![]() ![]() This inspired Stowger to invent a mechanical telephone switch that allowed people to dial their own calls, without operator assistance. Stowger noticed a drop in his business, which he traced back to the fact that whenever someone asked to be connected to the local mortician, the operator was forwarding all of the calls to one place: her husband’s competing funeral parlor. In Phil Lapsey’s book, Exploding the Phone, he mentions a device made by an undertaker named Almon Stowger in the 1880s. It really comes down to the broad idea of automation in the telephone network, which pre-dates the blue box by at least 80 years. But if you’ll humor me for a minute, the central concept behind the blue box-finding ways to circumvent telephone operators. Kristen: The first blue box wasn’t made by Wozniak, but by Robert Barclay, in 1960. Stephen: I think there’s a perception that Wozniak and Jobs invented the Blue Box, but that’s not true, is it? The Museum recently added a Blue Box built by Woz to their impressive collection, 2 so I thought it’d be a fun chance to look at part of the pre-Apple relationship between these two men, and what this little device could do. ![]() Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were a part of this scene, 1 as I recently discussed with Kristen Gallerneaux, Curator of Communications and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum. Image Courtesy of The Computer History Museum One leader of this group operated by the handle of Captain Crunch, as it was discovered a plastic toy whistle included in the cereal could generate a tone used to trick the phone system into allowing long-distance calls. The underground group of hackers and tinkerers behind this were dubbed phone phreaks. I’ve long been fascinated by blue boxes, small devices built in the 1960s and 70s to hijack the old analog phone systems for free calls. ![]()
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