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Northern California Wildfire Destroys American Telephony Museum
alphadogg writes: In this day of smartphones, cell towers and wearables, the American Museum of Telephony in the Mountain Ranch community of northern California preserved artifacts of a much different world of communications. But the museum, along with surrounding residences, burnt to the ground late last week during the raging Butte Fire and it's assumed that the collection is largely lost. The operator is vowing to rebuild.
If only the Phone Cops had been able to call in the Phone Firemen...
We are not going to be mature about this.
Skylar and me, we prefer the warm, rich sound that you can only get from a pre-1930's phone. But I guess the rest of you are used to settling for your lame digital phones.
[takes hit off bong]
And did I mention that we were into that band before they went mainstream and poseurs like you jumped on the bandwagon?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I see what you did there.
Fortunately, the Telephone Museum, AKA The New England Museum of Telephony in Ellsworth, Maine hasn't burned down.
This museum has several *working* switches, including a #3 and a #5 crossbar switch, dozens of switchboards, and other cool stuff.
http://thetelephonemuseum.org/exhibits/
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
There was no ample warning; the radio talked about people that were literally pulled from their homes by the firemen attempting to fight the fire as the fireline approached residences. The people responsible for the museum were probably themselves too busy with their personal problems to take time to save the museum contents.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
On the other hand, back when Bell owned literally the entire telephone network from the handset to the central office they designed their telephones to last for decades and to provide good call quality. Once the regulations changed and now anyone could manufacture/sell a telephone, the quality of non-Western-Electric phones dropped so far that there are many old landline phones that have terrible acoustic properties. [...]
Well, really early telephones have terrible acoustic properties, from the simple fact that the microphone and speaker elements were quite primitive -- carbon elements (IIRC) on paper cones with Alnico (not ceramic or rare earth) magnets.
I think it may of been the 1950s or 60s, perhaps earlier, but Bell standardized on filtering audio to pass voice frequencies in the 300 to 3400 Hertz range. I believe this (or a 300-3k Hz simplification) became an ITU standard.
I agree the build quality of Western Electric (and Nortel) telephones, particularly business phones were impressive in how ruggedly build "office equipment" was built.
Here's an interesting look at audio quality of modern (digital) mobile phones, from IEEE Spectrum (free access), Why Mobile Voice Quality Still Stinks—and How to Fix It