Mourning old technology might be a fool’s game, but I defy anybody to try out a dial phone at one of the state’s most delightful museums and not feel at least a slight pang of loss.
Go ahead, spin the dial on one of the solid, heavy 1960s AT&T phones on display at the New Hampshire Telephone Museum – the curator doesn’t mind. Enjoy the way you need just the right amount of effort to turn the dial, the way you can tell instantly what number you’re dialing from the distance your finger travels, that terrific clicking sound as the dial returns when you let go.
Or check out the pink Princess phone, complete with photos of a local princess – far cooler than anything Apple could ever devise. As are the “futuristic” 1960s swoopy plastic phones with a dial on the bottom that look, to be honest, more like a sex toy than a communications device.
For a change of technical pace, contemplate the 1880s-era wall phones, which look like a prop from a steampunk video game but were powered by a nasty old wet battery, basically a jar of caustic chemicals full of wires, or ponder the replica of Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone, which required you to shout into a bowl of acid.
Suddenly your beeping little smartphone doesn’t seem so interesting, does it?
Graham Gifford, program coordinator, has seen this intellectual transition happen often, particularly with teenagers who walk through the door of this small but jam-packed museum with an “I’m going to be bored” expression on their faces.
“When they leave they say, ‘This was a lot better than I thought it would be,’ ” Gifford said during a recent visit.
Indeed it is.
Thanks to the running start it received from the vast collection of telephone material gathered by founder Dick Violette, a 50-year veteran of the Merrimack County Telephone Co. who passed away in 2013, the New Hampshire Telephone Museum goes way beyond nostalgia. It’s one of the most interesting small museums I have visited in years – well-organized and informative, chock full of stuff, but entertaining and fun, too.
The more than 1,000 items here include the truly historical (an 1878 phone from the Bradford phone company, back when many towns had independent phone networks) to the pop-cultural (Elvis phone!) to the technical, including displays of different types of cables and a library bristling with technical manuals as well as old phone books.
“People come here for genealogical research, trying to find out their grandmother’s phone number,” Gifford said.
In an era where the idea of a telephone being connected to a wire in the wall is becoming outmoded, it provides a surprising window into past technology breakthroughs. Consider the “candlestick” phone, familiar to many of us from 1930s movies.
It had never occurred to me before, but this was a real improvement because it was the first phone in which the speaking unit was separate from the ringer box and power source. You didn’t have to stand by the wall talking, you could carry the phone in your hand and walk around a bit.
“It was the first look at mobility for telephones,” Gifford said.
Or consider switchboards. The museum owns several complete switchboards, including one used at the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel as late as 1980, as well as the one used just up the street in Warner for many decades. They’ve set one up to work, so you can see how they operated.
The operators in Warner worked 12-hour shifts, connecting calls with a plugboard, plus peering out the window so they could see that, for example, the doctor’s car was at the gas station which means he wouldn’t be able to answer.
“They were the early Google. They knew everything, were everything – first responders, directory, information; you even called them if you wanted to know how to make a chocolate cake,” Gifford said.
I suspect the museum’s collection is only going to grow as word spreads. Gifford says donations are common: “Somebody just dropped off material; it’s a daily occurrence – people leave ringer boxes, signs, insulators, uniforms, anything.”
It’s certainly well organized, especially for a place with just one full-time and one part-time employee. Speaking as somebody who works on my own town history museum, I know that organizing displays and making useful signage is much harder than it looks, and is usually a weak spot in small museums – but it’s not a weak spot here.
So why haven’t you heard about it before? There’s the location, of course, although Warner is right next to Interstate 89, so it’s pretty accessible by North Country standards. And there’s the name, which doesn’t really lend itself to social media excitement.
But mostly, I think it’s a reflection of the way society often regards science and technology as a thing apart, more like homework than everyday life. That’s why the nearby Kearsarge Indian museum, also in Warner, seems “normal” to people in a way that a museum about telephones doesn’t.
Those who are free of such technophobia have their rewards, however. The New Hampshire Telephone Museum is one of them.
The museum is open by appointment only in February and in March on Tuesdays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission $3 students, $7 adults, and $6 seniors. For more information, visit nhtelephonemuseum.org or call 456-2234.
(This story was originally published in 2015.)
