100 Objects #19: Western Electric 500 Series
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What is the Western Electric 500 series telephone and why was it so ubiquitous?
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But for one curious child, it was in these four walls that there lived a precious, almost mythical object.
It was in the front foyer of our house. There was a table devoted to it. This is Adam Savage. I am a former MythBuster, current YouTuber, science communicator, and maker of things.
And breaker of things.
And breaker of things. You have to break enough things
to learn how they go back together. But one of the few things Adam was never quite able to break was what sat on that table in the front foyer of his home. picture,
you know, the classic picture of a telephone in the encyclopedia, this black phone with a metal dial, letters in each hole of the dial and a handset sitting on top.
This phone was the Western Electric 500 series, and it was kind of just an ordinary telephone. In fact, it was the ordinary telephone. So ordinary that at the time you would have found some version of it in pretty much every home in America. So I'm an
elder Gen X, born in the late 60s. We had one telephone in our house for my entire childhood until I went to college. And Adam still remembers everything about it. Everything around the phone, from the tactility of dialing it, the zicka, zicka, zicka, putting your finger in the metal dial, the coldness of the dial, the fact that it kind of rang slightly as you moved it around. It was all part of this ritual of conversation. Yeah. I remember really loving the dial tone, the sort of the comforting sound of the dial tone.
You'll hear the dial
tone. One of my earliest memories is sitting there with my friend John Massaro, and we took the phone handset off this phone, and we put a banana in its place on the phone, and then the phone rang, which... We did not expect that that was possible. And the fact that the phone still operated with a banana on it was twice as funny as the funniest thing that ever happened to us.
But most of Adam's memories of the phone revolved around the object's true purpose, to connect you with people who
were far away. I remember having fights with my best friend in high school in that chair, talking to my girlfriend in that chair. And I felt like I could hear the whole inside of her house.
Mm-hmm.
Right. And it is a machine that gives me a presence in the other person's space. That's what it feels like. Like, I'm not just hearing a voice. I'm hearing the environment they're in and I'm feeling like I'm part of it. And we would talk for like two and a half hours, three hours.
It wasn't unheard of to be like three, four. Like you just were you hung on the phone.
Yeah. And what I really remember was the feeling of immediacy of that conversation. And it didn't matter what we were talking about. It felt like we were together in the same room. It's a feeling
we don't really feel anymore. The feeling of sitting on a phone line, hearing the whole inside of somebody's house, like you're actually there with them in person.
I think the Bell Telephone, the 500 series, is arguably the best consumer product ever built ever. They make 92 million of this one phone over 50 years. And for 50 years, it is the best device ever for talking to other people at a distance. And we no longer have that.
This one model of telephone became ubiquitous across the continental United States for 50 years. And then it just disappeared completely.
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