Although apparently designed in the 60s; at the time when I was in my teens during the 1970s the Trimphone still seemed the height of Space Age sophistication.
My best friend's family had one; and when I was visiting I got great satisfaction from its electronic trill (with volume control!), its shape, and the crisp way that the receiver fitted into position.
By contrast our home phone, with its old-fashioned bell and rounded contours, was unexciting; and it was a bit lame that we needed to share our telephone line with a neighbour so that only one of the houses could talk at a time.
Not that that was often a problem, because the phone was used very seldom and only for very short periods. Calls in that era in England were extremely expensive; and the culture was one in which letters and cards were exchanged rather than electronically transmitted words.
For instance; when I was at medical school I made one call home per week, from a public phonebox (outdoors or in a corridor) for three minutes - but wrote at least one newsy latter (and received the same).
It was not until I did my overseas study elective in the USA, and was house-sitting for a Harvard Professor (who gave permission for it), that I sampled that culture of endless (because very cheap) rambling phone conversations with people who actually lived quite nearby; carrying the phone around the house with me on a 30 metre extension, or even putting it beside my bed - just like I had seen in the movies.
There was one significant problem with the Trimphone, that became evident when our family eventually got one; which was that the base of the phone was too light and the diameter too narrow, so that dialling required the other hand (the one holding the receiver) to hold the phone steady...
Our old-style phone had been so broad-based and solid that one-handed dialling had been easy and normal.
Later Trimphones had buttons, avoiding this problem; although the buttons just triggered a kind of pseudo-dialling sound. It took another decade or so before The Post Office/ British Telecom changed their system to use tone rather than clicks to distinguish numbers.
I was saying today to someone wouldn't life be nicer without phones and when the phone first came in to use a business application could be seen for the thing but nobody would have it in the house destroying the sanctity and privacy of the home. My grandfather had one of those heavy bakelite phones I think the post office took it back when he died, Trimphones were certainly the in thing in the 70's but I knew people that had no phone and if you did have a phone it was too expensive to use and if the phone rang it was usually bad news it certainly was never used for chit chat. No if it was down to me I would get rid of the lot and go back to using calling cards and the old telegram service much more civilized.
ReplyDeleteWe had one when I was a child and loved it for the reasons you give. The only issue was that the local starlings could imitate it *perfectly* which had us fruitlessly charging in from the garden to answer it. Of course, that was when the phone ringing was an event which could not be ignored.
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