Number, Please

No, I' don't mean the number called by the clerk at the DMV or a busy Baskin-Robbins. In fact, the voice at the other end of the “wire” might have announced herself as “Central.”

Back in the days before dial phones and rotary phones were the rectangular boxes hung on the wall which we called telephones. They came equipped with mouthpiece, ear piece and the handle which you used to either ring up Central in order to connect with the outside world or use the code of one long, two short rings, etc. to call neighbors on “your line” (sort of like a neighborhood intercom).

All this nostalgia was brought to mind when I read our local paper’s Rewrite column last week. According to that information, it was 100 years ago this month that the Bell Telephone Company was building a line across Nevada and was expected to arrive in Elko before the end of the month.  I’m sure the city fathers had no inkling of what this would mean, nor of the communication marvels (or menaces) that would be invented in the next 100 years.

How I would have loved to visit with someone who experienced such an advance. My grandmother would have been 18 or 20 years old in 1914 and although I was blessed to know her until my 22^nd year, I never thought of asking her about such things as how she felt when she first used a telephone. (Not that she was a Nevadan. She lived in rural Northeastern Missouri, but the isolation factor would have been somewhat the same.)

Instant communication for the man on the street was a fictional idea when I was a child reading Dick Tracy when I visited my grandmother. Now most of us carry our “communicator” in our pocket, but the concept of that same little phone also being a camera and a computer (another unknown to a generation just past) would have been totally mystifying to my parents.

Just 100 years ago… Wonder what the next 100 years may bring?