THE LAST HAND-CRANK PHONE

For most of the twentieth century, a telephone call in Bryant Pond, Maine, began with a handle on the side of an oak box. You turned it, and a small generator inside the phone sent current down the copper pair to a switchboard in the Hathaways' living room, where a metal flap dropped with a clack and showed your line. The operator picked up already knowing whose line it was, and asked what you needed. 12

Elden and Barbara Hathaway bought the company in 1951, when it had about a hundred subscribers and its lines were old Army field wire, and they worked the board in their own living room for three decades. The Maine State Museum calls the Bryant Pond switchboard the last commercial switchboard in the United States. 13

Neighbors who shared a party line called each other without the board at all, cranking patterns of long and short rings that everyone on the wire could recognize, and giving a little ding when they hung up so the others knew the line was free. When a fire broke out, the operators kept a line open and rang the volunteer firemen the chief wanted. 12

In 1981 the Hathaways sold the business to Oxford Telephone & Telegraph, which announced that the exchange would convert to dial. Residents formed the "Don't Yank The Crank Committee" and petitioned the Maine Public Utilities Commission for a dual system that would let subscribers keep their crank phones. After a year of debate the commission rejected the request, clearing the way for the conversion. 4

At two o'clock on the afternoon of October 11, 1983, residents gathered at the Hathaways' house to watch the last call go through the switchboard, and then, with the flick of a switch, the 425 crank phones in the town were replaced with dial phones. Nearly two hundred villagers came to mark the occasion. 14

The last call was to go to Correy Snowden, a plant supervisor for the new phone company, who was in a Portland hospital being treated for cancer — the only one of the crew who could not be there. The Depression-era telephones, a cradle handset and an oak box with a crank on the side, were sold to subscribers for three dollars each as mementos, and the rest of the stock was auctioned. 4

The switchboard is now in the Maine State Museum. In 2008 a fourteen-foot iron telephone was bolted into the ground on North Main Street in Bryant Pond, to mark what had been there. 123

This episode is an AI-rendered reconstruction. Every image is an original generated scene; no archival footage is presented as documentary footage.