When I was in the first grade, the teacher had our class sit in a circle so we could play a game called telephone.
The teacher started the game by whispering something to the girl next to me and having her whisper the same message to the person on her left. That person whispered it to the next person, and so on.
I was the last kid in the circle and watched anxiously as the whispering arced its way around.
When the message had been whispered to me, the teacher asked me to say it out loud. This caught me by surprise, and I repeated the message as best I could.
The teacher then asked the girl to my left what the original message was. What she said differed so dramatically from what I had said, it made everyone laugh. There was a lesson in that experience that has stuck with me all my life: the more a bit of information is repeated, the more it changes. (That’s why reporters and police investigators prefer first-hand rather than second or third-hand sources.)
When I was a Cub Scout, I had another telephone experience. Our Den Mother helped each of us tap a small hole in the bottom of an empty can using a nail and hammer. We paired off and strung our cans together with a length of waxed twine. When everyone was done, my partner and I stood on opposite sides of the room and pulled our twine taut. I covered my mouth with my can and spoke.
“What did Johnny say?” our Den Mother asked.
No one could tell. No one, except my partner who had his ear to his can. What we had made, we were informed, were tin can telephones. With a burst of enthusiasm, all the teams stretched out their strings and began chatting.
There was no life lesson in this, but it did form a pleasant memory. And reflecting on that memory recently led me to an odd bit of information. Tin can telephones similar to the one I made as a child have been in use for hundreds of years.
The earliest mention of sound transmission through a taut wire was in the 1660s by British physicist Robert Hooke. By the 1880s, devices had advanced to the point of being able to transmit voices, not just across a room or even a backyard, but up to three miles. Three miles. Those devices, such as the ones sold by the Pulsion Telephone Supply Company, of Massachusetts, had springs inside the speaking part that intensified vibrations created by the voice. The springs helped launched the sounds along a wire without using electricity.
The sale of such devices began to wane as Alexander Graham Bell’s electric telephone system grew in popularity.
By the time I came along, tin can phones were something Cub Scouts made in den meetings. Gossip, on the other hand, hasn’t suffered at all from advances in phone technology.
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