Issue 1.5
NECK FACE
By Shepard FaireyPhotos By Mark the Cobra Snake
Illustration By Neck Face
The answering machine has become a fully integrated part of our lives in a way that most modern technological advances have failed to achieve. We rely on these machines (and their cousin, voicemail) to conduct business, reach loved ones, and screen our calls when people we date get too clingy. Most of us are way too busy to actually ponder the origins of the answering machine. SWINDLE is here to do the thinking for you, and offers this abridged and unceremonious history.In 1898, Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen patented the Telegraphone, thanks to an unwitting level of genius and a serious obsessive-compulsive disorder. This device used a wire to record the magnetic fields produced by sounds and then play them back.
Poulsen’s design would be taken one step further in 1935, when Mr. Willy Müller invented the world’s first automatic answering machine at the request of Orthodox Jews, who were pissed that they kept missing calls on the Sabbath.
A commercial version of Big Willy’s machine wouldn’t be available until 1971, when PhoneMate introduced the Model 400. It weighed ten pounds, screened calls, and held twenty messages on a reelto- reel tape. An earphone enabled private message retrieval, and it self-destructed if a mission was ever compromised by enemy spies.
The first digital answering machine was invented by Dr. Kazuo Hashimoto of Japan in 1983, and is listed as US patent #4616110, entitled Automatic Digital Telephone Answering. This futuristic Japanese technology became the basis for the modern voicemail once a crazy Texan industrialist named Gordon Matthews exploited it to boost sales for his company, VMX. In doing so, Matthews unleashed a plague upon our society, by which people are compelled to check their voicemail twenty times per hour, and are constantly leaving dinner tables to “check their messages.” Experts agree that the next generation of voicemail may actually be the final instrument of civilization’s downfall.