The Telephone in Silent Films

[Spiny Norman]

It happened to radios too - the hiding I mean:

Go to 18m40s (I can't embed WITH that start time).

[sepiatone]

One Week of Life(1919). Though this is a lost film, the great Pauline Frederick seems to spend a lot of time on her phone/?s judging by some surviving stills.

http://web.stanford.edu/~gdegroat/PF/re ... fLife2.jpg

http://cplorg.cdmhost.com/digital/colle ... l16/id/327

[Jim Roots]

When my family and I moved into our present house 20 years ago, we had a small wooden cabinet built to "conceal" the mini-TTY we had back then. Even had a lock and key, though we hadn't asked our handyman friend for that. We dumped the TTY a dozen years ago (they're such old technology!) but the cabinet had been screwed into the adjoining food cupboard, so it's still there. At the time, I never even thought about how closely we were following in the silent film tradition of "hiding the phone"... we just didn't have room for the TTY on the very short shelf that could only fit the phone. It was a practical decision, not an aesthetic one.

Jim

Uh . . . forgive me, Jim, but what the heck is a TTY? I was almost afraid to ask since "mini-TTY" sounded vaguely obscene to me . . .

A device that was used to enable deaf and hard of hearing people to access the phone. From the 1970s to 90s, it was the size of a hardcover book. Had a keyboard, an acoustic coupler, and a small LED display line above the keyboard. You put the handset into the coupler and then texted the person on the other end, with the messages running (slowly) across that LED display. You could only make TTY-to-TTY calls; if you wanted to call someone who didn't have a TTY, you had to call a relay service operator who read your typed messages out loud to the other person, and then typed the other person's spoken response back to you.

In the late 1980s or early 1990s they came out with a mini-TTY for travel purposes. It was about 8 inches long and 4 inches wide when folded (hard shell case). When you opened it up, the coupler was in the top half, the keyboard and LED line were in the bottom half.

I keep preaching that the TTY became obsolete in the 1980s with the invention of email, but a lot of hard of hearing people still use them, and they have more functions available now too. I haven't used them in years -- Deaf people (not hard of hearing people) like me dumped this old technology a quarter-century ago.

Jim

[CoffeeDan]

Thank you, Jim! I understand it now. And you just provided some context for a call I got in my early days of working in the hotel industry.

I was working the switchboard overnight when I got a call from a woman who identified herself as a relay operator. She said she was calling on behalf of a deaf customer using a "teletyping" machine, and she would read his questions about the hotel to me, and transcribe my responses and send them back to him. "Would you be comfortable in talking to the guest in this way?" she asked. Not knowing what to expect, I said I would try.

It went smoother than I thought. I gradually learned that I should speak slowly and enunciate, keeping my answers short. There were some long pauses at first, but they got shorter as we went along, and by the end about 30 minutes later, it was almost as fluid as a regular phone call. The guest thanked me (through the operator) for being so patient and informative, and he later booked a room with us!

[Jim Roots]

Thank you, Jim! I understand it now. And you just provided some context for a call I got in my early days of working in the hotel industry.

I was working the switchboard overnight when I got a call from a woman who identified herself as a relay operator. She said she was calling on behalf of a deaf customer using a "teletyping" machine, and she would read his questions about the hotel to me, and transcribe my responses and send them back to him. "Would you be comfortable in talking to the guest in this way?" she asked. Not knowing what to expect, I said I would try.

It went smoother than I thought. I gradually learned that I should speak slowly and enunciate, keeping my answers short. There were some long pauses at first, but they got shorter as we went along, and by the end about 30 minutes later, it was almost as fluid as a regular phone call. The guest thanked me (through the operator) for being so patient and informative, and he later booked a room with us!

Yeah, a lot of the baffled hearing people we called through relay service couldn't abide the lengthy silences. Operators were not permitted to read out the D/HH person's typing until it ended, so that made for really disturbing gaps in the conversation, especially if the user was a slow typist or had a lot to say.

Nowadays Deaf people (not HH people) use video relay services, with a sign language interpreter in place of the phone operator. It allows for far more fluid conversations because the "translation" comes in real time -- i.e., interpreters, unlike operators, speak out the Deaf person's signing as it happens, not after it's finished.

TTYs evolved out of of railway telegraph machines. In the 1960s, those huge old grinders were repurposed into teletype machines with acoustic couplers. The TTY was a revolution in the early 1970s, bringing the phone within reach of far more users than the gigantic teletypes.

Jim

[Big Silent Fan]

It's hard to think of any Silent Film that doesn't feature someone using the telephone, unless the film was set in an earlier time.

"The Arizona Express" (1924) even has a Telephone Office involved to help make a call to the Governor's Home.

In the Czech film, "Erotikon" (1929), the telephone plays a vital part in the story. Without the telephone ringing, in the middle of the night, there would not have been a story to tell.

In "Defying Destiny" (1923), The telephone plays an important part in the film.

And then there's my favorite.
Some forward thinking writers even introduced the invention of the "Television-Phone" in "Up the Ladder" (1925).

There are many other examples...like in Ben Turpin's short, "Small Town Idol."

[Arndt]

In the talkie "Allo Berlin? Ici Paris!" (1932), directed by Julien Duvivier, a French and a German telephone operator fall in love long distance. A rather sweet film with lots of scenes in telephone exchanges.