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Hey everybody, host Nora McInerney is back for season two of the Head Start Embracing the Journey, a podcast from Ruby Studio and AbV.
In each episode Nora has a real conversation with real people living with chronic migraine to see how they took action to understand this disease.
So jump into the conversation for season two, a show that creates a little more space for empathy and understanding in such a complicated world.
There shouldn't be so much hesitation around asking questions and asking for help.
So don't wait, join the Head Start Embracing the Journey and learn a little bit more about life with chronic migraine.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know.
That's right. Can we, can you do your little trumpet sound, announcement trumpet?
Yeah, are you ready? Uh-huh.
Sorry, I'm on. No. No. Hold on.
There we go. Yeah we want to announce the a new writer that we have working with us.
Uh-huh. Welcome aboard Kyle Huckstra.
And everybody, we have just classed up this joint.
Yeah we have. Because Kyle is British and he lives there.
He's not like some dumb British dude living in, you know, Waco, Texas.
Or some American living in Great Britain.
This guy is like legit Brit.
That's right. He lives in Brighton and we gave him a test article and this was it.
He did such a good job. We were like, Hey, this thing's great and welcome aboard and he was interested and so it seems like the beginning of a new great relationship.
Yeah, agreed. So welcome aboard Kyle and thanks for this one.
I'm excited about this and this Chuck, if you'll remember, came up from the whistling episode.
Do you remember that? Did we, did you mention this?
Uh-no. One thing that Anna had turned up and kind of included as a sidebar was how Captain Crunch Whistle had been used to basically hack the phone system.
And I, I've been wanting to do an episode on phone freaking forever and it just so happened that reminded me and here we are now.
We asked Kyle to do it and this is our episode on phone freaking.
That you've been waiting for freaking ever to do.
Yeah. Yeah. For real? With a pH?
Uh, both ways actually.
Okay. Uh, yeah. I mean, I guess we should introduce what we're talking about here because this is something that if you're, oh, maybe of a certain age, you might not know what this is and I'm, I'm of that certain age that should know, but I didn't really know much about it to be honest.
Um, but we're talking about the fact that in the 1950s, well before that, let's say, you're not a that certain age.
Then our lifetime, uh, right pre computers.
Yeah. We were all still connected via something called the telephone system.
And in the United States, the telephone system was, uh, it's how humans connected before the internet and it was a big interconnected system.
Mm-hmm. That was manually operated by switchboards, which we should totally do a switchboard episode at some point.
Yeah. It was very, really interesting.
And they started to get rid of the switchboard operators in the 1950s for automatic switches.
Mm-hmm. And the one thing they didn't think about was the fact that they had a bit of a design flaw, uh, or a weakness in this system, whereas the tones they used, uh, to let the automatic system know like what to do with a telephone call.
Mm-hmm. Could be mimicked and replicated with sometimes a human voice, sometimes a toy whistle, like you said.
Or something that somebody made to essentially hack into the phone system by replicating those tones.
And AT&T was like, oh, we never thought that anyone would be interested in doing that.
Yeah. That was an outstanding introduction, man.
And it's called phone-freaking, PHP.
Yeah. And so phone-freakers were pretty much the earliest, uh, examples of hackers.
They were free computer hacker culture.
Yep. And as a matter of fact, hacking just grew essentially right out of phone-freaking.
And a lot of the phone freaks who were, uh, kind of on the whole jam in the early 80s just made the leap to computers through phones.
It's pretty interesting, as we'll see.
Totally. But there's one thing we should say about them as a community, uh, phone-freakers, uh, were curious individuals.
Like they were technical-minded types.
They were, they wanted to see how this vast, huge, connected, uh, network worked.
And they knew very well that there were a whole huge parts of it that were shielded from public view.
You weren't meant to know about this.
You didn't need to know about it.
Just go in and punch the phone number and we'll connect it for you.
That wasn't enough. They wanted to know everything there was to know about it.
In one way that they're, uh, you can find out how something works is to try to break it.
And that was kind of what they were doing.
They weren't doing it maliciously for almost exclusively.
They weren't doing it maliciously.
They were doing it out of curiosity.
Yeah. And it sort of reminded me a little bit of like, hand-radio operators where like the victory of a, like a win for a phone-freaker was like, oh my god, I, I connected with someone through the back door in another country and was able to talk to them.
And yeah, maybe some people like took advantage of like free long distance and stuff like that.
But like you said, I think as a whole, the community was just like, those were the wins.
Like, oh my god, I was able to do this thing.
How cool. Right. So let's, let's kind of start at the beginning, shall we?
Because freaking did not exist prior to the 50s or 60s when they introduced automatic switches, which is a little aside about the switches.
The guy who invented them actually invented them in the 19th century.
He was a mortician who, his competition, the across town, mortician, his rival.
That guy's wife was the town operator.
So when somebody called to ask for a mortician, she automatically connected them to her husband's business, not this guy's business.
So he actually went out of his way to invent an automatic switch to replace human operators.
And decades later, they finally came into play.
But you couldn't have done this before when somebody was like connecting the call for you, because if you just started whistling in their ear, something like that, they'd be like, what are you doing?
This isn't, this is really bizarre.
I'm not going to connect this call.
It was once it became automated that it became possible.
Yeah. I mean, did they even have dial tones with switchboard operators?
I don't believe so. I don't see why you would.
I think, I think when they converted to automatic switches, they adopted something called multi-frequency tones, and it was all where you had a tone, like you pressed a one, and it made a certain tone actually a combination of tones, hence the multi-frequency thing.
And it told this network, turn this gear or this dial, and everyone knows I don't know what I'm talking about with gears, but there were gears involved.
And things like actually would move somewhere in space because a tone told it to.
That's kind of what they brought online in the 50s and 60s.
So if someone whistled at a switchboard operator, they would be from the future.
Yeah. Kind of, or else they'd be fresh.
Yeah, they'd be fresh because they'd be like a wolf whistler or something.
So let's talk about phones for a second because when we talk about these tones, we largely think of like a push button telephone, which is what we use starting, geez, I'm not even really sure, but they replace the rotary phones, not replace.
They worked alongside for many years.
We had both for a long time in my house.
Yeah. But the button on the phone isn't exactly key to the system operating.
The only thing the phone would do was create that tone.
The tone was what mattered.
It did get me wondering like, well, how the heck does a rotary phone even work?
And this is just a slight aside, but I never knew how that operated.
And the way a rotary phone would work was you would dial the number around.
And that part didn't really matter.
It was the return back into position that sent this, that would engage basically these electrical contacts to interrupt the electrical continuity.
So a nine would go, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it would interrupt it nine different times and sending a signal saying, hey, this is a nine dumb dumb.
And I never knew how that worked.
So I thought that was pretty fascinating.
But as far as the push button phone, you would just press a button.
It would have a tone assigned to it.
And it's those tones that freaks were able to replicate to essentially fool the phone company into thinking that somebody was pressing a button.
And in some cases, cases they were, which we'll talk about.
And just knowing that you could trick the system into dialing something for you just by whistles or making tones, not using your phone, that's fun in and of itself.
But there's a really good example of how this could be put to use in a way that was like, okay, this is no longer legal.
You're actually, you're actually hijacking the phone system for your own ends.
And this was the basis of freaking.
There was a tone that was instrumental to this whole multi-frequency tone system.
And it was, I think the minor E, that resonates at 26.
