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]
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[Ring builds with suspense]