Telephones Through Time

I went to the Frank H. Woods Telephone Pioneer Museum on Sunday:

We walked into the small building and were greeted by a friendly-looking old man sitting behind the desk who said, "Welcome to our museum." Yvonne and I signed in, then wandered further into the building. There were various contraptions behind a glass wall. The first thing that caught my eye was the little machine at the upper left hand corner of the wall... the first ever telephone. ...It looked more like a little wooden box with some metal on it. I was wondering two things, 'where do speak into it at?' and 'where do you listen?'

The next room we walked into had the manicans in it representing the women who operated the old switch boards. I was thinking, wow, the telephone operaters of today have it really easy!

We continued to meander toward the back of the buiding coming into a much more open room with tons of old-fashioned telephones, offices, phone booths, circuts, and various other contraptions. I noticed the little things of course, like the "Mr. Banks hat" (named after the Mary Poppins character) hanging on a coat hanger in the mock office. It fit perfectly with the time period, because the phones in this room were the ones with the listening device that you hold to your ear while you speak into the part that stays on the wall (just like in Mary Poppins). There was even a really weird phone that was used in businesses that could be pulled far out from the wall as it was conneceted to it with a weird metal spring.

Next, we moved into a very dusty room, with an old car parked in it that fascinated Yvonne. The old man from the front desk came back to talk to us at this point. Of all the pieces of history that we saw, I think he was the most interesting. He started pointing things out in the back of the truck that Yvonne and I never would have noticed otherwise.

He was an actual telephone man. He worked for the telephone and telegraph company for 33 years! He started as a clean up kinda man and worked his way through a series of steps until he was a foreman. He had so many experiences and so much knowledge to share.

He remained our guide as we toured the rest of the place. The next room was the most visually entertaining. It had the "Phones in Colour!" for the first time. There was even a painter's palette with little tiny phones in all different colors where the paint should have been. Also, the "Eloquent Phones" made their debut in this room, featuring the dial on the bottum of the phone so you could take it all with you for convienience. There were themed phones in this room as well; everything from phones held by Mickey Mouse to apples, Harleys, Garfield, and even a ketchup bottle! Imagine if you walked into the kitchen to see someone talking with a ketchup bottle pressed to their head!

As we got ready to leave I looked more closely at the artwork. There was one depicting Alexender Graham Bell making the first long distance phone call (from Chicago to New York, I believe) with many important-looking men standing around him. Another showed a man whose name slips my mind out in a snow storm, checking the phone lines. It was about the importance of service and based on a real man who was very dedicated to the job and just recently passed away. The neatest one, in my opinion, was called "Weavers of Speech." It was of a woman stringing her tangle of lines of communication from the poles on the right side, behind her, to the city, country and suburbs on the other side. In it's time, it was in a newspaper, used for advertisment.

As we left, we said goodbye to our guide and talked about how amazing it is how fast all of this happened. In the last hundred-ish years we have gone from the very beginning of telephones to little tiny cell phones that can be carried about in a back pocket. It's strange to think that our grandchildren will laugh at home phones, which we have been so used to until just recently.

I also thought about how that old man was a living history. And I wondered, what's going to happen when all the "oldies" are gone? Who is going to tell the stories and keep the history alive in a way. Most of their stories will die with them, although the written ones will survive. It's kind-of sad in a way to think of our rapidly changing world.