DON’T KEEP ME HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE [462]

Clear-bodied Trimphone, used for promotional purposes

Some time ago, I had the idea for a scene that would find itself in some sort of murder mystery film. A character would speak into a telephone, intentionally misleading whoever was on the other end of the line, then placing their hand over the microphone end of the handset as they describe what was really going to happen to the other person in the room, in much the way that villains always declare their plots out loud. 

At the end, as the detective puts together all the elements of the case, rewarding the audience’s attention as they go, it is revealed that the phone on which the villain was speaking was a Trimphone, the ubiquitous angled telephone found across British homes from 1965 onwards, the thinness of its receiver achieved by placing the microphone in the top section, next to the speaker – the other line heard the whole plot, then called the authorities.

Our family had one of these phones at home for years – once upon a time, you either had a standard-issue General Post Office phone in your home, owned by the provider of the phone line, or you rented a comparatively cutting-edge Trimphone for a few extra pence a week. Ours had a two-tone blue colour, the handset and cord in a darker blue than the base – modern reproductions always use one colour for the whole device, missing an important part of the design and aesthetic of the phone.

I now understand my murder mystery scene could not work in practice. It is easy as a child, using what felt like a top-heavy handset, to have thought the sound of your speaking must travel up the obviously hollow handset to the microphone at the top. That is what happens, but the sound is funnelled through a plastic tube running up the inside of the handset. While the speaker and microphone are installed in the top of the handset, with their backs to each other, the microphone fits into the head of the tube, sealing it off from the speaker – putting your hand over the bottom of the receiver will stop any sound coming in, just as the villain hoped.

While still weighing nearly a kilogram, and containing the same mechanism from other GPO telephones, I thought the Trimphone was named for its comparative lightness and angular design, making them a luxury. However, “Trim” is an acronym: “Tone Ringer Illuminated Model” referenced its use of a tone generator over the striking of bells, sounding like an unfamiliar bird or frog, while using a tiny tritium gas canister to make the rotary dial glow in the dark. Much safer to use than radium, tritium was also used by Rolex and other watch manufacturers on their dials, but despite this comparative weakness, and its average glowing lifespan of only twenty years forcing Rolex and others to find alternatives in the 1990s, enough of a worry existed over radioactivity as a concept for Trimphones to be replaced with dials that did not glow. A push-button version only arrived towards the end of the 1970s, requiring the base to be made slightly taller.

A popular complaint about the Trimphone was its comparative lightness caused the base to easily move if you were walking around while speaking to someone – the official answer was to wet the rubber feat to stick it down. Without the need for anything mechanical, I am sure the modern reproductions are lighter still – they may now even have a microphone small enough to fit next to your mouth.

CAUSE YOU RIDE ON TIME, RIDE ON TIME [153]

My perfect watch is the one I wear right now: a Casio G-Shock, an all-black version of the original 1983 design, with no decals that can scratch off, as much of a reason for buying it as its ability to survive a multi-storey drop. I could never wear a Rolex or Patek Philippe watch for fear of breaking it, although if I could actually afford one, I might be more relaxed about it. Even then, my Casio has a distinct advantage over the most expensive of watches: it will always give me the right time, because it does not rely on me to set it.

The question I asked myself is why I would insist on having a radio-controlled watch, and my first answer was itself a question: if you can have one, why would you not? For all the precious metals, delicate mechanisms, or ability to act as a status symbol, a watch that does not tell the right time is not an effective watch. Having to set the time yourself introduces the possibility that the time will always be wrong, no matter how accurately the watch counts each additional second. My watch tries to remove human error from its operation through its daily reading of the radio signal taking place overnight, although it relies on my remembering to put it close to a window – if I forget that, I can ask it to take it again the following morning.

The time signal is as old as radio. In the UK, the Post Office set up a transmitter in Rugby in 1926, initially broadcasting the time only twice a day – it only became an uninterrupted 24-hour operation in 1953, and stopped identifying itself via Morse code in 1988. Today’s signal, run by the National Physical Laboratory and broadcast from Anthorn, Cumbria since 2007, is entirely digital, broadcasting a second marker for the first 100 milliseconds of every second (500 for the first second in the minute, or “second 00”), with further bits transmitted through the minute to indicate how precise the time is to GMT, followed the year, date, hour, minute, and whether we have entered British Summer Time or not.

However, home devices that took this signal arrived relatively late: the first home clocks appeared in 1983, but the German watchmaker Junghans, producers of the first solar-powered radio-controlled clock in 1986, was the first to miniaturise the technology into a watch with 1990’s “Mega 1” model. It looks like it has a bulge on the side to accommodate the aerial, as many early watches like this did, but it is actually contained in the strap. Frog Design, the British company that designed the Apple IIc computer and the 2006 Sky HD box, encased the watch in an attractive and futuristic case for the time, making it appear close to other digital watches, although it would take a decade for the price to match them.

Asking myself again, why do I need to know the exact time? I do regard having access to it as having a level of control – I like being both in time, and on time. However, the exact time is something everyone, and everything, now requires: computers, mobile phones and TVs need the correct time to transfer data to them correctly. Having the ability to alter clocks on these devices, may actually prevent them from working. Choosing to give up that ability on a watch, to achieve the same level of accuracy, is when that process becomes conscious – whether that time means anything to you is another question entirely.

Even with everything I have said, I have to bear in mind that the time received from a time signal is set to Coordinated Universal Time, abbreviated as “UTC”, a worldwide system used to regulate world time – it is not based on Greenwich Mean Time, which is based on the rotation of the Earth, but is within one second of it. The time is not the same, but I think I can live with that, until the price of real atomic clocks come down.