Mothers never liked to blame their babies for failed telephone service. After all, what harm could a bit of saliva do? Yet in the early decades of the 20th century, reports of liquid-gone-wrong with telephones reached the pages of popular women’s magazines and big-city newspapers as evidence of basic troubles that could befall consistent service. Teething babies were particularly called out. The Boston Daily Globe in 1908 recounted, for instance, how a mother only learned her lesson about her baby’s cord chewing when the baby received a shock—or “got stung”—and the phone service went out. These youthful oral fixations rarely caused harm to the chewer, but were “injurious” to the telephone cord.

License to Spill is Rachel Plotnick’s second book. Her first, Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing (The MIT Press, 2018), explores the history and politics of push buttons. The MIT Press

As more Americans encountered telephones in the decades before World War II, those devices played a significant role in daily life. That daily life was filled with wet conditions, not only teething babies but also “toy poodles, the ever-present spittoon, overshoes…and even people talking while in the bathtub,” according to a 1920 article from the journal Telephony. Painters washed ceilings, which dripped; telephones sat near windows during storms; phone cords came in contact with moist radiators. A telephone chief operator who handled service complaints recounted that “a frequent combination in interior decoration is the canary bird and desk telephone occupying the same table. The canary bird includes the telephone in his morning bath,” thus leading to out-of-order service calls.

Within the telephone industry, consensus built around liquids as a hazard. As a 1913 article on telephone service stated ominously, “Water is one of the worst enemies.” At the time, cords were typically made from silk tinsel and could easily corrode from wetness, while any protective treatment tended to make them too brittle. But it wasn’t an elemental force acting alone or fragile materials that bothered phone workers. Rather, the blame fell on the abusing consumer—the “energetic housewife” who damaged wiring by scrubbing her telephone with water or cleaning fluid, and men in offices who dangerously propped their wet umbrellas against the wire. Wetness lurked everywhere in people’s spaces and habits; phone companies argued that one could hardly expect proper service under such circumstances—especially if users didn’t learn to accommodate the phone’s need for dryness.

In telephony’s infancy, though, users didn’t always make the connection between liquidity and breakdown and might not even notice the wetness, at least in a phone company’s estimation.

This differing appraisal of liquids caused problems when telephone customers expected service that would not falter and directed outrage at their provider when outages did occur. Consumers even sometimes admitted to swearing at the telephone receiver and haranguing operators. Telephone company employees, meanwhile, faced intense scrutiny and pressure to tend to telephone infrastructures. “Trouble” took two forms, then, in dealing with customers’ frustration over outages and in dealing with the damage from the wetness itself.

Telephone breakdowns required determinations about the outage’s source. “Trouble men” and “trouble departments” hunted down the probable cause of the damage, which meant sussing out babies, sponges, damp locations, spills, and open windows. If customers wanted to lay blame at workers’ feet in these moments, then repairers labeled customers as abusers of the phone cord. One author attributed at least 50 percent of telephone trouble to cases where “someone has been careless or neglectful.” Trouble men employed medical metaphors to describe their work, as in “he is a physician, and he makes the ills that the telephone is heir to his life study.”

Serge Bloch

Stories about this investigative work abounded. They typically emphasized the user’s ignorance and established the trouble man as the voice of reason, as in the case of an ill-placed wet umbrella leaned up against the telephone wiring. It didn’t seem to occur to the telephone worker that the umbrella user simply didn’t notice the umbrella’s positioning. Phone companies thus tried to make wetness a collective problem—for instance, by taking out newspaper announcements that commented on how many households lost power in a particular storm due to improper umbrella habits.

Even if a consumer knew the cord had gotten wet, they didn’t necessarily blame it as the cause of the outage. The repairer often used this as an opportunity to properly socialize the user about wetness and inappropriate telephone treatment. These conversations didn’t always go well: A 1918 article in Popular Science Monthly described an explosive argument between an infuriated woman and a phone company employee over a baby’s cord habits. The permissive mother and teething child had become emblematic of misuse, a photograph of them appearing in Bell Telephone News in 1917 as evidence of common trouble that a telephone (and its repairer) might encounter. However, no one blamed the baby; telephone workers unfailingly held mothers responsible as “bad” users.

Teething babies and the mothers that let them play with phone cords were often blamed for telephone troubles. The Telephone Review/License to Spill

Repair work often involved special tools meant to identify the source of the outage. Not unlike a doctor relying upon an X-ray to visualize and interpret a patient’s body, the trouble man relied on an apparatus known as the Telefault to evaluate breakages. The repairer attached an exploring coil to a telephone receiver and then generated an intermittent current that, when sent out over the malfunctioning wire, allowed him to hear the source of the fault. This wasn’t always an easy process, but linemen nevertheless recommended the Telefault through testimonials and articles. The machine and trouble man together functioned as co-testers of wetness, making everyday life’s liquidity diagnosable and interpretable.

Armed with such a tool, repairers glorified their own expertise. One wire chief was celebrated as the “original ‘find-out artist’” who could determine a telephone’s underlying troubles even in tricky cases. Telephone company employees leveraged themselves as experts who could attribute wetness’s causes to—in their estimation—uneducated (and even dimwitted) customers, who were often female. Women were often the earliest and most engaged phone users, adopting the device as a key mechanism for social relations, and so they became an easy target.

Phone repairers were constructing everyday life as a problem for uninterrupted service; untamed mouths, clumsy hands, and wet umbrellas all stood at odds with connectivity.

Though the phone industry and repairers were often framed as heroes, troubleshooting took its toll on overextended phone workers, and companies suffered a financial burden from repairs. One estimate by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company found that each time a company “clear[ed] wet cord trouble,” it cost a dollar. Phone companies portrayed the telephone as a fragile device that could be easily damaged by everyday life, aiming to make the subscriber a proactively “dry” and compliant user.

Telephone workers also quantified the cost of moisture incidents that impaired good service. According to an investigation conducted by an Easton, Pa., central office employee, a baby chewing on a cord could lead to 1 hour and 45 minutes of lost service, while a spilled pitcher of water would cause a whopping 8-hour outage. Other quantifications related to spilled whisky, mustard, wet hands, and mops. In a cheeky summary of this work, a reporter reminded readers that the investigator did not recommend “doing away with babies, sponges and wet bouquets” but rather offered his statistics “as an educational hint to keep the telephone cord away from dampness.”

Everyday sources of wetness, including mops and mustard, could cause hours of phone interruption. Telephony/License to Spill

A blossoming accessory market also emerged, which focused on moving phones away from sources of moisture. The telephone bracket, for example, clamped onto a desk and, like a “third arm” or “human arm,” would “hold [the phone] out of your way when not in use; brings it where you want it at a touch.” The Equipoise Telephone Arm was used in offices and on ships as a sort of worker’s appendage. One company’s advertisements promised that the Equipoise could prevent liquid messes—like overturned inkstands—and could stop cords from getting tangled or impeding one’s work.

Although telephone companies put significant effort into reforming their subscribers, the increasing pervasiveness of telephony began to conflict with these abstinent aims. Thus, a new technological solution emerged that put the burden on moisture-proofing the wire. The Stromberg-Carlson Telephone Manufacturing Co. of Rochester, N.Y., began producing copper wire that featured an insulating enamel, two layers of silk, the company’s moisture-proof compound, and a layer of cotton. Called Duratex, the cord withstood a test in which the manufacturer submerged it in water for 48 hours. In its advertising, Stromberg-Carlson warned that many traditional cords—even if they seemed to dry out after wetting—had sustained interior damage so “gradual that it is seldom noticed until the subscriber complains of service.”

Serge Bloch

Western Electric, another manufacturer of liquid-friendly cords, claimed its moisture-proof and “hard-knock proof” cord could handle “rough” conditions and wore its coating like the Charles Dickens character Tony Weller in The Pickwick Papers, with his many layers of clothing. The product’s hardiness would allow the desk telephone to “withstand any climate,” even one hostile to communication technology.

Telephone companies that deployed these cords saw significant cost benefits. A report from Bell Telephone noted that in 1919, when it installed 1,800,000 of these protected cords, it began saving US $90,000 per year (about $1.6 million in today’s dollars). By 1926, that same report concluded, the company had saved $400,000. But something else significant had shifted in this transition that involved far more than developing a moisture-proof solution. The cultural balance tilted from encouraging consumers to behave properly to insulating these media technologies from their everyday circumstances.

This subtle change meant that the burden to adapt fell to the device rather than the user. As telephone wires began to “penetrate everywhere,” they were imagined as fostering constant and unimpeded connectivity that not even saliva or a spilled drink could interrupt. The move to cord protection was not accompanied by a great deal of fanfare, however. As part of telephone infrastructure, cords faded into the background of conversations.