From the RealOne player's menu bar click Tools, then Choose
Visualization. Choose the one called "Annabelle the Sheep" and watch its
reaction to the phone noises.
Scroll down past the list of recordings for an explanation of what this is
all about.
I ran a telephone line for many years where the public could dial in
and listen to recordings, which I would change every few days. Sometimes I would
play phone trip recordings like the above, sometimes educational lectures,
sometimes skits that my friends and I would create, sometimes excerpts from
commercial humor records. The following is a sample. Me and my friends weren't the only ones who went on phone
trips. Here's another recording with telephone sounds from the
Seattle area, and also recordings from Great Britain. Andrew Emmerson from London corresponded
with someone in Seattle 30 years ago and they mailed tapes to each other with
narrated telephone sounds from their respective cities. Here is the tape
he received from the guy in Seattle, but he forgot the name. If anyone can
identify this voice, please send
email and let me know. Following that is Andrew's tape.
Phone Tripper and phone phreak Evan Doorbell tells the story about how he got
interested in phones and recording phone sounds. (You can download higher
quality versions of Evan's recordings to your hard drive from the Group Bell
download page.)
The following recordings of phone trips and switching sounds were contributed
by Evan Doorbell. He has many more, and I hope to have some of them on
here shortly.
Evan Doorbell made recordings about phone phreaking and other phun stuff: Evan Doorbell made recordings of and about several telephone conference
lines: Evan Doorbell was a member of Group Bell. They made the famous "Dom
Tuffy" tapes in 1973, based upon a real telco security agent they had
encountered: Tom Duffy. They decided that in retrospect the real Mr. Tuffy
was a decent guy who was just doing his job. He wasn't out to ruin anyone's
life; he just wanted the phone company to get its "revenue", about which he was
genuinely enthusiastic.
Click on the name of the file to play the lower quality version meant
for modem users. If you have a DSL line, cable modem, or other high-speed
access, click on the 64kb link. ALL USERS can download the higher-quality
versions to their hard drive from the Group Bell
download page. Here is a recording made in 1972 of a phone conversation between the
young Evan Doorbell and the real Tom Duffy, with a narration before and
after explaining why the Dom Tuffy recordings were made. Group Bell made other entertainment tapes; here are two samples.
Listen to ALL of the above Group Bell tapes first to get a feel for
Evan Doorbell's sense of humor, then listen to: Evan Doorbell and friends made tapes of other people's joke lines in
Southern California: Phone Tripper Frank Wilsey visited the Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum
in Seattle, WA and the New England
Museum of Telephony in North Ellsworth, Maine. Both museums have
complete, fully-restored, fully-functional, electromechanical switching machines
just like the ones you hear in the phonetrip tapes above. You really must
visit them to see and use the equipment instead of just listening to old
tapes. Frank made tapes on the history of telephone switching using sounds
he recorded inside the museums as examples.
Phone tripper Joseph G. Molter (aka JeepMan), email jmolter@sbcglobal.net, took a trip to La
Crosse, IN and made a recording from a payphone and from inside the switchroom.
Phone tripper Trace McCall sent us a recording he made
inside a step by step central office, and he promised to send us more. The
pulse repeating followed by the loud chattering was a CAMA trunk MF sending to
the Frederick Tandem office. At the beginning of the segment, in the
background you can make out a "snoring" sound. That's a linefinder group running
a switchman-started test. The following are other people's telephone recordings
that I dialed and recorded at various times. OK, so what are these recordings all about? Why
are they here? Greetings fellow web trippers, my phone phreak handle is Mark Bernay and 30
years ago I used to go on phone trips. Yes, it's true: just like the people in
the picture at the top, I would drive around to small towns primarily for the
purpose of playing with their payphones. I often brought along my trusty Craig
212 portable 3-inch reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was before cassettes were
popular) to record the phone noises and narrate information about them for my
friends. I don't go on phone trips anymore and you are probably thinking that
this is because I grew up, but no, I never did. The reason I stopped phone
tripping is that all phones are about the same all over the country nowadays
and they are really boring.
This picture shows my recording equipment around 1968, which I used to edit
these tapes and prepare them for playing on a public phone number. My current
desk is just as messy, but with PC's instead of reel-to-reel tape recorders.
I first started playing with phones -- not talking on them, but playing
with the switching systems and the network -- when I was a teenager growing up
in Los Angeles. My family moved from Pacific Telephone (now Pacific Bell)
territory to General Telephone. I noticed big differences in the noises the
phone made as the dial tone came on, in between digits as numbers were dialed,
after dialing and the call was switching through, etc. I did a lot of reading
about telephone switching systems and visited many phone company switchrooms
to learn what was going on.
I moved from Los Angeles to Seattle in 1968. Seattle itself had completely
different telephone switching systems than either Pacific Telephone or General
Telephone in Los Angeles. When I started driving around the Seattle area I
noticed that many of the little towns had their own independent phone
companies and every one had different equipment. My phone phreak friends in
Los Angeles (and later in Seattle) wanted to hear this variety of phone noises
I was telling them about, so I tape recorded by holding the microphone of the
recorder against the earphones of the payphones. (I was aware of telephone
pickup coils, but they picked up too much hum from the fluorescent lights in
payphones.)
Unfortunately I wasn't into photography at the time these tapes were made
and I have no pictures of myself on a phone trip. I got the photo above from a
friend who also went on phone trips, but none of the people in that picture
took part in these recordings. The gentleman at the payphone is famous and you
probably heard of him. There have been 139695 accesses to this page.
All recordings on this page are copyrighted by
their respective authors and are presented in RealAudio format. If you
have a modern web browser, you probably have all the software you need to play
them. Simply click on one of these links and it should start playing in
several seconds. If they don't work, visit http://www.real.com/ to install the RealOne
Player. Warning: the Real page will try very hard to get you to download the pay
version, which costs $9.95 PER MONTH. There is also a free version that they
hide away, so look carefully.
(More parts eventually.)
(Part 3
eventually)
(NPR has a longer and clearer recording
of Mr. Watson)
Please send your comments and questions to phonetrips@wideweb.com