Meet the Record-O-Fone

I came across a reference today to a message being left on a "record-o-fone".  I delight in futurama - particularly material culture and technology from the 1930s through the 1960s which were often given names intended to sound really futuristic.  All you have to do to make me laugh is to make a joke somewhere in this genre.  This is no doubt a big part of the reason I love the show Futurama, which riffs on these themes all the time. Historian Rob MacDougall cracks me up with his jokes about "electromail" and the "interwob".    

From our perspective, many of these names sound deliciously outdated.  When I noticed the reference to the device in a letter, I had to take a 15 minute break to find out what the heck it was.  My guess is that fifty years from now, historians will no doubt view some of those engaging in today's Futurology or "Future Studies" in the same way.  

I frequently mock the Bay Area's "Bay Area Rapid Transit" (BART) heavy rail as being the product of a designer in the 1970s imaging what the year 2000 would look like.  See for yourself.  The BART even has carpeted floors, which, as you can probably imagine, have not stood the test of time.  They really should have chosen the shag carpet instead. 

Here is an up-close picture of a record-o-fone, more specifically, the Bell RT-65 Recordophone.   

Today, while looking at correspondence from the National Anthropological Archives, I found a reference to a record-o-fone from 1969 in a letter from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.  The reference was fleeting, to paraphrase it was sort of a "We got your message on the record-o-fone," type of thing.  Wenner-Gren is a non-profit which promotes anthropological and social scientific research.   Apparently, the foundation had acquired one of these fancy devices that recorded the voices of those calling a phone with nobody on the other end available to pick up.  The record-o-fone was the precursor to the answering machine, which is also known as the answerphone, or telephone answering device (TAD).  According to Ye Olde Wikipedia, the answering machine was invented by 1935 by a man named Benjamin Thornton, about which Wikipedia knows nothing else. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the terminology here, "Hey there, this is Sam, leave me a message on my TAD."  The lingo must have taken some getting used to.  

The snazzy thing about the record-o-fone is that you could use it to tape pretty much anything with it, not just phone conversations.  The Watergate Tapes were evidently created on a similar device, called produced by Sony, the TC-800B.  You can see nerds talking about it here.  Those working on behalf of Nixon had "bugged" the Oval Office with several microphones which allowed it to record the crazed ramblings of our elected officials for our listening pleasure. 

Early answerphones used tapes to record the voices on the other end of the line.  The digital answering machine was invented in 1983, but didn't catch on for millions of grandmothers (who still used those little tapes) until years and years later.  Another letter in the archives complains that the one caller had a mere fifteen seconds to record a message for the Wenner-Gren Foundation before being cut off.  Instead of recording the message, the individual in question, in his secretary's absence, chicken pecked a letter to the foundation instead.  While snail mail may have been winning some minor victories over telephone recording devices, the record-o-fone was already well on its way to winning the war.  The answering machine became standard in both the workplace and home in the United States in the later half of the twentieth century. The answering machine is still common place in American homes today, but voicemail has largely replaced the answering machine in the workplace and is also standard on mobile phones.

For further proof that the web is amazing, and my life is awesome, moving picture of a recordofone in action can be viewed here.  While this video borders on the verge of life-changing, I'm not exactly sure what is up with the leopard print blanket in the background.  

Clearly, the record-o-fone has little to with my research on the history of American museums. While the device has little to do with my research, I like to tell myself that by taking a 15 minute break to learn about it may just help me understand the people I study just a little bit better.