Mail Call - 1970 Smith-Corona talking mail gadget

[barengeist.livejournal.com]

Mail talkies. What'll they think of next?

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

It's not as quaint as it seems - in AD 1970 cassette tapes were not the commonplace they would become. Reel-to-reel was about it.

My parents sent cassette letters back and forth when my Dad was away on business trips, for years. Thus their voices through time are preserved, long after they've passed away.

[luke-russell.livejournal.com]

Wow. What a beautiful thought. How lucky you are.

[kshandra]

We wound up sending the same cassette back and forth between my great-grandmother's place (with whom I lived) and her sister. I wish we still had one of them.

[bradygirl_12]

Couldn't help it! I thought of the Harry Potter-verse and their screeching letters. ;)

[plumtreeblossom.livejournal.com]

WTF? Telephones existed in 1970, and they didn't require a playback unit.

[luke-russell.livejournal.com]

But you needed to take out a second mortgage to pay AT&T's extortionist long distance rates. In 1970, a 3 minute call from NYC to LA cost the equivalent of $44 today.

[kshandra]

/nod We were just calling from one end of CA to the other, but the family standard was to dial the number, let it ring twice, then hang up, just as a way to say "all is well, we love you." If there was something that actually needed to be talked about, we'd let it ring. If not, the other household would two-ring back - "things are good here, too; same time next week."

Morse Phone

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Consider - using two rings for 'dash' and one ring for 'dot,' in theory you could have sent a real message!

In practice, I'm not sure that would have worked - making the same long-distance connection then hanging up three hundred times (which would send your comment above) would rouse somebody's suspicion, even if you had an automatic speed dialer. If you didn't, cranking that rotary dialer around three thousand, three hundred times would be a grueling endurance test (for both sides!) and would take hours.

But you'd be a shoo-in for Ripley's Believe It or Not!

[flummoxicated.livejournal.com]

Didn't I see this on an episode of MASH?

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Probably: Starting in WWII you could have wire recordings made, just step into the booth and blither away for thirty seconds, and the company would press it onto a phonograph record which you could then send. “Next best thing to being there,” you know.

[A running subplot in the film The Story of GI Joe was of such a record received by a soldier, ostensibly of his newborn son's voice, but being at the front lines he had no way to play it. As I recall, finally he found an Italian family living in their bomb-damaged house who still had a Victrola… They had no idea why he was so weirdly insistent until they, too heard the record, and smiled.]

[twillery.livejournal.com]

Aww, her grandson has such a cute cap on!^^

[luke-russell.livejournal.com]

It's not just the cap that's cute!