100 Objects #19: Western Electric 500 Series

Former MythBuster Adam Savage joins Roman Mars to explore the history of the 500 Series Telephone and what we lost when we eventually decided to leave it behind.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  This episode of 100 Objects is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need. Custom calculators, data visualization dashboards, even prototypes, all without writing a single line of code. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai. That's claude.ai.

• 0:41Roman Mars?

  It's the 1970s and we're in the peaceful bliss of suburbia, in a family home pretty indistinguishable from any other family home. But for one curious child, it was in these four walls that there lived a precious, almost mythical object.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It was in the front foyer of our house. There was a table devoted to it.

• 1:04Roman Mars?

  This is Adam Savage.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I am a former Mythbuster, current YouTuber, science communicator, and maker of things.

• 1:12Roman Mars?

  And breaker of things.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  And breaker of things. You have to break enough things to learn how they go back together.

• 1:19Roman Mars?

  But one of the few things Adam was never quite able to break was what sat on that table in the front foyer of his home.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Picture, you know, the classic picture of a telephone in the encyclopedia, this black phone with a metal dial, letters in each hole of the dial, and a handset sitting on top.

• 1:38Roman Mars?

  This phone was the Western Electric 500 series, and it was kind of just an ordinary telephone. In fact, it was the ordinary telephone. So ordinary that at the time, you would have found some version of it in pretty much every home in America.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  So I'm an elder Gen X, born in the late 60s. We had one telephone in our house for my entire childhood until I went to college.

• 2:04Roman Mars?

  And Adam still remembers everything about it.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Everything around the phone, from the tactility of dialing and the zicca, zicca, zicca, putting your finger in the metal dial, the coldness of the dial, the fact that it kind of rang slightly as you moved it around. It was all part of this ritual of conversation. Yeah, I remember really loving the dial tone, the sort of the comforting sound of the dial tone.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  You'll hear the dial tone.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  One of my earliest memories is sitting there with my friend John Mossero, and we took the phone handset off this phone, and we put a banana in its place on the phone. And then the phone rang, which we did not expect that that was possible. And the fact that the phone still operated with a banana on it was twice as funny as the funniest thing that ever happened to us.

• 3:00Roman Mars?

  But most of Adam's memories of the phone revolved around the object's true purpose, to connect you with people who were far away.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  I remember having fights with my best friend in high school on that chair, talking to my girlfriend in that chair. Then I felt like I could hear the whole inside of her house, right? And it is a machine that gives me a presence in the other person's space. That's what it feels like, like I'm not just hearing a voice. I'm hearing the environment they're in, and I'm feeling like I'm part of it. And we would talk for like two and a half hours, three hours.

• 3:36Roman Mars?

  It wasn't unheard of to be like three, four, like you just were, you hung on the phone.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and what I really remember was the feeling of immediacy of that conversation. And it didn't matter what we were talking about. It felt like we were together in the same room.

• 3:52Roman Mars?

  It's a feeling we don't really feel anymore. The feeling of sitting on a phone line, hearing the whole inside of somebody's house, like you're actually there with them in person.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I think the Bell telephone, the 500 series, is arguably the best consumer product ever built. They make 92 million of this one phone over 50 years. And for 50 years, it is the best device ever for talking to other people at a distance. And we no longer have that.

• 4:25Roman Mars?

  This one model of telephone became ubiquitous across the continental United States for 50 years. And then it just disappeared completely. What does that say about what kind of human connection we prioritize and what we let fade away?

• 4:47Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the Western Electric 500 series, and how one device, which was once near omnipresent in every single household in America, created a level of interpersonal connection and intimacy unlike any object ever had before. And why, over time, we decided to give that up.

• 5:20Roman Mars?

  The history of the telephone is really the story of how America became connected. So let's back up. Could you describe like before the phone shows up in our lives? What are we, what are we dealing with?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Well, for normal people, getting a message a great distance, the main thing people could use was Western Union. There were telegraphs and teletypes.

• 5:41Roman Mars?

  The telegraph was a fairly rudimentary system that involved wires and tapping out messages in Morse code. And very quickly, Western Union realizes this technology can carry messages across an ocean at unheard of speed.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  The telegraph, along with the trains, compresses the world so quickly that it's one of the reasons we ended up with the international time. Because people were talking across great distances, and it got everyone really cranky.

• 6:10Roman Mars?

  But despite being able to send messages across the ocean, telegraphy had a pretty central flaw.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  You were very limited in terms of the language you could use. It was very expensive. Every word costs you money. So this is where you see those old movies where they're like,

• 6:26Speaker 03

  It's from London. Oh. Mr. Gower cables, you need cash. Stop. My office instructed to advance you up to $25,000. Stop.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stop. Because that was smaller word than period for communicating.

• 6:41Roman Mars?

  Really?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, stop is the shortest word that means period.

• 6:46Roman Mars?

  Huh, I had no idea. This brevity was necessitated by the fact that early telegraphy cables could only carry a single message at once. And time was money. Couple that with the fact that a professional operator would need to be reading your whole message at the other end, whether it was private or not, meant that telegraphs weren't exactly conversational.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  You had technology helping them communicate across greater distances, but there was nothing really personal about it. So this is also a time when people were writing, like people finished their days writing, you know, half a dozen letters to people.

• 7:22Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. In fact, the writing was really expansive. Like you get huge letters about people's days, you know what I mean?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  It's crazy when you read about these folks, like reading Washington's letters. Like every day he finishes spending two hours just hand calligraphy, often two copies of everything. He's writing every letter twice, so he has a record. These guys were writing thousands of words a day sometimes. I get really tired thinking about how much they were handwriting.

• 7:50Roman Mars?

  But writing the letter was a painfully slow form of communication compared to the telegraph. It would take weeks to reach somebody. And so people were trying to find a way to marry the conversational, personal qualities of letters with the spontaneity and ease of the telegraph. Western Union offered $1 million to anybody who could develop a multiplex system, which would allow for multiple telegraph transmissions simultaneously. But around this time, something else emerges.

• 8:17Roman Mars?

  Something that will threaten the domination of the telegraph. You know, the creation of telephone is highly disputed. There's many claims and counterclaims about its invention.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  You don't say.

• 8:30Roman Mars?

  So what is the simplest story to explain the invention of the telephone?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  The story we were all taught in school was that Alexander Graham Bell was working on the attempt to make a mechanical way for transmitting sound, figuring out a way to transmit sound through wires.

• 8:47Roman Mars?

  Despite many claims and counterclaims, Bell's invention would secure the patent, meaning he was the only one who could legally make a telephone. And everybody wanted one. Well, everybody but Bell himself, who famously refused to have a telephone in his own study for fear of distraction. He was a smart man. And Bell's design was both a stroke of genius and actually fairly simple.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  The basic mechanism I believe Bell was working with was a magnetic coil with a membrane, and using your voice to vibrate that membrane to create an electrical signal. Then that gets converted into mechanical movement at the other end of the equation and converted back into sound.

• 9:27Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  So this is an analog process where the vibrations of my voice are moving a small membrane. And those movements transmit small amounts of difference of an electrical signal that can then be just picked up as an analog signal on the other side and converted back into the same mechanical movement. So you hear sound.

• 9:48Roman Mars?

  The miracle of this invention, what is absolutely amazing about it, is that the time it takes for this analog system to work is nearly instantaneous, milliseconds, almost impossible to detect for the human ear. Now, a single telephone is a triumph of engineering. But for the invention to truly matter, you need to get as many phones out in the world as possible and connect them all via copper wires. You need to build a network.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  So he creates Bell Telephone. It matriculates into AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph, in the early 20th century.

• 10:24Roman Mars?

  While they're not exactly the same thing, people generally use Bell Telephone interchangeably with AT&T.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  Bell Laboratories, Western Electric, long lines, the local telephone company, and finally, AT&T, the parent company. Five parts, but known collectively as the Bell System.

• 10:44Roman Mars?

  In reality, they are all facets of one massive telecommunications company.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And it is the most rapaciously capitalist enterprise you could imagine.

• 10:54Roman Mars?

  At this moment, in the early 1900s, Bell has the patent for the telephone, but it doesn't have the patent for the miles of copper cables that are required to make that phone work. And other companies realize this. They figure out they can lay down local wires and get in on the telephone boom. Bell doesn't like this. While there's nothing they can do to stop local providers connecting people, Bell does have a couple tricks up its sleeve. They refuse to let these local lines interface with their national network.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  And they are buying up every possible competitor as they arrive because they have the monopoly. And they use the money they make from their monopoly to just keep on eating more small companies that show up in the space. It's a classic perfect model of what a monopoly does with its monopoly power.

• 11:41Roman Mars?

  But a classic model of monopoly was also a classic target for the government to break up. The government had just broken up Standard Oil and the American Tobacco Company, and now it was starting to hire AT&T. But the president of AT&T, a man named Theodore Vail, came to the government with an offer.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I feel like he must have had an epiphany because round about 1913, 14, he starts reaching out to the US government and offering a non-adversarial relationship. He starts saying, "Look, I know you guys think that we're a monopoly, but please don't break us up. Please don't subject us to antitrust laws."

• 12:18Roman Mars?

  This was the deal. They would build a telephone system so incredibly large that it would provide every single possible American business and home with a telephone signal. And they would supply this infrastructure for universal coverage completely free of charge. But in return, they wanted a monopoly over the network. No more having to buy competitors out, no more fighting for permits to lay cables in any given neighborhood.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  The reason Vail, I think, gets the US government to agree is he makes the case that what AT&T needs to do is so large and so complex, it will happen faster and ultimately be better for the American public if one company is able to maintain a consistent standard across that whole network, rather than different companies having different standards of quality. And the US government agrees.

• 13:14Roman Mars?

  It was a massive win for AT&T. But now, the difficult part started. They needed to make sure every home or business in the country was connected by wire to every other home or business in the country.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  This becomes the thing that, once you start to unpack it, makes what Bell Telephone and AT&T did so insanely incredible. It is such a massive engineering project, getting actual copper wire to every last person in the United States.

• 13:48Roman Mars?

  That isn't an exaggeration. AT&T wanted to connect the whole country, and they'd have to lay tens of millions of miles of copper cable to do it.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  You may have noticed that lots of work has been going on. New cable pulled into place and other types of construction.

• 14:06Roman Mars?

  And making the telephone system was not cheap. Usually, the most expensive part was connecting the last mile, the part where the wires branched off from the main cables and wound their way into individual homes.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Starting in 1925, AT&T starts Bell Labs.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  Bell Telephone Laboratories, the largest single organization in the world, devoted exclusively to communications research.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And the origin of Bell Labs is literally just to keep on making the network better and helping to design out how to get a phone to every last mile.

• 14:42Roman Mars?

  And before long, Bell Labs came to a key realization. If they were going to painstakingly connect America with millions of miles of copper wire, they ought to create the perfect interface with which to use those wires. Bell Labs needed to create the perfect telephone. The man who would ultimately step up to the plate was Henry Dreyfus, who started his career as a prolific designer of Broadway sets before branching out.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  He designs a movie theater where he puts an audience in a giant round room with four screens at the four corners of the room and one soundtrack. They're all watching the same movie, but they're able to fit way many more people in the room with no balconies and no, like, obstructions that increases both the audience satisfaction and the amount of money the theater owner can make. And I love this because Henry Dreyfus, really early on, is considering both the rules of commerce, i.e. we've got to make some money, and also the experience of the people spending the money that's going to be made.

• 15:53Roman Mars?

  In 1929, at the age of 25, Dreyfus started his own design shop. And his design philosophy was clear from the beginning.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Dreyfus was saying there can be no friction between the use of a tool and its utility.

• 16:07Roman Mars?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Right? He wants to reduce the friction of using anything that he is building to the lowest possible common denominator. His shop designs the Honeywell thermostat, like, the default thermostat for the entire United States for decades.

• 16:23Roman Mars?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And this is the simplest tool there is. You turn the dial to the temperature you can see, there is nothing to know.

• 16:32Roman Mars?

  But unlike the thermostat, there wasn't one perfect telephone that nearly all America used.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  The history of the design of the telephone is sort of a constant evolution. The first phone was, the earpiece was separate, then the handset. You had this, like, old-timey little tube you held up to your ear while you spoke into this, like, tulip. And then there was a handset that put the microphone and the speaker in the same piece.

• 16:59Roman Mars?

  But when AT&T wanted to make another evolution, they didn't go directly to Dreyfus to solve the problem.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  So AT&T has a contest to design the 300 series phone. And they put a call out, an RFP to design studios. Henry Dreyfus refuses to compete. He's like, "I would like to talk to the designers." And they're like, "That's not part of the competition." He's like, "Then never mind." But after that contest yields no designs they like, they just hire Henry's firm to design the 300 phone. He just waits them out.

• 17:28Roman Mars?

  Oh, that's amazing. Like, that's amazing. For people who don't know, like, the world of spec work and design is like an extremely fraught world where you have to endure all these sort of design contests and do this work for free. And the fact that he had the confidence in his own self and his own research to just wait it out is amazing.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  The waiting it out just blows my mind to smithereens.

• 17:49Roman Mars?

  In 1937, Bell introduced the 300 series model, designed by Dreyfus. He used thousands of measurements from the, quote, "average American" to determine the size and shape of the handset. And the result was pretty successful.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  They built millions of the series 300 phones, and they learned a tremendous amount from them. They learned they needed to put the ringer inside the body, because I didn't know this, but you could buy early phones where the ringer was extra. I don't even know how you would get a call. Just wait till you hear someone yelling on your "wrrr, wrrr, wrrr", and you pick it up?

• 18:22Roman Mars?

  So before long, Dreyfus and his shop refined the design, and he came out with an updated version, the 500 series. It must have been a 400 in between there, but you can just forget about that. Dreyfus's team improved the microphone, made the phone prettier. But maybe most importantly, in terms of its reliability, is they made it possible for the 500 series users to fix their device at home.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  It was also built for repairability. Nothing was attached to the body of the phone. Two screws pulled it off the chassis. Now you had access to all the electronics of the phone, and it would still work and be testable, so you could troubleshoot it much faster. This was the object designed to allow them to repair these things, to keep them operating. And the parts of the 500 series phone were compatible from 1949 to 1984.

• 19:16Roman Mars?

  Oh, my god.

• 19:21Roman Mars?

  Western Electric, the hardware manufacturing division of AT&T, made over 90,500 Series phones in just over 30 years. And the internal parts were almost entirely interchangeable. That meant if you bought a phone in 1950 and you broke it in 1960, the newest parts would still fit your old phone. And then if you broke it again 15 years later, the pieces on the market would still slot right in. And all of this, the interchangeability of parts, the ease of repairability, the intuitive troubleshooting, were all conscious decisions made for a specific reason.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Actually, maybe people don't realize this, but people didn't own those phones. Those phones were all, all 92 million of those phones were the property of AT&T and they were rented to the customers. This is probably the most important fact, actually.

• 20:09Roman Mars?

  Regular Americans, Adam's family, my family, your family, did not own their telephones. We rented them from AT&T. And in this fact, it really changes the things that you build because they're rented. Like, they do not want to make these things disposable.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Western Electric builds rugged phones and tests some of them beyond endurance.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  Chances are, the phone your Bell Telephone Company installs will never need repair.

• 20:41Roman Mars?

  They want them to last decades because they do not want to replace them.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the thing. The end user was not the customer. That's kind of amazing to me, right? It is, it is so beefy.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  You can take your Bell phone for granted, because we don't, at Western Electric, manufacturing and supply unit of the Bell system.

• 21:02Roman Mars?

  It is so sturdy that when it shows up in pop culture, it is clear that this thing is nearly indestructible.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  In the movie Get Shorty, Gene Hackman is a Hollywood producer who tries to front to a genuine mafioso played by Dennis Farina, who proceeds to beat the ever-living crap out of him with the handset and body of a 500 Series telephone.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Look at me, Ray. I tell you what, Harry. Why don't you take a look at this?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And every blow hurts because I know how strong that thing is. You, you cannot break the handset. I have tried.

• 21:39Roman Mars?

  A lot of people have. In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Angelina Jolie's character gives it a go.

• 21:47Roman Mars?

  In American Hustle, Bradley Cooper's character gives it three goes. And in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,

• 21:55Roman Mars?

  I mean, it's pretty grim. If you see it, you know what I'm talking about. The 500 Series is both incredibly sturdy and it shows up everywhere. Hello, Neil and Buzz. I'm talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. In what might be the greatest moment of his presidency, Nixon used a touchtone version of the 500 Series to call the Apollo 11 astronauts as they walked on the moon. I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. And when it all came crumbling down with those telephones being bugged at Watergate, well, those were almost certainly 500 Series telephones too. Chances are, if a phone call was made in the United States between 1949 and 1984, it was most likely on a 500 Series telephone.

• 22:42Roman Mars?

  All this to say, the 500 Series was a gigantic success. It was such a success that they also added different variants of the Bell phone to appeal to different users.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  AT&T released the Princess Phone, a phone literally built for a teenage girl's hand. It's little, it's lovely, it lights. The new Princess Phone. And the Princess Phone is the one, you know, every home in America in the 70s had a Princess Phone and a curly cord that was like 25 feet long, where you could get to kind of any given corner of your house for a private conversation. But everyone else was doing the limbo under this phone cord that was stretched across the house.

• 23:22Roman Mars?

  A robust, rented Bell telephone was a fixture of American life for over 30 years. It was omnipresent across culture and politics and the lives of everyday people. Eventually, it was replaced. In time, everything is. The real tragedy is what we lost in the process.

• 23:44Roman Mars?

  Let's take a break to talk about our sponsor for today's episode, Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Have you ever wished you could hand off a task to someone while you're on the go? Claude is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and things with you. Integrate Claude into any part of your project, keeping you focused on solutions. As your research assistant, Claude's research capabilities are comprehensive. Reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Claude becomes your command center by connecting to your professional tools like GitHub, Jira, HubSpot, Notion, and Google Workspace. Build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need. Delegate tasks, big and small, with coworkers so you can handle other work while Claude runs. It even has checkpoints

• 24:29Roman Mars?

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• 24:56Roman Mars?

  By 1982, the Bell system was at the peak of its powers, but its monopoly was built on a shaky foundation.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  When Vale makes the deal with the US government in, in 1915 to like, we'll play nice if you guys let us build this thing out. He sort of gets a promissory note for them that they don't call in for seven decades. Like, the idea to let AT&T do what it wants to build this network out was always a compromise and a compromise that had to come due.

• 25:27Roman Mars?

  The government began to rethink the monopoly they had allowed Bell to run for so many years. Things had changed. The country had been connected. Bell had already done the job.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  AT&T fulfills every ounce of its promise to build a robust network where people can talk across the country and it feels like they're in the next room.

• 25:46Roman Mars?

  And now that they've built the thing, they just don't need them to be that big anymore.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:51Roman Mars?

  The government broke up the Bell system into eight different companies. The Baby Bells, as they were called, controlled different regions of the US. New long-distance carriers were allowed to offer service on Bell telephone lines, which was great. Long-distance prices came way down. Cheap, plastic phones and cordless phones could be purchased at Kmart, none of which had the post-apocalyptic reliability of the 500 Series. But you could also buy a phone with a clear case so you could see the wires inside and it lit up when it rang. It was so cool. Meanwhile, and over many more years, analog was being replaced by digital and a new technology was emerging that would make having control over all that copper wire not matter so much.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Cellular phones not only are becoming less expensive, they're getting smaller. One piece, handheld, not car phones, street phones.

• 26:42Roman Mars?

  Enter, stage left, the cellphone.

• 26:47Roman Mars?

  Gone were the days of speaking into membranes and vibrating copper wire across an entire country. Cell phones were digital and digital phones had a new way of doing things.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  In the simplest possible terms, when I speak into a phone, my voice is being broken into discreet sounds of a certain length. And the computer has a library of sounds that it describes to my voice as a code. So if I go, ah, maybe it's got that sound stated as sound number 41. And then when I finish with a consonant like t, that's sound number 43. This is grossly oversimplified. But the computer takes my voice and breaks it down into numbers that equate to the sounds that then get reassembled by those numbers, by the other telephone, and wrapped into a simulacrum of my voice for the other person.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  It is not like an audio signal is being transmitted over the wires. That takes too long. The audio signal is being encoded and then decoded.

• 27:55Roman Mars?

  So the pioneers who made the cellphone had to make a difficult decision.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Cellphone companies had a choice to make when they were first transmitting voice. They could prioritize the lack of latency or they could prioritize voice quality.

• 28:12Roman Mars?

  Meaning, should they prioritize how quickly the audio would transmit to another phone? That's the latency. Or how clear the audio should sound when it gets there? That's the quality.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  They made the choice to go for quality. And that was literally a cost-benefit analysis they made about like what the public would care more about.

• 28:32Roman Mars?

  The delay on a call using the 500 Series, which operated on the copper wire infrastructure, was virtually unnoticedable to the human ear. On a coast-to-coast call, the delay would only be around 25 milliseconds. But the digital cellphone is different.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  It takes between 150 and 250 milliseconds. 250 milliseconds is a quarter of a second.

• 28:55Roman Mars?

  So that's 25 milliseconds for analog compared with 250 milliseconds for cellphones. Remember, the cellphone is converting voice into numbers, bouncing those numbers off a tower and then maybe a satellite in space and then back down to Earth and then another tower and converting those numbers back into sound on the receiver's phone. So if anything, it's kind of a miracle that it only takes that long. But the trade-off is still real.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  When you look up the specs on phone latency today, they will say 150 milliseconds isn't really noticeable. And I would like to point out, when you're at the end of your day and you call your partner on your phone and it's just a check-in call. How was your day? It was great. Mind, what do you want for dinner? Well, I was thinking burgers. Okay, I'll pick those up. That is a really easy call to have because as a couple, you have a rhythm of how to do that kind of check-in. And the back and forth is, is a known quantity. But try and have an argument on the cellphone where you absolutely cannot interrupt and 150 milliseconds makes an argument impossible because you are, ah, nope. Okay, you go, you go, right? You are always wanting to interrupt.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  The interruption happens much later than you think. You can't get a rhythm and now you're both annoyed that you can't actually communicate across this thing. That 150-millisecond delay, to me, is deadly in terms of intimacy.

• 30:15Roman Mars?

  And if the cellphone and digital phone calls are to be considered the killer of intimacy over long distances, then there can be only one chief suspect for the crime.

• 30:27Roman Mars?

  The heir apparent to the 500 series. In many ways, you could argue that the iPhone has taken the place of what the 500 series was in our lives.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  While the iPhone is an unbelievable, unmeasurably important invention.

• 30:43Roman Mars?

  The iPhone's amazing. Like, let's just stipulate the iPhone's amazing.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  The iPhone is amazing, and I can't stand to have it more than 10 feet from me. That's how amazing it is.

• 30:57Roman Mars?

  When Western Electric made the 500 series, they were manufacturing the perfect telephone that would last for decades in our home. The design brief for the iPhone is entirely different. It's really a pocket computer, camera, and media player. The phone part of the iPhone may be its least important part. When Apple markets a new iPhone, they tend to brag about the camera or the storage. They don't really say that the phone is better in this new one.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  The one thing that we call it is the one thing that it does the poorest of its tasks, which is to be used as a phone. Today, you know, cold calling is an aggressive act. And I feel like it's an aggressive act because talking to someone you don't know with 150 to 250 seconds of latency is non-trivial. And we have to navigate more than just the social dynamics of the call. And that means that there's friction between the object and its utility.

• 31:55Roman Mars?

  Eliminating friction between an object and its function was the driving principle behind all of Dreyfus's design. Modern cell phones abandoned this when it came to human conversation. And Adam thinks this abandonment plays a big role in why young people hate being on the phone.

• 32:11Speaker 06

  A YouSwitch survey found nearly 70% of people ages 18 to 34 prefer a text to a call.

• 32:18Roman Mars?

  Adam has seen his own kids avoiding phone calls, but he thinks they have been replaced by something else.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  My kids were in high school, and they would Zoom or FaceTime with their high school girlfriends, and they'd fall asleep next to each other. And I love this. This was the same thing as sitting there talking on the phone for three or four hours.

• 32:40Roman Mars?

  And he thinks the reason why they're choosing video calls is a question of intimacy. Given high enough speed internet, the latency can be pretty good. But it's the pictures that really help.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Having a visual like Zoom, getting social cues by someone's body language, that feels like it supplies some of the intimacy that's lost with the latency.

• 32:59Roman Mars?

  Adam also points out another fundamental change in our phones that maybe only someone like Adam would articulate, but everyone feels it in some way.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  The 500 series wants you to take it apart. I think that the phone handset might be the very first machine I ever took apart, because you could just unscrew these robust pieces of nylon, and you saw this little microphone element. And I noticed it was slipping on two commutators. And even at like, eight years old, when I did this, I remember thinking, oh, that is a really replaceable part. Like, there's some aspect of the reason the phone was built the way it was that I sort of grocked. And I don't think that's me being brilliant. I think it's about this object being so perfect, it like communicates how much energy went into making it so easy to use.

• 33:52Roman Mars?

  The 500 series used interchangeable parts for the better part of a half a century. This is because Bell made the phone to sell to itself, and they just rented it to you. So they built it to last. But we're not renting an iPhone, meaning there's an incentive for it to change and upgrade and not be robust enough to last for years and years. Every change means we need a whole new phone, which means more money for the people who make them. Even the very design of our phones disincentivizes us from opening them up at all.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  I'm a big proponent of the right to repair movement.

• 34:24Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Which is really catching fire around the United States. More and more states are passing right to repair legislation, allowing people the right to open up the devices they own. We are actually in a moment culturally where we are redefining what it means to own something. And commerce would prefer a subscription model for everything.

• 34:46Roman Mars?

  Mm-hmm. You know, it's really, there's a kind of an irony here, how much you felt intimately connected to your household phone, but you owned it less than you own anything else. But for some reason, you felt more connected or felt more like you could take it apart and unscrew the mouthpiece and look at what was inside.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 35:05Roman Mars?

  Which is why I think Adam Savage can't get over the Western Electric 500 series.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  It said, I can communicate across the world, and you are talking to a person, and it feels just like language, the way you know how it works. And it did. It solved that problem. And now we have that problem again of real communication with voice.

• 35:29Roman Mars?

  The 500 series was the ultimate vision of Dreyfus's ideal, the frictionless device that allowed you to talk to anyone in the world. It was a device that met you on your terms, designed to mold to your hand, to be comfortably cradled in your neck, pressed against your ear, hearing someone talk as soon as the words left their lips. It also invited you to open it up and learn how it worked. It's a vision for the objects in our life that seems to have all but disappeared. Well, except one place.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  The old timey ring on your iPhone. This is probably the sound of the two bells inside the 500 series telephone.

• 36:12Roman Mars?

  Mm-hmm. Even if it's only in a small way, the memory of the 500 series survives in the very thing that left it behind.

• 36:23Roman Mars?

  Adam Savage, thank you so much for talking with me. I had such a good time.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. This was really, really fun, Roman.

• 36:32Roman Mars?

  Adam Savage is a science, technology, and engineering communicator and former Mythbuster. If you want to see more of him, check out Adam Savage's Tested on YouTube. If you have a curious mind and love to build things, there's no better place on the internet.

• 36:57Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States and 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Isaac Fisher. Our series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorf, and Ellie Lightfoot. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Iver Manley. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Cathy Too. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé, and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan Wright. Artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part

• 37:42Roman Mars?

  of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful White City, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

• 38:09Roman Mars?

  Thank you again to the sponsor of today's episode, Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the collaborator making your day-to-day life easier. Set up workloads with cowork to run on a schedule like daily reports and weekly summaries. Claude can scan your Slack and email to build you a prioritized action list. That's how I use it for this project, actually. It takes all the suggestion emails and puts them in the spreadsheet for me so I can check them all out and share them. You can build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need, like custom calculators, data visualization dashboards, even prototypes, all without writing a single line of code. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai. That's claude.ai.