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Chapter Four

AWaiting RoomWithout Walls

Paging, Pagers, and the Rise of Mobile Communication

Benjamin Morton

[4.0] The O’Hare Inn, a Chicago area hotel erected in the early 1960s, was de-signed with an amenity unique among its competitors. Its large swimmingpool broadcast music underwater as well as on the pool deck. The underwaterspeakers paged patrons who received calls from their wives or kids at home,secretaries in their offices, or associates in other cities (Janson 1962). Al-though it may seem like a mere competitive gimmick, the underwater pagingsystem was part of a larger expansion and integration of the many communi-cations networks used to remotely send messages between people. It was partof a century-long merging of telephone and broadcast communication sys-tems that shaped and continues to shape remote communication.

[4.1] Indeed, hospitals, factories, YMCAs, and other large buildings had usedelectric paging intercommunication systems since the 1920s to call thoseinside. By the 1960s, most of these institutions sought to contact employeesboth inside and outside the walls of the workplace using remote radio receiv-ers. When coupled with the telephone network, these portable pagers maderemote communication available to anyone who used a telephone. The transi-tion from paging to pagers is an important intermediary between twentieth-century broadcasting technology and today’s networked environment. Moresignificantly, the process of paging ties together three fundamental practicescommon to networked communication: individual address, alerts and notifi-cations, and recorded messages for recipients. This chapter is organizedaround these three practices.

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[4.2]INDIVIDUAL ADDRESS

[4.3]In the 1920s, telephone giant AT&T branched out beyond point-to-pointcommunication to the mass audience of public address. Due to new develop-ments in amplification and loudspeaker technology, AT&T subsidiary West-ern Electric began installing public address systems at both large outdoorgatherings like the presidential inauguration and smaller indoor venues likesound film theaters. One significant venue merged AT&T’s long-distancetelephone communication with the large voice of mass-mediated public ad-dress. On Armistice Day 1921, Western Electric employed its public addresssystem for the speeches, prayers, and performances commemorating theinternment of the Unknown Soldier. Over one hundred thousand people gath-ered at Arlington National Cemetery for the event. Everyone was able to heareach speaker’s voice due to the amplification devices and speakers spreadthroughout the cemetery. Moreover, tens of thousands of additional listenersfollowed the live sounds at New York’s Madison Square Garden and SanFrancisco’s Civic Auditorium thanks to AT&T’s long-distance telephonelines and additional public address systems in each city (Wurtzler 2007).

[4.4]Yet the function of the telephone was not lost on some institutions usingthese new public address systems. The most interesting, yet less popular,applications of these public address systems were aimed at getting the atten-tion of individuals rather than mass audiences. Paging over public address isat once the most efficient and inefficient way to grab an individual’s atten-tion. It is efficient because anyone within earshot will hear the message. Itsinefficiency stems from the same reason for its efficiency: because the mes-sage is intended for one person you must sacrifice the ears of those for whomthe message is not intended. It seems somewhat wasteful to expose all to amessage for one. Yet the paging practice justifies this wasteful form ofcommunication if used in urgent situations. Recall a time when an intercomsystem calls a patron who left their car lights on, misplaced an importantpersonal item, or momentarily loses a child. In these special circumstancesthe emergency justifies the technique.

[4.5]Paging, then, came to be used in what I call industries of urgency. In theearly 1930s, hospitals installed public address speakers in their hallways andpatient rooms so that nurses and administrators could quickly grab the atten-tion of doctors roaming the halls. When a doctor is paged, everyone hears,but the significance of the message is for one. A large New York Cityhospital set up one such system in which a central microphone served as abroadcasting hub. From there, as one 1933 issue of Popular Science reports,“Loudspeakers Page Hospital Doctors.”

[4.6]Sound proved to be the fastest means for delivering a message. Sound,after all, is not limited by bulky materiality. Sound is accessible for everyoneclose enough to hear. Unlike prior forms of point-to-point communication,

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paging does not require one to wait by a mailbox, a telegraph office, or evena telephone. A paged message plucks its receiver from a crowd, even if thatreceiver is not expecting a message. The doctor hears from the loudspeakerthat they are needed, and responds back to the broadcasting hub. But what ifthe doctor leaves the hospital?

[4.7] In her study of police communication systems of this period, KathleenBattles (2010) notes that the public as well as police officers complained ofslow response time to crimes or emergencies. In the era of Bonnie and Clyde,automobiles gave criminals the same speed advantages as the police. Sopolice forces decided that if they could not outrun the likes of Bonnie andClyde in their automobiles, they would focus their efforts on somethingmuch more effective: an efficient strategy to communicate criminal where-abouts.

[4.8] The solution for many police departments was found in the very samebroadcast technology that many Americans used when listening to advertis-er-supported entertainment. Battles (2010) claims that “Radio communica-tion guaranteed speed in response that makers of the call boxes could barelyimagine, making instant response to calls a key measure of police effective-ness and success” (158). Police departments solicited custom radio ordersthat reengineered the device to operate like those two-way radios used byamateur ham radio operators prior to the government’s policing of the air-waves. Radio communications would become the significant modernizingtool for police authorities in the twentieth century. It provided a rhetorical“dragnet” identity for law enforcement.

[4.9] Police radio communications essentially created a mobile and wirelesspaging system. These systems cut the wires on hospital paging systems andput them into the patrol car. Both hospital and police paging systems put acertain amount of responsibility on the recipient of the message. In the hospi-tal a paged doctor was required to call an administrator or move to a locationinstructed by the page. Likewise, each police officer was expected to respondto emergency calls in their vicinity. This “call and response” might haveeased some patrol anxiety, knowing that a silent radio meant things weregenerally under control (Battles 2010).

[4.10] What is key about paging systems of this time is that they assume readyand willing listeners. Of course broadcasting assumes the same of its audi-ence, but paging systems differ in that the significance of each message couldbe critically important. In other words, a message broadcast over the hospitalintercom system or the police radio could be cause for a doctor or officer toact, but it might also be intended for another doctor or officer. Like the beepor vibration of a text message, one does not know the full tenor of themessage until it is read or listened to.

[4.11] By the late 1950s, portable transistor radios appeared as part of the toolset for many professions. “The old public address system that used to call Dr.

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Kildare in hospitals,” writes one commentator, “is giving way to an electron-ic gadget that locates him instantly and preserves the quiet of the corridor”(Freeman 1957, 28). Indeed, many hospital patients would come to complainabout the constant murmur of voice pages over hospital public address sys-tems. In 1967, the Brookdale Hospital Center in Brooklyn, NY, established aPeace and Quiet Committee to stamp out annoying hospital noise. The majoroffender was voice paging which, according to the committee, occurred anaverage of 412 times between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. (Phillips 1967).As with many modern communication problems, administrators hoped toameliorate the problems of one technology with another. After the installa-tion of a new pocket-receiver paging system, claimed one hospital adminis-trator, “Then we will have utter silence” (Phillips 1967, 1). Thus, moreefficient communication meant keeping the same sense of urgency withoutsacrificing the ears of hospital patients. Personal paging systems substitutedloudspeakers for portable radios not only in hospitals, but in office buildings,industrial plants, department stores, hotels, sports stadiums, railroad yards,and other sites where employees could not always be by the telephone. Someof these paging systems, like police radios, could extend broadcasts over athirty-five mile radius.

[4.12]However, due to FCC regulations, many existed as intramural pagingsystems limited to the facility in which they operated. Motorola, for instance,installed intramural paging systems with broadcast antennas on the roofs ofbuildings or even within a building’s walls (Freeman 1957, 28). Dependingon the system, anywhere from 50 to 450 employees carried their own device(Hospital to radio staff, 1957). The significance of the new mobile communi-cation system was personal. Those carrying the device had new listeningresponsibilities.

[4.13]Personal paging systems punctuated an employee’s day with requests forresponse. Some devices broadcast a list of numbers assigned to each user, butothers let out a “beep” (or “bleep” in Britain) to alert an employee to call thecentral broadcast station. In The Human Use of Human Beings: Cyberneticsand Society, Norbert Wiener (1950) develops a theory for the function ofalerts or alarms as communication. As a loud sound, claims Wiener, mostalarms are intended for a large or mass audience. Yet most alarms do notappear to have a particular audience in mind. For these “To-whom-it-may-concern” messages, as Wiener describes them, “The concept of an undirectedmessage spreading out until it finds a receiver, which is then stimulated by it,is not an unfamiliar one” (Wiener 1950, 70). Indeed, to this day mosques,churches, and fire brigades use undirected messages to call those concernedwith each institution’s interests. The expectation, as Wiener (1950) pointsout, is that those who hear (“a receiver”) these messages will be “stimulated”by them (70).

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[4.14] Although a page is a directed message (unlike an alarm’s undirectedmessage), it travels through the relatively undirected medium of broadcast-ing. Yet a page’s urgent properties stimulate receivers like that of an alarm.There is perhaps no more efficient way to stimulate a listener, to make themreally pay attention, than to send messages that could be especially for them.If an individual within an audience can be convinced that a message maycome, even without a specified time, then they will be prepared to listen allthe time. It is not unlike waiting for one’s number to be called in a raffle. Sowhile Wiener’s “To-whom-it-may-concern” message assumes that anyonecan be a receiver, a paged message has a slightly different makeup due to itsattentive audience. The paging concept seems to say: be concerned and listenup, because your name could be called—a kind of “Mass CommunicationBingo” ensues.

[4.15] ALERTS ANDNOTIFICATIONS

[4.16] It may seem surprising that the telephone did not always ring. “One aspect ofthe telephone that is often overlooked,” notes Michèle Martin (1991), a tele-phone historian, “is the signalling [sic] system” (19). We often forget thering’s absence in the retelling of the first telephone call. In 1876, AlexanderGraham Bell’s famous call in his Boston laboratory had no such system. ForBell, a device to alert the recipient that a message was coming—or hadalready come—seemed unimportant. According to Bell’s own lab notebookentry on March 10, 1876: “I then shouted into M [the mouthpiece] the fol-lowing sentence: ‘Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you.’ To my delighthe came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said.” Mostanalyses stop here, however, allowing the telephone message to Thomas A.Watson, Bell’s assistant, to obscure how a telephone caller actually broughtanother person on the line.

[4.17] Bell’s description of the experiment makes no mention of a device thatmight call the attention of the recipient on the other end. As he describes it,Watson’s ear was at attention, ready to receive the message before it came:“Mr. Watson was stationed in one room with the receiving instrument. Hepressed one ear closely against S [the speaker] and closed his other ear withhis hand. The transmitting instrument was placed in another room and thedoors of both rooms were closed” (Bell 1876). Watson knew Bell’s messagewas coming because he was told to anticipate it.

[4.18] It is not surprising that Watson, the receiver, was soon interested in howtelephone users could be notified that a call was coming in. Without signal-ing systems like bells or ringers, early telephone subscribers used other crea-tive means of attracting the attention of telephone operators and telephoneowners. One way was to shout loudly, like Bell’s first call, into the telephone

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diaphragm, hoping that the receiver would hear from the other end. The othertechnique was to “thump” the speaking mechanism, often with the butt of alead pencil. This produced a faint sound on the receiver’s end, informing theuser or operator to pick up the line (Watson 1913, 28). As the amount oftelephone subscribers increased, the techniques for notification became partof the device itself. Watson created the “Watson Buzzer,” which “made asound quite like the horse-radish grater automobile signal” (Watson 1913,28). However, it was not until Watson applied the “magneto-electric callbell,” an adjunct to the telephone apparatus, that a signaling technique be-came standard across all telephones for decades to come (Lockwood 1883).

[4.19]What is significant is that, from an inventor’s point of view, signalingmechanisms were important for a communication apparatus that would beused by a larger public. Many years later, with time to survey the signifi-cance of his signaling mechanism, Watson (1913) recounts the impetus forcoming up with a device that would call a user’s attention to the telephone.“It began to dawn on us [Watson and Bell] that people engaged in gettingtheir living in the ordinary walk of life couldn’t be expected to keep thetelephone at their ear all the time waiting for a call, especially as it weighedabout ten pounds, then, and was as big as a small packing case, so it devolvedon me to get up some sort of a call signal” (28). Although Bell retainsnotoriety for the telephone, it is Watson’s modest bell that gave the telephonea sense of urgency.

[4.20]Watson’s call bell marked only the beginning of a long line of twentieth-century devices to incorporate alerts and notifications. In doing so, by theirvery design, these devices tacitly promoted a sense of communicative urgen-cy, not to mention importance. The pager is one significant device in thisregard because its function is pure notification. One who carries a pager issought after. The pager’s purpose—as described by reports of the 1963 Busi-ness Equipment Exposition, an office equipment tradeshow—is merely toinform an individual that a message was waiting. “The person being pagedthen goes to a telephone or intercom station and replies” (Freeman 1963, 45).Thus, the alert emitted by a pager device is not merely a call, but a call to geton the closest communications network. In this way, alerts encourage thoseconnected to a communications network to return to that network. If youhave ever received a text message or email to turn in a report, book chapter,or journal article, and have struggled to find a WiFi network for your com-puter, then you know the feeling. Alerts are minor yet significant elements ofmodern communications. They keep networks humming by alerting userswhen networks request their attention. But if a user misses an alert or notifi-cation, there is usually a recorded message.

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[4.21] RECORDEDMESSAGES

[4.22] Portable radio pagers, as we have discovered, were different from two-waymilitary and police radios in one distinct aspect: like existing public addresspaging systems, the radio pager was a one-way communication device. Therewas no button to talk back, as with major network radio to which civilianswere already accustomed. Early pagers relied on users to either listen formessages broadcast at regular intervals by pager providers or, later, beepsthat would sound from an individual device. Whatever the signal, all pagingdevices delivered the same message—someone is trying to get into contact.

[4.23] Mobile pager devices functioned as an alert system connected to messag-ing networks such as answering services. In fact, most pager services grewdirectly out of businesses whose main role was to answer calls and takemessages for clients who were not near their phones. As Clayton Niles, aformer paging business owner, remembers:

[4.24] In almost every case the recently created public mobile services were offeredas an adjunct to a primary and sustaining business of telephone answeringservice. . . . The Great Depression had precipitated a need to reduce costs, andmany businesses opted for telephone answering service in lieu of an office andsecretary. Thus the telephone answering service industry was born. (Niles2001, 58)

[4.25] The beep merely signaled that a user was trying to be reached—that a mes-sage was waiting. Recorded messages, of course, are an ideal way to conveya message when persons cannot talk to one another at the same time. Hospi-tals that had previously used intercom systems now expected their pager-carrying doctors and nurses to respond to messages when outside of thehospital.

[4.26] These answering services acted like secretaries who worked for manydifferent clients. The pager, however, put the secretary in the position ofbeing a broadcaster. Paging services essentially established a message relaysystem between the caller, an answering service, and a user’s portable radiopager. Many 1950s services used radio broadcast frequencies to send mes-sages to their subscribers’ portable radios. One system used an automatic“transmitting machine” (see figure 4.1) in which a numbered audio filmstrip,representing each subscriber, was placed on a conveyor belt that paged allsubscribers at repeated intervals (Ennis 1951). These pagers were similar topublic address systems in that many people simultaneously heard the sys-tem’s broadcast. Therefore, it was important for subscribers to frequentlycheck for messages by listening to the broadcast on portable pocket radios. A1953 “Pocket Phone” system from Chicago is described in this way:

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A message is repeated at intervals for an hour unless canceled. So while you [4.27]watch your ball game, doctor, you take the Pocket Phone out of your pocket atleast once an hour, hold it up to your ear, press a button, and listen to thecurrent list of messages. You hear the message to call your hospital, and that isthat. (Chicago Daily Tribune 1953, B7)

[4.28]This automatic “transmitting machine” is a fitting name for a messagingsystem that does not relent until the pager user calls to have the messagecanceled. Device names like “Pocket Phone,” “Radio Phone,” and “PagerPhone,” among others, associated these one-way products with the two-waycapabilities of the telephone (see figure 4.2). Two-way portable telephones,however, were only a dream in the 1950s as cellular technology was notrealized until the late 1970s.

[4.29]Pagers did not require new technology, infrastructure, or connections totelephone lines. They utilized existing devices such as portable radios, exist-

[4f1] Figure 4.1. Photo by Hubert P. Luckett, in Ennis, C. (1951, January). Pocketradio pages doctor night and day. Popular Science, 103–4.

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[4f2] Figure 4.2. Photo by Hubert P. Luckett, in Ennis, C. (1951, January). Pocketradio pages doctor night and day. Popular Science, 103–4.

ing infrastructure such as radio broadcast frequencies, and existing messagemedia such as answering services. Although existing devices like the two-way radio enabled users to speak to one another in real time, these newpaging systems recorded those moments when one could not be near thephone. The pager essentially reminds users of something that may haveseemed forgetfully obvious: others are trying to contact you when you areaway from the phone. The pager, therefore, not only served as a constantreminder of one’s absence from the telephone network, but it made sure thatmissed calls would be returned. The notion of a missed call, in fact, became

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more prevalent with the spread of message services and devices such aspagers.

[4.30]When doctors and other professionals wore their absence reminders, theybecame easier to contact. A page sent them to the nearest telephone to returnmessages. The process became a human analogy to Martin Heidegger’s(1977) “standing reserve,” originally defined by the German philosopher asresources in nature “ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeedto stand there just so that it may be on call” (298). Urgent-minded profession-als became closer to their devices, a standing reserve for answering servicesthat acted as their own standing reserve for telephone callers. A new kind ofintimacy, therefore, emerges when these remote paging devices are incorpo-rated between persons and their answering services. Like today’s answeringservices—voice-mails, text-messages, e-mail, and others—these answeringservices produced responses. The standard form of these message media is,“Call me back.” Messages ask recipients to call their callers.

[4.31]For some the pager signaled a new type of freedom, but for others theburden of mobile contact became a form of enslavement. On the one handpager distributors claimed that “Beepers give you peace of mind. . . . Notonly in knowing you can be reached if needed, but also knowing that ifyou’re not beeped, you’re not needed” (King 1976, 67). Knowing that onehas no calls is more comforting than not knowing if there are any calls at all.Today’s mobile phone users may have this fear of missing out when theirphone is turned off. Therefore being available brings with it a sense ofreassurance.

[4.32]However by the mid-1970s, as professionals like salespersons, reporters,flight attendants, and lawyers wore pagers, many felt burdened by the re-sponsibility to respond. “I call it my dog chain. I’ve broken a few of them byturning them upside down and pounding them on a table,” said one mainte-nance man (King 1976, 67). Others complained that the device blurred theboundaries between work and home. One lawyer’s wife left messages aboutdinner plans. His eleven-year-old son complained of frightening thunder-storms. Calls from home were nothing new, but missing a message becamemore difficult (King 1976). Additionally, the ways in which pager userslearned of messages took on greater significance. If all messages are an-nounced with a personal beep, the meaning of those messages is flatteneduntil the recipient calls for the requested message. That is, one doesn’t knowwhom the message is from or its content until they reach a telephone. There-fore, being paged is not merely to be alerted of a message; beeps producesphone calls on the communications network.

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[4.33] CONCLUSION

[4.34] The pager was not revolutionary. Most of its technology relied on existingdevices and services. What was new, however, was the haphazard intercon-nection between portable broadcast radios and the telephone—then Ameri-ca’s most expansive communications network. Answering services imaginedbroadcasting as a way to find individuals within the mass instead of the massaddress approach made standard by network radio. Telephones, too, werereimagined by callers as a way to instantly contact pager users and for thoseusers to respond to paged alerts. Therefore, pagers reveal how existing broad-casting and telecommunications networks renewed themselves when em-ployed for different social uses.

[4.35] Popular histories talk of broadcast radio’s demise after the rise of televi-sion audiences in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Susan Douglas (2004), aninfluential radio historian, warns researchers against uncritically acceptingthis declinist narrative. In a similar vein, Matthew Killmeier (2005) arguesthat “radio continued to be significant, but in ways yet to be adequatelyinterpreted or accounted for in media historiography” (162). It is not thataudiences suddenly left radio, claims Killmeier, but they began to use it fordifferent purposes and in different contexts. The 1950s was characterized byan increasing amount of Americans moving to suburban homes, further awayfrom their workplaces. By 1955, seven out of ten families owned cars. Theincreased mobility of Americans was reflected in the changing content ofradio: “primetime” programming scheduled during commuting hours andradio content that went from foreground attention to background listening(short-length popular music, brief news reports), during which listeners couldfrequently enter and exit the broadcast flow (Killmeier 2005, 169). Commu-nication technology worked in tandem with the increasingly mobile lifestylesof Americans.

[4.36] After the major networks showed little interest in radio, due to the rise inTV audiences, the number of FCC radio licenses more than tripled, fromeight hundred AM stations in 1942 to over three thousand by 1956 (Killmeier2005, 166). Without national network funding, local stations learned to becreative—and local—in their sources of revenue. Paging services were onesuch broadcasting experiment that did not require a revolution in radio tech-nology, but a repurposing of its function, showing just how malleable com-munication technology can be. Most significantly, early paging devices re-purposed the practice of broadcasting (from one to many) in order to targetindividuals (one out of the many). The combination of available technology(telephone, answering services, radio) and increasing mobility encouragedthe use of radio in a range of new contexts. In short, the early history ofpaging can be seen as an effort to bend technology to account for socialchange: broadcasting a message to one particular individual.

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[4.37]Remote communication with individuals is increasingly part of the twen-ty-first century experience, but its roots stretch much deeper in communica-tions history. The history of pagers and paging opens up a number of poten-tial areas for future communication research. Although mobile devices beganin military and hospital contexts, how did they migrate into the lives ofconsumers? What social uses were negotiated? What institutions were in-volved? How did an emergency device become one of leisure? How havemany individuals come to identify with their own unique communicationsdevice (cellular telephone, voice-mailbox, Internet browser), and how doesthis form of identification solidify or rearrange power relations? Paging—asan idea and cultural technology—plays an influential role in informing thefoundations and evolution in remote communications.

[4.38]REFERENCES

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Bell, A. G. 1876, March 10. Lab notebook, March 10, 1876. Alexander Graham Bell Family [4.40]Papers—Manuscript Division. American treasures of the Library of Congress.

Chicago Daily Tribune. 1953, December 6. Message to a master sleuth: Chicago gets pocket [4.41]phones, B7.

Douglas, S. 2004. Listening in: Radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis: University [4.42]of Minnesota Press.

Ennis, C. 1951, January. Pocket radio pages doctor night and day. Popular Science (January): [4.43]104–5. Photos by Hubert Luckett.

Freeman, I. H. 1957. Hospitals, hotels, plants shift to tiny radios for quiet paging. New York [4.44]Times, August 13, 28.

Freeman, W. M. 1963. The office of the future will have improved copying machines and filing [4.45]systems. New York Times, October 29, 45.

Heidegger, M. 1977. The question concerning technology. In The question concerning technol- [4.46]ogy and other essays, trans. W. Lovitt (287–317). New York: Harper & Row.

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King, W. 1976. The people beeper: It’s peace of mind to some, electronic leash to others. New [4.51]York Times, July 20, 67.

Lockwood, T. D. 1883. Electricity, magnetism, and electric telegraphy: A practical guide and [4.52]hand-book of general information for electrical students, operators, and inspectors. NewYork: D. Van Nostrand.

Loudspeakers page hospital doctors. 1933. Popular Science (July):32. [4.53]Martin, M. 1991. Hello, central?: Gender, technology and culture in the development of tele- [4.54]phone systems, 1878-1920.Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Niles, C. 2001. A radio common carrier journey.Wireless Week, June 4, 58–61. [4.55]Phillips, M. 1967. Quiet zone hard to find in hospitals. New York Times, June 5, 1. [4.56]Watson, T. A. 1913, October 17. The birth and babyhood of the telephone: Address delivered [4.57]before the telephone pioneers. Bell Telephone News 3 (4):21–29.

Wiener, N. 1988. The human use of human beings: Cybernetics and society. Boston: Da Capo [4.58]Press.

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[4.59] Wurtzler, S. J. 2007. Electric sounds: Technological change and the rise of the corporate massmedia. New York: Columbia University Press.