If someone asks you if you know what something is (i.e. a strange noise or music coming from outside) and you have no idea what it is, just say, “Maybe we’ll read about it in the news.”(…or the grapevine). Speaking of grapevines, they are pretty amazing, but often not very accurate, especially over time. No, I am not talking about the vines that grow lovely purple or green fruit that can be squished into wine. Although that could be an interesting blog, I’m talking about the passing on of news from one person to another. Did you ever play that game when you were a child where you sat around in a circle and one child whispered something in the child’s ear next to them, and each would pass it to the next until it came to the last one who spoke it out loud? It was almost always garbled into something else – sometimes it was funny and sometimes it was mostly unintelligible. Something like “Susie got engaged,” became, “Sussiged rolled goats.” Or “Road runners are pretty,” became, “Roddy is pregnant!” (I hope there isn’t a Roddy in the room.) As children, I doubt we realized that it was a lesson on what can happen when we aren’t careful about how we pass information on about others. (Did the parents infiltrate this game into our playtime? Smart parents, if they did.)
Communication is so key to mankind, for many reasons. Honest, open communication is best. And it starts early. Did you ever have a line running from one can to a buddy’s can? Could you hear each other? I vaguely remember trying, but it didn’t word. However, my husband has fond memories of getting it to work to some degree. He says the old Morton salt paper cans worked better than tin cans. Better or calmer vibrations? Amazing. Was this what prompted Alexander Bell to create a working phone line?
Okay, a slight side track: Alexander Graham Bell. Did you know that his middle name was a birthday gift at age eleven (he asked for it), likely to differentiate himself from his father and grandfather who were also Alexanders? He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at age 23 (1870) he and his parents immigrated to Canada. Bell moved to the United States to teach at the Boston School for the Deaf (professor of vocal physiology at Boston University) and only became a naturalized citizen after gaining fame for developing the telephone (1882). Both his father and his grandfather were distinguished speech therapists and Bell’s mother and wife were both hearing-impaired, so he had firsthand experience of hearing through vibrations – “or the principles of acoustics and his experiments in transmitting sound waves over wires”. While in Boston, he developed a written system of symbols that instructed the deaf to pronounce sounds (Visible Speech). Amazingly, Bell also invented the first wireless phone – patented in 1880! – but it took many decades and fiber-optic technology to transmit sound by light for a wide-scale commercial application. He also invented an electromagnetic machine (a rudimentary metal detector) in a quest to save the life of President James Garfield after he was shot in 1881. The device failed to find the bullet, in part because of the interference of steel mattress wires and in part because they thought the bullet was on the right side, when, after Garfield’s death, it was found on the left side. Bell was lifelong friends with Helen Keller, as he was the one who directed her father to Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind where the recent graduate and miracle-working tutor Anne Sullivan worked. Bell experimented with aviation and created giant manned tetrahedral kites. His interest in planes that could take off from water helped him in designing a winged hydrofoil boat (skips across water surfaces at high speeds). His design held a world water-speed record in 1919 (70 mph) that stood for over a decade. Telephones in North America were silenced in Bell’s honor following his death.
Attempting to pretend to get back on track, recently, one of my daughter-in-laws brought up the subject of party lines. I’m sure you younger folks are thinking this is a line of people waiting to get into a really awesome party. But what we were discussing was the old telephone systems wherein you shared your telephone line with one or two or more houses. Yes, that’s how it started – at least in rural areas. If you tried to use the phone and you picked it up to hear people already talking, you’d have to wait your turn. If you tried several times and they were still talking, you could interrupt their conversation to politely let them know you needed to call someone. If you were lucky, your party-line neighbors were nice and agreed to wrap it up soon. If they were rude or uncaring, then you’d just have to fume a bit until the phone was at last free. I was only unfortunate to have had a party line once, and my co-liners were decent. But the point is, that if you were a snoop and you were careful picking up – there could be a click picking up or setting down – you might get some good gossip material. Of course, you couldn’t make any noise at all or you’d be caught. I would never have done this, because I wasn’t interested and it was not a nice thing to do, but even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have pulled it off as I had two little ones at the time. A little too much noise on my end.
As things progressed, if you picked your phone up and someone else was talking, it meant someone in your house had beat you to it (sometimes it took longer to get to use the phone than the party line phones!). That was a big step from having only one phone in the house…now we had two or three phones on the same line in the same house. Much handier if you were in the kitchen and the phone rang. Previously, the phone was stationary in one room or hallway and you’d have to run to get it. Very exciting it was in those days. The next step was the honking big cordless phones. We laugh when we see them in old television shows, but it was step one in a liberation of communication through the telephone.
Sliding about three and half decades into the future (it’s really not that many years when you think about how far technology has come) through slimmer cordless phones, to flip phones and now smart phones (seriously? smart? how can phones be smart? where's the world coming to?), and one of my granddaughters at about seven years old, tries to use the landline phone in our den to call her mom and was quite seriously confused (you should have seen the frown) when I told her someone else was using it. She couldn’t grasp that someone else was using the phone in her hand or that the one in her hand was also the one in the kitchen and that it was on the same line as the one in the den. (Confused yet?) Hilarious – her expressions. She also could have listened in on the conversation if she had ever gotten through to understanding the concept of two phones on the same line. (She is likely one of the people who was thinking that a party line was a line of people waiting to get into a very awesome party.)
The magic of telephone lines is gone (well, partly – some of us do still have landlines), and now we have phones that run off of “magic air” and towers, and sometimes we have as many separate phones in the house as we do people. Not that that is bad; it’s generally quite helpful. If you need to make a call, you have your phone and no one is competing for it. Less arguments in the house.
I'm not sure how this became a “history” of telephones when I set out on the subject of talking about others. But I’ll wander back to it for a few minutes. (Feel free to time me, so someone else gets their turn.) None of us like it when other people talk about us behind our backs, or assume they know what we’ve done or why we’ve done it or if it was “bad” or “good” or whatever. My ex-father-in-law once said to me that if people would keep their noses in their own business instead of other people’s business, the world would be a whole lot better. He was a circuit court judge, so he knew what he was talking about. And he practiced what he preached. One of the best things I ever heard said about my own father was that he never said a bad word about anyone; and he never gossiped. My own husband, like his father before him, follows in their footsteps. Did you know there is a verse in the Bible that says, “Do not pay attention to every word people say, or you may hear your servant cursing you— for you know in your heart that many times you yourself have cursed others.” (Ecclesiastes 7:21-22 NIV) I equate that with talking about other people; don’t get mad at someone for speaking ill of you, because you’ve done the same thing at some point or other. Whether because you were hurt, angry, in the right or just plain being mean or jealous, or merely (oops!) careless, chances are we’ve all been there, said something we shouldn’t have, shared something we shouldn't have shared, and, if we’re decent people, felt bad later. “I’m sorry” goes a long way sometimes; just saying.
So, the moral of the story: we can care about other people and pass information on when it is necessary, but we should be very careful with the facts, and we should not be passing judgments or passing on anything that we wouldn’t want passed on about ourselves or our loved ones, or without permission or knowledge that it is a subject that is free to share. It’s nobody else’s business if you’re going through a divorce, or if your child is gay or trans or overweight or whatever, or someone you know was arrested, or, or, or,….we all have our blunders, problems, trials, etc. Most of the time, NOT passing on another’s business is the best policy. Be like Sergeant Shultz on Hogan's Heroes. "I know nothing." (sounded more like noth-ink.) Meanwhile, I hear my phone pinging – I hope it’s one of my kids in for a good chat (text) on my magic (smart) cell phone. All I need now is a magic carpet to get me to them in a flash.
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