| Remember the name: The "phone" is of course a "telephone." Early abbreviators used 'phone. Phone without the apostrophe wasn't common until after World War II. Is this thing working? At first, most calls went through an operator. The operator would tell the caller to hold the line and the caller would wait patiently to be connected to the other person. When direct calls became possible, many callers got frustrated because the telephones didn't seem to work very well: nobody picked up the line. The phones were working just fine, the callers simply hung up before someone picked up on the other end of the line! (And you thought hold time seeming to drag on was a recent experience.) To address the above problem, telephone services created a ring that callers hear. We still have this system in place today. But the "ring" you hear after dialing a number is not actually the sound of the other telephone ringing. It's artificial; designed to keep you on the line until the other person picks-up the phone. That's why the other person sometimes picks up the phone before you hear it "ring." The voice of voicemail: The original was Jane Barbe. Before that, Jane was the "time lady." Jane passed away in 2003. And, now that the time-recording is no longer in service, her voice no longer lives on. Hearing yourself speak? Many of us lose the thread of the conversation if we can't hear ourselves speak. This caused problems with cell phones, in particular, because there's often lots of noise to block our voice out. To fix this problem, many cell services use a device that echoes your own voice back to your ear. Sometimes things get a little out of sync between your phone and the device and that's why you hear your voice echo back to you. Check it out: The echo is often the fault of a particular transmitter and it will often happen in the same physical location. |