The Secret Life of the Telephone Remastered
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- čas přidán 6. 09. 2024
- I've been in my workshop making things ever since, and the covid lockdown was the perfect time to make some new videos, trying to pass on some of what I've learnt. So if you're interested do try my new 'Secret Life of Components'
These old films were remastered and upscaled by Norman Margolus from a 1987 PAL tape made directly from the 16mm print, using machine learning software from Topaz labs. Commentary added in Feb 2021.
View all 18 episodes of the series and read about their background on my website:
www.timhunkin....
The videos are also here @ / timhunkin1
34 years later and I'm *watching* this episode on a " telephone".
WHOHHHHHHH wow man
Lol it’s a computer that has a phone app.
@@PibrochPonder Nicely put!!!
I love living in " The Future".
Sadly, the telephone also watches us!
This one couldn’t come at a better time so coool. I recently have become captivated by all things telephone exchange and having grown up in the late 90’s I hadn’t seen this series only heard of it. And just now getting through them as you have put them up on your channel Tim. just fascinating and amazingly put together.
Somehow it is not surprising to find Look mum no computer here.
Nice to see you here. Tim & Rex are the Original Makers
Mr Mum. You need to check out Tim's arcades. Lots of stuff he's made that you'd love. Maybe you could do a tour of them for your channel? I'd love to see you two chewing the fat and talking technology.
@@cromulence yeah ofcourse! went to under the pier show a couple of years back when driving past southwold and made the connection that it was the pier with tims arcade place!! .. it was absolutely awesome. what i meant to more say was i hadnt had the opportunity to see the secret life of as full episodes as it wasnt on the tv when i was a kid, i wish it was :D
@@cromulence it would be awesome to chat with tim some day, a friend of mine the nervous squirrel chats with tim quite a bit and has told me how cool his workshop is!
16:10 "Keeping it all working is quite an undertaking." - that's why it was invented by an undertaker.
I ignore the phone now, too - because the chance that the call is a robocall is over 95%
One of the benefits of living outside the Anglosphere is that the robots are too lazy to learn another language than English or Python
@@TheStraatjutter Lol python 😂🤣
It's scary how old these are and how current and important they still are. There is more education in one episode than most schools teach in one term time.
yeah but they never taught anything about gender studies in these videos
'One term'? - try 15 years for many schools these days.
You could perhaps understand kids not knowing about any of this or similar stuff IF they had other learning to show for it, but they generally don't.
Educators (or do I mean re-educators) seem to think it sufficient for children to have learned a few political slogans, even though they can't justify or discuss them, and to hold a few political opinions which they believe to be axiomatically true and therefore require no justification. Job done.
Good on you Tim, calling out Shockley for his creepy eugenics
I could never get enough of this series, such a shame it ended. This really spoke to me as a child
same here. It still does.
TV channels would rather show garbage, reality TV and 'entertainment' shows than something people can learn from.
@@ptonpc I suppose it's just a reflection of what people want to watch, people are not interested in learning really.
@@ptonpc Thankfully many CZcams channels have followed in the footsteps of Tim and Rex and do science and technology episodes not unlike these, but obviously not with that special Tim Hunkin style. Smarter Every Day is a bit nerdy and smug, but he covers similar stuff from an engineering perspective.
Mate look Tim up. He's still doing his thing, sadly minus his hair, and even more sadly, minus Rex "Cassius" Garrod.
I was a telephone switchman back in the 70's and 80's and I really miss the days of the electromechanical and the early electronic systems. It was fascinating work and one of the very few jobs I really loved - not to mention the joy of being a young guy working in a building full of female operators! Sadly it eventually all evolved into sitting at a desk with a terminal and I changed fields multiple times after that. I miss the old central office days.
What did you ended up working after all?
The song about connecting was so good, no?
I live in Bryant Pond Maine. The last town in America to stop using the hand crank phone in 1983. There’s a 14 foot tall telephone in the middle of town.
I remember my grandparents having a crank phone in 2001. In a village in post-communist Bulgaria. Having a telephone during communism was considered luxury and talking was very expensive. Nowadays everyone uses smartphones. Talking is done predominantly via the internet on apps like Messenger, Viber, Whatsapp...
@@gosho0 exactly. It’s amazing. I remember talking to my first girlfriend for hours on a rotary dial phone.
@@soundspark yes it is. I have a video of it up.
Fantastic original series and the remastered episodes are a testament to your early work. I Started my working life (aged 16) in 1967 as a trainee technician with the GPO. Part of my training involved working in a telephone exchange at that time. Most of the telephone exchanges were Strowger. They were usually maintained by a cleaner, four technicians and a senior technical officer. By the early 80s five exchanges were maintained by one technician and a dog. People would ask what was the dog for? - Answer "to keep the technician away from the equipment". The digitization and computerization of the telephone infrastructure had a huge impact on the number of people employed and a level of skill required. Happy days.
31 minutes and 16 seconds of pure delight. Thanks from Australia.
I think the big difference to our response when the phone rings, is that now we can look at the phone and see how important the call is. In the old days you had no idea if the call needed to be dealt with right then or not. Also, if you missed the call, you had no way of finding out later who had called. Also this was the time before telephone advertising and the majority of calls were wanted. Ronn
Re-watching, I realize it used to be exciting when someone called. These days I'm always stressed out and downright frightened whenever someone calls me on the phone. I do not know what they want, or if I can answer in time. The phone takes me away from whatever I was doing before, and it's hard to go back after the call.
Hi, i am in australia and my in-laws from europe.
Up until recently when the home phone rang, my father in law would run around all upset and say "Whos Dead Who Dies" I never understood it until he explained as a child the small town of @ 1500-2000 only had about 3 or 4 phones 1 x local council, 1 x bank, 1 at local shop and another, so any important news was rung to the local shop who would take the message and pin it on the notice board eg Fred is dead, mary had a baby boy etc
I bet when you made this Tim, you guys had no idea that everyone would be carrying a digital mobile phone in their pocket by 2020!! I used to watch this show all the time as a kid, awesome work Tim and Rex.
rex....... yeah..........
Huh, phones that fit into pockets, that was a thing around 5 years ago, wasn't it. Nowadays everything is a 6.5" phablet and designers are intent on eliminating all pockets from women's clothing, or making them as tiny and as useless as possible. And at 200g, the phone is borderline too heavy for my arms.
We all knew it would happen eventually. We weren't stupid cavemen.
I was in my final year at the University of South Florida when the series was on TLC in the USA (1993) I was an Informations System major and wanted to work for GTE here in Florida! These series served as an inspiration to me.
2024 AI 💀
My 30 year old VHS tapes thank you, Tim!
Wish we could bring back those lovely lady telephonists. Our local one in the 1960's would even tell you the latest gossip in the village or the bus times to the big town. Party lines were great fun, not many people today would have a clue what they were !
My family owned the local phone company and there were still several step switches in use when I was a child. I remember it sounded like 10,000 typewriters going when you walked in the CO in the middle of the day. I’ll never forget the smell either. It smelled like carbon and ozone, with hint of light oil.
I was a BT operator a few years after this was made but I recognised some of the computers we would have used in the switch room. There was a lot of hierarchy at the time, agency staff were brought in and paid a very poor rate for the same job. Someone has mentioned in the comments here about female operators, and until the 80's it was females on the day shift and only men were permitted to work on a night shift. I really enjoyed the retrospective at the end of this film, I think our phone system is particularly unique especially how the Ericsson system Y effectively became the beginnings of Vodafone here and system x had lots of issues in the beginning due to the tendering and procurement processes of the day; plus Telex and I still have house sale documents via Telex since fax was not legally permissible for binding sales transactions. Lots of wonderful nostalgia thanks Tim.
The electro mechanical exchange switches were a work of art. Amazing video :)
SLOM is why I am a systems / electronics engineer today (I like making new, functional, and professional looking items)... Hats off Tim, I was 12 when you made this episode
Another amazing episode, thanks Tim and the late Rex! I guess technically, when the telephone started off as morse code, it actually started digital, before becoming analogue, now it's all gone full circle to digital again!
Absolutely love this gardenshed style of production. And yea, final piece.
Tim, thank you for remastering The Secret Life of Machines. To this day, many of the things I learned about how things work, I learned from this series. The way you and Rex explained how things work in this series is how I explain them to my children and others. This series goes far beyond nostalgia and and has helped build a huge who I am as a person. It gave me the inquisitiveness that I carry with me even today to understand how complex things work and what I learned from this series taught me the fundementals on how to do that.
I remember spending lots of time as a 11,12, and 13 year old setting the VCR to record Discovery Channel and getting so super excited any time a new episode was aired on Discovery Channel. I collected as many episodes so that I can watch them later. I still have many of those tapes today. You and Rex were my childhood heros. Thank you!!!!!! Rex will be missed. RIP.
This series was a fantastic programme of the time. Sadly a rare example of truely educational TV productions. Teaching geniuses.
How sad that programmes like this are a rarity these days, supplanted by reality TV.
tragedy, really.
Yes, tattooed motor-cycle making morons shouting at each other in scripted drama.
@@ianbutler1983 You called it. Any TV show centered on the industrial arts today is all drama, absolutely no learning. It is a sad situation.
@@andyZ3500s Yes, but CZcams has some great content and a much greater variety of it.
@@ianbutler1983 It sure has, the only thing that I watch on TV is the news and a documentary now and then.
I love the silly animations. Sounds like the people who did the voice over had a blast doing it.
The added commentary about job satisfaction in the digital age plus the use of one’s hands rings absolutely true with me. I work in software but find myself looking to use any time off the clock and off parenting in having very manual projects, mostly involving working on our cars. It is quite something to process that while in other jobs you create or build things that will last years or lifetimes, in software you create things that without electricity are essentially non existent, and that by evolving technology will almost certainly be needing to be replaced in a few years time.
I LOVE the fact this series is remastered and available straight from it’s creator. I’m going through slowly and with great joy through the new series. Thank you so much!!
I’ve been waiting for this one! This episode is a large part of why I now have a shed full of (working) obsolete telephone exchange equipment!
@MichaelKingsfordGray what a hateful comment
@MichaelKingsfordGray Dafuq are you even talking about?
I have wonderful memories of stroger two motion switches. I was a stroger technician in the Navy. And cut my teeth on that equipment. Nice thing about the relays was you were able to cobble together special pieces of equipment for special applications, which occasionally I did. I had the privilege of operating and maintaining a 100 line stroger exchange and a small town in Morocco part of an US Navy facility in kenitra, now long since defunct due to satellites. I eventually went on to own my own interconnect company selling installing and servicing telephone systems for private clients. I eventually expanded into information technology, selling installing and servicing computer networks. It's amazing how much the technology has changed as I am dictating this comment on a Motorola cellular telephone. I quite enjoyed his comments at the end regarding job satisfaction which I can very much relate to. Well in my business I do still have to pull wire from one location to another and make physical connections and other related things as far as servicing these products you become a board swapper. You almost never track down a problem to a specific component in a system.
This sries is really unique combining animation, demostrations, old archive material ... like a perfect recipe, like a good wine, if only get better with time. Love Tim and also ReX ... Rex was a jake of trades really, always humble. Great hosts.
When I was a kid, I caught part of your show on internal combustion and vividly remember the cannon demonstration. Glad I can finally watch the rest of them!
And here I am, like many others, watching this on my phone, which hardly gets used for actual calls at all any more. There's no landline at my home. The phone company no longer offers one. They would rather just sell wireless service, which is not unlike the original wireless telegraphs. They've come round in a sort of full circle.
'Secret Life of . . . ' was one of my favourite shows back in the day. It's great to see them all again. Thank you very much!
This together with The Great Egg Race and Tomorrows World were my favourite tv programs when I was a kid.
After 30 years I've just realized that that "high speed" printer actually prints TESTING in Morse code at 4:30
"Grandpa, why do people say, 'hang up'? What are you hanging it on??"
I like the private phone where you stick your head partially into a cavity. Reminds me of the 60's sitcom called "Get Smart", and their "Dome of Silence"---- so funny to watch Maxwell Smart, 99, and the chief attempting to have a conversation under the dome of silence.
My great grandmother started working as a phone operator after the great war. This is when they used roller skates. She eventually became the floor manager. When she retired she received a suitcase set with stickers that read "Telephone Pioneers of America" "It's Fun To Be A Pioneer". I still have one of her suitcases.
These are amazing. Wish I could of seen these when I was growing up in the late 80s, early 90s. My school system sucked.
I just love how at 6:25 the test song they use is "The Russians Are Coming", the Take 5 reggae instrumental used as the title theme. This entire show sits the back of my brain as a time capsule to some of my earliest memories being fascinated how things work, and the delightful ways in which inventions involved over the years... and subtly my love of ska, jazz and reggae too.
For those who suffer migraine headaches, try to identify your main causes. I learned of mine, interruption in sleep cycle, lack of electrolytes if out in the heat, skipping meals or lacking protein were main causes and manage to avoid them by addressing causes rather than addressing symptoms. Keep a journal for any headache, eventually you can avoid them for your own causes.
Thanks for these therapeutic videos. I've been an electronic engineer since the mid 80s, of analogue audio gear mainly, and there are times when I really value being able to escape into this gentler world and learn stuff from like-minded friendly people.
Tim these videos are quite brilliant. Really regret not seeing them when they were first released, my understanding of the world and how it works would have been far superior. Your recollections of filming the series and how technology has moved on since then, make for an interesting ending. You are so creative, do keep making things.
The" spend .spend .spend" Dummy reminds me of the tv series (Are you being served )
I had that exact piano phone when I was a kid!
After the fast paced world of Aí and social media. It’s so nice to come back and look at the technology of the past. Thank you so much for sharing these wonderful videos. 🙏🏽🙏🏽
You have produced some of the most entertaining shows and machines over the years Tim! Every time that song starts playing, I’m instantly transported back to the early 1990’s! It’s like hearing from an old friend! Thank you for the work you do and have done!
I remember your series on TV, shame it is not on now! Better than some of the crap they put on these days!
Your series was an inspiration to me and made me look at things I would never have attempted.
The TV series also helped me think out of the box so to speak. Now I can watch them all again on CZcams.
Thanks for being such an inspiring guy, it gets my brain back into gear.
I hope you got your migraines sorted out, they really can be debilitating!
I was 8 years old when I first watched your show in Singapore. It is what got me into building drones and computers. Thanks a bunch for your hard work and head aches. It inspires a lot of people. God bless😊
Bell didn`t invent telephone. He stole it. Now after smart phones, I want the rotate dial phones back.
Priceless knowledge from all these documentaries from our past Cheers. Especially love the telephone exchange ladies choir❤
Thanks for this video. Sometimes we forget how it all started.
The transistor experiment reminds me of a similar thing I did playing with a cheap electronics kit a while back. Discovering that I could light an LED with a transistor with nothing more than touching the leads with my dry fingers immediately drove home to me just how sensitive transistors are and why they are so useful for amplification.
I have always loved your videos, along with Rex. I love the simple "jonny ball" style. Edutainment at it's best!
Love seeing these. Thanks for uploading Tim. I’ve learned a lot- and Rex seemed like a fascinating character.
I was a kid when this was shown on TV. I loved it but I thought it had been forgotten. I'm glad to be proved wrong.
Everything being more integrated these days, makes things much harder to understand. I really really like these series. They go into the physics of things. Thank you for your efforts.
Thanks for posting the remastered videos. I find them an important part of history, it’s really interesting looking at all the obsolete technology. It’s also pretty crazy how obsolete the “new” product have now become so dated or obsolete now. I wonder what this program will age like in another 30 years time.
I appreciate your hard work Mr. Tim Hunkin and I enjoy watching your knowledge in action. Thanks and have a good life!
"It's a miracle of the age ..." Indeed it is.
There's a few key bits of technology I remember seeing on TV that caught my interest and helped me realise most of it is quite simple really. The bit with the mic and earpiece of the phone just being connected together and working was one I remembered even before this series reappeared on CZcams. I think after seeing it as a kid I went and tried to build it myself from bits of an old stereo I'd dismantled in my bedroom.
This is one of my favorite episodes.
Surprising that from childhood 30 years ago, the exchange in our small town was AXE. Click and bang was long gone and the system pretty much looked after itself. Todays internet runs on crossbar switches, which are closer to "click and bang" than circuit swich technology of late 20th centuary.
And now we're back to most houses not having a phone - well at least not a wired one.
I absolutely adore the lady who does the voice acting for the animated segments in all of these. Her voice is awesome and she does such a great job!
I can easily watch Each episode over and over....I find the animated segments are so enjoyable and they are some of my favorite parts of the series. the illustrations are extremely well done... And many of them just downright hilarious.
Tim and Rex are like The Engeneer Guy and Scrapheap Challange rolled into one :)
I is almost as long between the "kitchen phone" clip and this show and now!
I swear I learned more from watching this show then I did anywhere else. Wish they would update and continue this series! MIss ya Tim!
Why have I never seen this before. Amazing.
I loved this show and still watch the reruns.
Tim what is the story behind the old carpet on the wall? It’s still there now over 30 years later.
Probably some sound deadening or insulation. It's still common in Russia to have carpets on the wall because the walls are paper thin.
Yet another great remaster, I remember this one from way back, especially the beginning with Rex talking to you through bits of a phone wired together with nothing else! So many great demonstrations you and Rex did. As always the episode is made even better with your current thoughts at the end. Thanks Tim!
We still keep a line to our house, but we're not as likely to pick up the phone today. With so many robotic scam calls, we let it go to the message machine, and scrutinize the number that appears on Caller ID, and we also have a selective call blocking system.
The worst telephone issue we ever had was in the 1990s when we had a second number added to the existing wires for dial-up internet. To much annoyance, we learned that a fax machine in another state was testing itself with our new number at 3 o'clock in the morning. We made the telephone company issue us a different number, and that stopped the ringing issue.
When I moved out in the early 2000s, the phone company let me take the second number with me as my primary, but through a clerical error that wasn't caught for several months, I had been paying an extra dollar-something for a second listing that no longer existed as such. I was eventually credited back a little over $ 26 in over-payments because I had kept the billing statements for just such an issue. This was about the same time the local telephone company changed owners several times; a rather chaotic era.
When your mobile goes don't worry.
You know who called and you can call them back.
Cartoons are very good here.
I wish I had been your neighbor all of these years! Thanks for all of the informative videos. It really stirs the curiosity in so many of us! ❤️❤️🇺🇸🇺🇸
I just love these videos. They remind me of how fast technology rolls along. Tim is a wonderful and articulate presenter. Keep 'em coming!
Great series Tim ! Never get tired of watching !
Thank you so much for remastering and uploading this series. I used to watch it here in Australia on ABC TV with my dad back in the 90's
Yes, many people lost jobs as the telephone advanced. I remember growing up in the 60's-70's my grandmother was a switchboard operator for Bell telephone here in America. Luckily she had reached retirement at the time when there was no longer a need for that job position any longer.
b.t.w. Thank You Tim, I can understand that producing these shows (especially at the time w/o the tech) could have been quite stressful with the amount of research, setup, and animations too. Sorry you suffered the migraines from the toll... also note; The tremendous positive effect, and absolute enjoyment/entertainment brought to the now (podcasts) millions of viewers who so appreciate your efforts of producing your show.
Enjoyed and learnt so much from this series when it aired in Australia, I was looking for it and had forgotten the right name, just found a video where a section on the VCR was used and I now can watch it again.
At 43 seconds in the telephone Tim picks up is a statesman and was notorious for picking up or receiving RF interference around the Manchester area (probably other areas as well) from BBC radio and the odd taxi company,,,,if anyones interested -great video- ex BT engineer
Grew up in Washington state in the US, was never aware if Tim or his work. Guess I missed out, because this is the most brilliant channel on CZcams. I can't get enough Hunkin
The lack of job satisfaction resonates with me - after more than 25 years as a service engineer in the computer industry, the job had deteriorated to a mind numbingly boring level. Essentially just swap the thing with the red light on, and that's it. I left that behind 6 years ago and I'm not going back!
Tim, thank you for your effort to make these available and for all to see. As a younger guy I have never seen any of this, but its magnificent!
Fantastic... absolutely fantastic!!! I remember watching as a child and really enjoyed seeing you and Rex again !!!
Interesting similarity in the evolution of the phone and the radio. Both, once prominent singular devices, have now become secondary to clocks, analog and digital music players, cameras and video recorders, and personal computers. Excellent episode. Very intriguing series that stands the test of time.
Well done, Mr. Hunkin.
Thank you for suffering migraines to make this amazing show Tim.
Thank you for this series and especially the release on CZcams for me. I wish I had seen these as a kid.
What i find fascinating about analogue telephone is that it accomplishes duplex transmission on a single wire pair. And you haven't lost a word on it.
On the idea of ignoring the phone, it used to be that you could not turn off the ringer (at least with BT). When the 'trimphone' first came out there was a volume control at the side - if you opened the phone up and removed a screw then you could silence the ringer completely. Naturally this wasn't allowed by BT as you might not answer calls - as that's where they got their revenue.
Come to think of it you could silence an older phone with bells. The two bells were mounted off centre and could be adjusted to change the tone and volume - vital in an office where you'd want to be able to tell one phone from another. But if you turned the bells to press against the clapper then they'd not ring (maybe give a slight vibration).
"It wasn't long ago that it was extraordinary to have more than one phone in the house."
Today every single little kid in the house has their own iPhone.
while explaining the transistor you actually explained class D amplifiers as well in its rough form :)
@7:22 Bell wrote (of the phone), "I often wonder if I really did invent it, or was it just someone else I'd read about."
A little too on-the-nose there, Alexander. Someone else you'd read about in the patent office, no doubt.
Absolutely wonderful Tim
I remember the cordless phone come out in the 80s. The only problem was the battery did not last long !
I've always had a love of everything telephone!
Caller ID and text messaging were all part of the SS7 standard used by BT. In theory any capable phone and exchange could have had them.
Tim, thanks for bringing the additional content for the episodes onto CZcams. I’ve always been a huge fan of the series. I think there’s a lot that young “makers” can learn from experiencing and understanding old technology.
Thanks so much for sharing. 😎👌🏼
Great series Sir.
Thankyou so much for re uploading another great video,
I remember them in the 80s as a boy , nothing else like it at the time!
Captivated.
And re living and loving the videos now. Many hours of entertainment and memory's 😀