How the Telephone Failed Its Big Test During 1918's Spanish Flu Epidemic (fastcompany.com) 40
Fast Company's technology editor harrymcc writes:
When the Spanish flu struck in 1918, the U.S. reacted in ways that sound eerily familiar, by closing public places and telling people to stay at home. The one technology that promised to make isolation less isolating was the telephone, which was used for commerce, education, and even news distribution. But the phone itself got caught up in the flu's damaging impact on society, and AT&T ended up running ads asking people not to make calls if at all possible. I wrote about this little-known tale of technology's promise and pitfalls for Fast Company.
The article shows some strange glimpses of a very different time.
"A New York Telephone ad even warned that operators might inquire about the nature of a call to ensure that it was truly necessary."
The article shows some strange glimpses of a very different time.
"A New York Telephone ad even warned that operators might inquire about the nature of a call to ensure that it was truly necessary."
Telephone triage (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
In 1918, phoncalls required manual intervention, intervention by people who had to risk getting the Spanish Flu (is THAT racist?) to sit in a crowded room and physically "connect" callers. The more calls, the more operators that had to report for work, the more operators that worked, the more likely they would get sick, the more sick operators there were, the harder it would be to find people to come in and work the (actual) switchboards.
Seems perfectly reasonable to encourage the few people that had teleph
Phones were better back then. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The only reason that phones can be used to annoy people is that they and the network are both better now. It wasn't cost-effective back then.
Re: (Score:3)
Back then phones were used to call people. Today, phones are used by motherfuckers to annoy the hell out of everyone on the planet.
It's not the hardware, it's the quality of media commentators in the two eras. Back then, real journalists still existed. Had today's media people been around in 1918, they would have cited the overloaded phone system as an excuse to heap scorn on the whole idea of telephony. The technology would never have developed to the point of being universal and trusted. Teenagers of the Fifties would have spent hours sending telegrams back and forth to each other.
Re: (Score:2)
And I remember back in the day we used to rush to answer the phone. Sometimes we even had to push our little sisters away to get to it first.
And when we got answering machines the first thing we did when we got back home was to check it. You have 3 messages. OMG, I can't wait to hear them!
But now? I don't even look at my phone. Sure, I paid 300 times more for it than that really cool slimline AT&T phone I bought in 1987, but...wait...300 times more? I don't have a $6000 phone. I meant 30 times mor
Re: (Score:2)
Tldr; A lot operators got sick. Anti-5G criminals (Score:5, Interesting)
For those who don't care to read 5 paragraphs into the story to find out what happened:
Back then calls were connected by human operators plugging your line into someone else's line. (Using 1/4" phone plugs, same plug as large headphones). Many of the operators got sick and were out at the same time call volume increased. There weren't enough operators to handle all of the calls.
That reminds me of something happening today. People scared of 5G are intentionally damaging wireless phone company equipment, at a time when people most need connectivity.
Re:Tldr; A lot operators got sick. Anti-5G crimina (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Even now, the telecommunications systems -- landlines, wireless, etc... -- are only designed to handle a fraction of the customer base at any one time. It's not designed for *everyone* to call at the same time.
That's not true anymore. For wired networks the voice traffic does not even register as noise, it's so insignificant. Switching capacity is also essentially unlimited, a simple software softswitch can handle millions of simultaneous calls.
Modern LTE networks are capable of supporting 100% voice utilization. Think about it, a typical voice call in HD is about 8 kilobytes per second. Urban base stations typically have 1Gbit fiber optic connectivity (so about 15000 simultaneous calls). And by dropping HD th
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Tldr; A lot operators got sick. Anti-5G crimina (Score:5, Interesting)
Calls between different providers in many places around the world still use POTS line
I was working at a mobile phone operator back in 2006 (in Ukraine) and even by that time there were no copper trunks between phone stations. The weirdest thing we saw was an electromechanical switching system (Strowger-type) installed inside the ministry of defense, with fiber optic uplink to the phone network.
So I don't think there are any actual copper inter-CO trunks, except maybe deep in rural areas.
Re: (Score:1)
That is true for _calls_, yes. That is not true for telecommunications.
That is not true for Netflix watching and torrent downloading and ... It is not true for utilizing the full amount of bandwidth that you've been sold.
Re: (Score:2)
That was true in the days of circuit-switched networks. But modern telephony systems are all digital, all data packet switching networks and have been for a decades now. We all went packet switching because
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Tldr; A lot operators got sick. Anti-5G crimina (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not, but mobile transmitters and receivers ARE needed to make your cell phone work, and the idiots who think corona is caused by 5G can't tell a 5G antenna from a 4G one, or even from anything else. They just see technological thing and break it.
Luddites (Score:2)
They just see technological thing and break it.
Luddites [wikipedia.org] are nothing new sadly.
Re: (Score:3)
The theory they use to defend their actions are amusing - they believe 5G towers (and only 5G towers) are causing the spread of COVID-19. Their "proof" is the lack of Coronavirus deaths in Africa, a continent with lower per capita infection/death rates than anywhere else.
The fact that there is wide-spread use of anti-malaria drugs in Africa and the minimal amount of travel between African nations and China, specifically Wuhan province, is not a factor in their minds.
These are likely the same people that bel
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Over 2.5 months, not a single person under age 39 has died
Bullshit [independent.co.uk].
Re: 1918 and SARS-CoV-2 cannot be compared (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Not a single person under that age in Canada, you dopey fucking muppet.
Bullshit [theglobeandmail.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit [independent.co.uk].
Canada's largest province is Ontario, not California.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
The information on the Washington state coronavirus website https://www.doh.wa.gov/emergencies/coronavirus [wa.gov] shows 0% deaths in the 0-19 age range, and 1% of deaths in the 20-39 age range. Even the percentage of deaths in the 40-59 age range is only 6%. 93% of the deaths have been in the age range 60+.
I'll be interested in seeing information from global sources regarding death rates by age, but despite lower age ranges getting infected at well-distributed rates in Washington (2% confirmed cases 0-19 years
Re: 1918 and SARS-CoV-2 cannot be compared (Score:2)
We have had a 13 year old with no known underlying health conditions die in the UK this week. We have also had a 5 year old with underlying health conditions die in the last couple of days. So while the young are less likely to die, they do die. Lots of people in the 20-30 and 30-40 ranges have died too.
Re: 1918 and SARS-CoV-2 cannot be compared (Score:2)
We have had a 13 year old with no known underlying health conditions die in the UK this week. We have also had a 5 year old with underlying health conditions die in the last couple of days. So while the young are less likely to die, they do die. Lots of people in the 20-30 and 30-40 ranges have died too
Is this email really necessary ? (Score:1)
No comparison (Score:1)
It's really hard to compare the largely manually operated, electromechanically driven phone system of 100 years ago to the digital, fiber optic system we have now.
The fact the 1918 system remained functional at all during that pandemic is nothing short of a miricle.
Re: (Score:2)
It's really hard to compare the largely manually operated, electromechanically driven phone system of 100 years ago to the digital, fiber optic system we have now.
No it isn't, you just ignore all the differences and assume that, like today, everyone had a telephone and no one ever worried about the cost.
In 1918 phones were rare (not common), expensive, and relied heavily on manual interaction to establish a call on the limited number of phone circuits available. Today it's a service so common poor get free service, the infrastructure is nearly infinite, and the cost of an actual phone call is all but immeasurable.
Correction (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Interesting reading. I checked wiki to remind myself why it was called the Spanish Flu in the first place...
To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.[7] Newspapers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit.[8] This gave rise to the name Spanish flu.[9][10] Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify with certainty the pandemic's geographic origin, with varying views as to its location.[1]
I guess it's good that we're not in the middle of a world war (GWT notwithstanding).
Overlooking the obvious (Score:2)
Only the rich (Score:2)
In any case this is another story of how the privalidged were promised special treatment but in the end were subject to the same inconveniences as the poor.
Today the companies are helping everyone. Opening up hotspots. Added data. Free calls to infected countries. Even zoom, as