the 1950s that it actually caught people's fancy.
It was in the 1950s, when the television started influencing the lives of the common men. Also according to a survey, approximately 3.1 million people had television sets in America in the 1950s.
To attract buyers, there were many interesting ads that launched in this decade. And these are some of them.
