This is one of countless examples of the Western
Electric Model 500 telephone. Originally introduced in 1950, this telephone
in its many colors and variants was used in pretty much every household and business in
the United States well into and past the 1980s. See, until the 1984 divestiture of the Bell
system, no one owned their telephones. They were the property of the telephone company
and were leased to the customer. Western Electric was a wholly owned subsidiary
of the American Telephone & Telegraph company, with AT&T enjoying a monopoly as THE telephone
company for the entire united states throughout much of the 20th century. So, this phone in every sense belonged to
the phone company. The Model 500 telephone, along with the wall-mounted
Model 554, is an iconic design by the firm of Henry Dreyfuss, a prolific designer whose
focus on ergonomics shaped much of the mid 20th century. One of its most recognizable features is its
ring. If your smartphone has an old phone option,
it could very well be a recording of one of these phones. [Telephone rings] When touch-tone service
was first introduced in 1963, the Model 500 was altered into the Model 1500, replacing
the rotary dial with an array of buttons. In 1968, the Model 1500 was further refined
into the Model 2500, which added the star key and the hasht… [hacking cough] ...excuse
me, pound key. You see children, before the advent of the
touch-tone dialing system, telephones used a rotary dial. By repeatedly interrupting the phone’s connection
with the phone line, through a process called pulse dialing, mechanically driven switching
equipment would create an actual circuit between one telephone and another possibly hundreds
of miles away. To use this dial, the finger is inserted to
the hole corresponding to the number desired, and the dial is dragged to the finger stop. When the finger is removed from the dial,
it returns to its original position, creating a corresponding number of pulses as it travels. Smaller numbers were faster to dial, which
is a large part of why big US cities have area codes consisting of small numbers, with
New York being 212, Chicago 312, and Los Angeles 213. Poor Honolulu was late to the party, getting
the terribly long-winded 808. [sound of dial] Anyway, the model 1500 and 2500 did feature
an altered faceplate to accommodate the push buttons, but almost everything else stayed
the same. Ignoring this model’s added modular connection
between the handset and wall cord, everything from the cradle back is exactly the same. Take a look at the bottom and you’ll see
it’s almost identical. And of course, the ringer stayed pretty much
unchanged. [Telephone rings] These phones were designed to be in service
for decades, and as such they are among the most robust objects in the home. Each and every one had to withstand at least one of
these; “Oh yeah? Well have a nice day to you to!” [bells
ring from the violent replacement of the handset] Sometimes they’d even have to endure one
of these. That pretty much sums up why these were in
service so long--they were robust, they worked, and were easy to repair. Their modular construction meant each component
was easy to replace, and since there were millions of the same phone in service, every
telephone technician would be intimately familiar with what could go wrong and how to fix it. The phone was so reliable, though, that they
didn’t often need repair. Sitting at the back are a pair of bells. These are what make the distinctive ring,
with the pitch interval between them a delightful major third. [bells struck manually] There’s a striker
sitting right next to one bell, and a good distance from the other. When it receives a phone call, the roughly
20 hz, 90 volt electricity that drives the ringer will energize this solenoid and repeatedly
pull the striker into this bell, and push it into the other. The farther bell can be moved with the help
of a thumbwheel on the bottom, and this adjusts the volume of the ringer. Less distance between the bells restricts
the movement of the striker, which makes the ring softer. Even when switching to the touch tone keypad,
the interior construction of the phone was virtually the same. Take a look at the ringer, and it’s got
the same bells and the same striker, though there is a slight pitch variance between each
phone. [bells struck manually--the second phone is
slightly lower pitched] This example ditched the all-metal construction for some cheaper
plastic components, and the bracket the bells rest on was broken and needed repair. Nevertheless, you can see that much of the
design in these telephones is the same, with the exception of the keypad / dial and the
network electronics. Being a fixture of American life for so long
means these phones made their way into countless movies and television shows. [ROB: Boy I sure hate to let Maria down like
this] [BIALYSTOCK: Go to desk. Answer telephone. ‘Bialystock and Bloom? Bialystock and Bloom?’] [MAN HOLDING PHONE: Mr Chambers? Kevin Harkins] [COACH: I better give ‘em
a call and find out what this is all about] [KITTY (sarcastically): I need to work on
my attitude. Bye, then!] Since the phones were so ubiquitous, any television
show or movie made between 1950 and 1984 and beyond in which a character answers a telephone
call is gonna have one of these phones ring. [JACK: Backup crew has to set up the guest
list, and (telephone rings) the hotel room. Swigert. Yeah] [Telephone rings] [MARGE: Hello?] [MIKE: Yeah, eh, is this Marge?] [PETER: You gonna answer that?] [Telephone rings] [JANINE (under her breath): I’ve quite better jobs than this. Ghostbusters, whaddya want?] [SAM: I’m fine] [Telephone rings] [COACH:
Cheers.] [Telephone rings] [JOHN: Studio 6.] [TONY: We got a green light] These were in service long after 1984, in
fact this model 500 is marked 1988, and was originally the property of Saskatchewan Tel. Apparently it took a while for Saskatchewan
to get onboard with touch-tone dialing. It’s very possible, though, that this phone
is actually much older, and was sold to Sasktel and refurbished, with the manufacturer being
ITT and not Western Electric. Regardless, even into the nineties, these
phones were common at home, and in the movies, too. Now before you call up and complain that “there
was also the princess phone and the trimline phone!” I recognize the existence of all these variants
and others. However, the Model 500 in its original desk
phone configuration was by FAR the most common telephone, and thus we’re just gonna ignore
the specialty phones for now. Anyway, back to the ring. If you’re producing a TV show or movie,
and you need a phone to ring, there are a few ways to do it. One of which is to actually wire the phone
into a ringer circuit, which can make the phone ring with the press of a button. This has the advantage of creating a very
realistic sounding ring, as the acoustics of the set will affect the ring just like
it does everything else. It can also make timing for the actors easier,
as they can actually react to the phone’s ring. Or, you could go a step further and actually
make the telephone functional by connecting it to a real phone line. Then you could actually call it. This has the added advantage of making the
one-sided telephone call far more believable, as the actor could actually be talking to
someone on the other end. This could be impractical for set design,
though, and adds expense to the production. Your third option is to cheat. Since you could hear this phone ring in any
household, office, or business, and every phone sounded pretty much the same, you could
just add a stock recording in post. Doing this allowed the actors to simply answer
the phone on their own time, and it also eliminated potential problems from poor microphone placement
or high levels of background noise. But sometimes you can tell when this has been
done. And surprisingly, there seem to be some very
old recordings that were being used well into the age of digital sound. In the days of analog recording technology,
two significant things to avoid were what are called wow and flutter. For example, a recording made on a tape requires
that the tape move at precisely the same speed without any variation, otherwise the pitch
of what’s being recorded can vary along with the tape speed. Often times this can go unnoticed, but when
the recording is of a tone, it can be quite pronounced. This 2000 hz sine wave should sound like this. [Tone] But if recorded onto a tape with a
tape recorder that has a worn capstan or any number of other issues, the tone might come
back out sounding like this. [Same tone, but pitch falters rapidly] That’s
flutter, and it can be quite annoying. Since the bells in these telephones produce
a constant pitch, it’s easy to tell a recording from a real ring. If you hear any flutter in the sound of this
phone, you know you must be listening to an analog tape recording. [Recording with strong flutter of the telephone’s
ring] Of course, movies and TV shows used tape recorders for many years, so some flutter
was to be expected in older films. But sometimes, you hear a very slow, distinctive
wow, which is by the way technically just very slow flutter. Take a listen to this telephone ring from
the film Trading Places. [Telephone rings] [COLEMAN: Hello? Hm. Oh. Hello Mr. Duke, sir.] Did you hear how the pitch dipped as it rang? Listen again. [Telephone rings] [COLEMAN: Hello? Hm. Oh.] The pitch rises and falls as the telephone
rings. This pitch variation continues as the vibration
of the bells decay. This wouldn’t happen with the recording
equipment used on set, because a tape recorder would rarely if ever introduce wow as pronounced
as this. Where this wow comes from is almost certainly
a vinyl record. I’ve put the sound of the phone ringing
in Audacity so I could place some markers on where the pitch falters. This first marker is where the pitched peaked,
and the second is at its lowest. I placed a third marker at the next peak. [Recording is played three times] The time
from peak to peak was 1.784 seconds. Why is that significant? Because a record with a speed of 33 and a
third RPM will make one revolution every 1.8 seconds. This is the New CBS Audio-File Sound Effects
Library. The only audio-file guaranteed to never start
an argument. Discs like this could be used as a source
of any number of sounds. Now, these particular discs don’t have a
telephone ring, but they have plenty of other stuff. [Background noise from an airport] [MALE ANNOUNCER: The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. No parking.] [FEMALE ANNOUNCER: The white zone is for immediate
loading and unloading of passengers only. No parking.] A tricky thing about vinyl records, though,
is that unless the disc is exactly perfectly centered, the pitch will rise and fall with
each rotation. This happens because with an off-center record,
the speed of the groove as it travels past the stylus will repeatedly increase and decrease. It’s not that uncommon for the center hole
of a disc to be punched just a little bit off-center, and result is the dreaded wow. Listen to this recording from the Official
Album of Epcot Center. [Music begins, with a repeating dip in pitch] That’s pretty bad. You can actually see the stylus moving left
and right with each rotation, which shows just how off-center this record’s hole was
punched. This is probably what’s happening when you
hear this phone ring. [Telephone rings] Because the recording is of a pair of bells
which have a constant pitch, it’s easy to discern if the pitch has faltered at all. Many films were made that seem to use recordings
from old vinyl discs. I’m guessing film studios had just archived
these recordings and used them again and again. Many people might not notice it, but those
with a good ear for pitch (or the pedantic) will. And I definitely have. And it bugs the crap out of me. [MR. FAWLTY: It’s..it’s..it’s a semitone
higher!] [GUEST: A semitone?] [MR. FAWLTY: At least!] But what’s most interesting to me is that
these recordings just kept on being used even into the nineties. Take a listen to the phone ring in this scene
from Terminator 2. [Telephone rings] [MRS. CONNOR: Hello?] [JOHN CONNOR: Yeah it’s me.] [MRS. CONNOR: John?] That’s even worse than the last one! [Telephone rings] Opening it in audacity and adding markers gives a time between the peaks of about 1.85
seconds, close to the 1.8 seconds per revolution of a 33 and a third rpm record. But the really pedantic viewers out there
might know that this sound effect is not only riddled with wow, it’s also the wrong ring! John Connor’s Mom, and I’m putting that
in air quotes there, answered a Trimline phone. The Trimline phone only had one bell in its
ringer, and it did not sound like the Model 500. It should have sounded like this clip from
Argo. [a distinctly different telephone rings] How’s that for pedantry? Now because it’s the wrong ring we know
it’s a recording anyway (though it hasn’t yet made its way to the Goofs page on the
IMDB, who wants to add it??) but the fact that the film is from 1991 makes it hard to
believe that digital sound recording equipment wasn’t being used on set. And it’s also funny to me that no one had
bothered to make new recordings of these telephones ringing. There are millions of these floating around,
how hard can it be to make a new, digital recording? But I digress. As a side note, you may have noticed I used
a clip of the Dick Van Dyke show. On air from 1961 until 1966, this show is
riddled with Model 500’s just like this. But throughout the show, they use a completely
different ring. [LAURA: The butcher! I gotta take the roast out of the freezer!] [Telephone rings--unlike any we’ve heard
so far] [ROB: Hi!] [The same telephone rings]
[ROB: Oh! That’s loud at night!] [Telephone rings softly after adjustment]
[ROB: That’s better] To be honest that sounds like it came from
an alarm clock. I checked on YouTube for older model 500’s
just in case the ring had changed, but there’s a red model 500 from 1957 that sounds just
like these two. A link’s down below if you’re interested. Making a movie or TV show is a huge undertaking,
and the sound designers deserve a lot of credit for all the post-production work they do. Much of the sound you hear in a film comes
not from microphones on set, but from the people working behind the scenes to make it
all sound real and believable. Terminator 2 actually won the oscar for best
sound design, but man does that phone ring bother me. [Telephone rings] Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the
video. If this is your first time coming across the
channel and you liked what you saw, please consider subscribing. You can also support the channel through Patreon. If you’re interested in making a totally
voluntary contribution, please check out my patreon page. Thanks for your consideration, and I’ll
see you next time. [Ring builds with suspense]
The Dick Van Dyke show might have used a doctored ringtone to not confuse viewers at home by making them think their own phone was ringing.
Hey, get a load of this nerd!
I actually found this really interesting.
Guy's subtlety in dialing Jenny's number on the rotary phone and the IT Crowd's Emergency Services number on the touch tone phone. Brilliant.
Shout out to SaskTel!
Taking a while to get on with the touch tone dialing.... But at least now they have Fiber direct into my house. :)