"The home telephone had a good hundred-year run. Its days are numbered now. Its name, truncated to just phone, will live on, attached anachronistically to the diminutive general-purpose computers we carry around with us. (We really should have called them teles rather than phones.) But the object itself? It’s headed for history’s landfill, one layer up from the PalmPilot and the pager."
This is so true. The only reason we still have a land line is my wife insists on it. It would be much cheaper to just go cellular.
And I recall a phone exactly like the one in this picture, hanging from the wall at our house when I was a kid. Ours didn't match the drapes, in a cheerful color, like this one. Instead, it was a vile flesh tone that even to this day I find repulsive.
I still have my old Palm Pilot down in the barn somewhere. I remember running across it about six months ago, and thinking, "Wow, I can't believe this is still here!" If I keep it for another ten years or so it will probably be worth money to a collector.
The only problem with that photo (beside the color) is the length of the cord. Kitchen phones usually had long cords. Believe it or not, I tried to buy something like that for my kitchen and they don't make them anymore. They offer cordless phones that the neighbors can intercept with a $19.95 contraption from Radio Shack.
ReplyDeleteHa! I even remember having the "party line'! Three different families had the same number - but each one had a separate ring. And yes, we did listen in.....
ReplyDeleteThat's a purely American anachronism (and lord didn't we think you all strange and exotic seeing you with thirty foot cords on the kitchen phone in the films/TV shows), here in the UK it was always kept in the hall (on a little combi seat/table, usually surmounted by a set of plaster ducks on the wall for some strange reason – everyone had them) usually because the Post Office (yes, I know, but they'd run it since the late C19 when it was still telegraph only) put the junction box by the front door and wouldn't ever fit an extension more complicated than a straight wire.
ReplyDeleteWe didn't have wall mounted appliances either, ours being huge, black Bakelite monstrosities sufficient in size and weight so that the handset could be used to beat intruders to death (or small brothers into a concussed state – with six stitches – I never sat down for a month) and that need an engineer certified table to support.
I don't think the land-line phone will go out so quickly since hard-wired internet access and cable TV are now classed as basic necessities and the phone will continue to offered as a package (and a wired phone maintained even if only for emergency, power outage, usage). That and even here in this tiny, overcrowded island there are vast swathes that it will probably never be economical to site a cell-tower to support.
That and just like the resurgence of vinyl LP's there's a resurgence of wireless, digital home phones designed to replicate the look and feel of old round-dial analogue telephones. It may be all a flash in a steampunk pan but speaking as someone who has his sited in a real, renovated red phone box in the living room that visitors take turns phoning themselves from (I should charge a fee) I think there's a demand waiting to be filled (yes I'm sad, but I do have a matching red GPO post-box outside for the mail deliveries too).