Having experienced the end of this era working in the telecommunications industry, I had an opportunity to learn the nature of electricity , as practically applied, from working on the public telephone network. Here I had a perspective to appreciate the incredible impact some relative simple innovations could have. One of the most dramatic examples in my opinion was the effect that twisting two wires together had on an alternating current signal (such as a modulated voice) and the distance that it would travel intact.

As a child in the 60’s, I remember traveling by car on a highway which ran along some distance next to a train track. From the back seat of the family’s Buick sedan, I noticed that every few hundred feet there were these strange little metal crosses suspended on the old telegraph wires which ran along the tracks. These little metal crosses, I later learned, were actually brackets that had glass insulators on the end of the four arms configured so that two adjacent wires were routed through it so that the two parallel wires switched positions with each other. The purpose, to take miles of parallel wires and approximate a slight twist between them in pairs and improve this infrastructure allowing it to carry a voice phone call where before only dots and dashed could make the distance.

I recall a service call once related to me by a phone installer tasked to address the complaint,”can make and receive calls but the phone won’t ring”. The installer knew this had to be some kind of mistake for how can you receive a call if the phone doesn’t ring? But upon arrival at the home in question, the lady of the house assured him that this was indeed true. As he was asking her how this could be true, he was interrupted by her politely excusing herself to…answer a phone call, although the phone had clearly not rang. Upon her return, the baffled phone man inquired as to exactly how she had known she had a phone call . Her reply, “why, because the dog was barking , sir.” Perplexed, the man went into the back yard to investigate and soon found a friendly collie in a dog run. This dog run, as it happened, had been hastily fashioned from a short length of chain looped over the phone cable into the house. Over time, the insulation had worn away from one of the wires and poor ole ‘Rover’ was lit up with 130 volts on every call. Now immensely popular, this was the advent of another innovation, the custom ’ Dark Barking Ringtone ’.

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