http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/magazine/30joybubbles-t.html?ref=magazineSomeday there will be no need of the dial tone, and for a few of us it will be as if the voice of God has gone dead. That reassuring voice that will speak to anyone who knows how to listen: like God, it exists everywhere and yet only in your cupped ear, even if you’re a small blind boy with a reputed 172 I.Q. whose parents are fighting late at night.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Victor Schrager
Joybubbles’s phones (top phone for incoming calls only).
This was in the early 1950s. He was still Josef Engressia then, born in Richmond, Va., and phones were solid objects. All those lovely, palpable parts: the dial, the curved metal tooth that stopped a fingertip, the 10 finger holes, the curled cord from mouthpiece to phone body that could be straightened out but boinged right back. The thin cable that ran from the back of the phone to the wall, and from the wall into the world, a secret passageway as sure as any rabbit hole or mirror. A phone could be endlessly caressed and — if there were noises to drown out — listened to. Phones didn’t care that he couldn’t see.
“Lots of scary sounds and stuff at night,” he’d say, years later. “Sometimes I’d hug my phone up close and listen to the dial tone, the soft hum of the dial tone that was always there.”
Ask any mother: children love telephones. “I’m a telephone man forever,” he told his mother when he was not quite 4. The family moved a lot — his father was a school portrait photographer — but the phone lines followed him. The phone directory was his favorite storybook, with all the new exchanges and Dial-a’s: Dial-a-Joke, Dial-a-Devotion and Dial-a-Prayer, 24-hour-a-day voices, improvisations on the dial tone: something to listen to when you have no one else to call.
The boy decided to talk back to the phone. Not to other people, not right away: to the phone line itself, and in its own language. At 7, with his perfectly pitched ear, he heard through the receiver the tone that controlled long-distance connections, 2,600 cycles per second. “I started whistling along with it,” he said, “and all of a sudden the circuit cut off, and I did it again, and it cut off again. And gradually . . . I figured out — back in the mid-’50s — just how to do it.”
. . .
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
