Despite being around for several decades beforehand, like this early unit from 1898 (top), answering machines came into their own in the 1960s, with cheap domestic and business machines becoming commonplace.
41 : Answering machine
1898
Despite being around for several decades beforehand, like this early unit from 1898 (top), answering machines came into their own in the 1960s, with cheap domestic and business machines becoming commonplace.
Before today’s advanced array of communications gadgets and services, finding out ‘what’s about’ or announcing the arrival or presence of rare birds meant reliance on a commonplace but ingenious household device: the telephone answering machine.
While it would be some time before such equipment was commandeered for keen birders, the first known answering machine was created in 1898 by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen. His ‘telegraphone’ used a wire to record on which passed a recording head to receive a magnetic signal that replicated a sound wave. The wire was later replaced by tape or disks, which served the very same function almost until the present day.
Telegraphones and their successors had to be manually operated, and it was not until the early 1930s that automatic answering machines were developed. The first commercially available machine was the American ‘Tel-Magnet’ which appeared in the shops in 1949, but the expense of this machine was successfully undercut by the introduction of Phonetel’s ‘Ansafone’.
This affordable, practical and popular device spawned many imitations and improvements, and really began to take off in 1960 for business and the more well-off private customer. However, it was still to be some years before such devices became truly household items. The presence of an answering machine on the credits of the TV detective series The Rockford Files, for example, was still enough to excite much workplace and school playground comment in 1974.
Initially a reel-to-reel tape loop provided the machine’s answering message from its owner, but the development of the ‘microcassette’ enabled messages to play from beginning to end and then record the caller’s own voice in response.
Unsurprisingly, the technology was adopted by birders as a semi-automated means of relaying news of rare and interesting species to local audiences. The heyday of the nascent bird news services was in the 1980s, though local news could be found on key numbers in some places in the 1970s; they were even still used occasionally in North America as news hubs at the turn of the century, notably in out-of-the-way sites in Alaska. All were usually at the phone numbers of the local recorder or other luminary, and could often be at least a little out of date if not maintained.
Until the 1960s, rare bird sightings in Britain were largely reported by post, and the likelihood of a bird still being present once a postcard or letter had been received was slim. As the hobby of twitching developed through that decade, key people became the ‘go-to guys’ for news, and several obtained answering machines for this purpose.
However, the sightings hub of Nancy’s Café at Cley, Norfolk, had no answering machine in its hey-day in the 1970s and 1980s, relying on birders to answer the phone. This was to develop into one of the first bird news services, for which answerphone technology was key (see pages 146–147).