Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hate there and Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the Tech are You? So? Not that long ago, I was watching a YouTube video on Max Miller's Tasting History channel, And if you don't know what that is. Max Miller prepares historical meals, you know, like meals that people ate, you know, way back in history. So he'll pick a specific time and place and talk about a typical meal that was prepared or a special meal that's mentioned in some historical document, and he will prepare it himself as well as deliver a history lesson to go along with the food. It's a great channel. I have no connection to it. I have never corresponded with Max Miller. That bit's not important. But in this episode, Max was visiting the Mythical Test Kitchen and Josh of Mythical Kitchen. That's another YouTube channel as a connection with Good Mythical Morning, which has been a show that's been on forever, a great success in the world of online entertainment, one of the few shows that has had real staying power. But anyway, Josh of Mythical Kitchen and Max of Tasting History. We're talking about five foods that changed fast food forever. A lot of alliteration. I guess that does well in YouTube titles. During this conversation, they talked about the fast food chain in an out Burger, which is a chain I've never actually eaten at, because by the time I traveled to a place that had in an out Burgers, I was no longer eating meat, and that pretty much cuts down on what you can order there. I'm on the East coast of the United States, where in and Out just isn't a thing. You kind of had to travel further west to start encountering them. Anyway, Josh dropped a little bit of trivia that made me scratch my head. Namely, he said that the founder of In and Out, a guy named Harry Snyder, invented the two way intercom for drive through operations back in nineteen forty eight. Now, that to me can seem a little misleading. First of all, if you're talking about just inventing the intercom, that's far too late. However, you know, if we use the qualifier that he specifically invented it for the sole purpose of being able to communicate between a person in their car and a person inside a restaurant. Then really it all checks out. So it all just depends on how you word it. He didn't invent the intercom, but he did invent what would become the modern drive through. So today I thought I would talk about the actual history of the intercom, because that starts well before nineteen forty eight and Snyder's inventiveness. In fact, we have to kind of go back to the nineteenth century to talk about the telephone first, even that is super tricky to do. The simple answer as to who invented the telephone is one that I think most people know right. If you ask who invented the telephone, the answer invariably is Alexander Graham Bell. But that's not the complete answer. It's not even necessarily the most correct answer, depending upon your point of view. But we have to remember, like most inventions aren't really a stroke of genius that one person in the world experienced and then created something where nothing was before. Usually, invention is something that is built upon lots of other discoveries, and saying who is the inventor of something largely comes down to just time, place, and who was witness. So Bell would be the first to secure a patent for a technology that eventually would work. When he applied for his patent, he did not yet have a working model of a telephone. But he does deserve quite a bit of credit for being the first to really secure a patent. But other folks had mused upon the possibility of a talking telegraph and had done a lot of work toward that. The first mention I find predates Alexander Graham's Bell's patent by nearly three decades, nearly thirty years. And Tony Miucci began to experiment with a way to transmit voiceover telegraph wires all the way back in eighteen forty nine, that's before the US Civil War. He continued to experiment until he finally was able to file a caveat in eighteen seventy one. Now, in most contexts, we use the word caveat to mean a warning, right, it means beware, And in fact that was the only context I was familiar with. I had not heard of filing a caveat. But in this particular context, what it means is that you are essentially a that you have an upcoming invention it's kind of like a preamble toward filing a patent. You haven't filled out the patent yet, but you file the caveat. It's kind of a placeholder to say, I don't want anyone swooping in here and patenting a technology that I am already working on, so I'm filing this document that says I have a patent application coming now. Unfortunately, Miucci was not really in a secure financial place in his life, so he wasn't able to afford the fee to renew his caveat when it came up for expiration. So for more than a century, Miucci was largely uncredited for his contributions toward the invention of the telephone. But in fact, if he had been able to be in a financially stable place, it's possible that Miucci would be the name we would be talking about when we say who invented the telephone. But there are other people who also did a lot of early work. There was a french Man named Charles Borciul. I'm just gonna call him Charlie because I already know I butchered his last name. So Charlie worked on his own version of a telephone or a speaking telegraph. In the eighteen fifties, he was employed by a telegraph company and he was convinced he could create a device that was capable of transmitting voice across those telegraph lines. So he developed a microphone to convert sound to electrical signals, but he never quite figured out how to make a receiver that could playback sound so that you could, you know, understand it. So I imagine a phone call with his device would sound like you were talking to one of the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon that muted trumpet sound. Then there's the potentially shady story of Elisha Gray. His lawyers applied for a caveat for a talking telegraph system, and did so the very same day that Alexander Graham Bell's lawyers were applying for a patent for his telephone system. And if Gray's lawyer had been able to secure that caveat early enough, then that might have been enough for the patent office to dismiss Bell's application. But Bell's lawyer was recorded as being the fifth person in line that morning at the patent office, and Gray's lawyer was listed as the thirty ninth, And you know, first come first served. I guess now there are people who suggest that there were some shenanigans going on at the patent office, that perhaps Gray had a more legitimate claim to getting his caveat filed before Bell's patent was filed, and even some allegations that Bell perhaps lifted some of Gray's ideas in his design when Bell went on to actually make a working device, because like I said earlier, when Bell filed for his patent, he didn't yet have a working model of a telephone. And I found most of this information at the Library of Congress website, by the way, it's a fun little read, and you know, some of the other info were from other sources. But in the end, Alexander Graham Bell gets the simplified credit because he first secured a patent for the invention, and then later he was able to build a working version. His telephone had two components. It had a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter had kind of a cylindrical speaking phone device. You would speak into this cylinder and the other end of the cylinder was closed off right, the end you spoke into was open. The other end had a membrane across it. Technically a sheet of paper in the early days. And connected to this sheet of paper, on the opposite side from where you were talking in was a piece of cork that had a needle attached to it, and the needle would make contact with a conductive liquid like sulfuric acid and stuff in it. This was Gray's approach, by the way that he had described in his caveat This is the bit where some historians suggest that perhaps Bell was lifting from Gray in an effort to build a working version of his invention, and that he was essentially stealing. Whether that's true or not is still one of those historical mysteries. On the other side of the container of this liquid was a metal contact, and so the paper would vibrate due to the sound coming in through the cylinder, so that sound makes the paper vibrate. That ends up making the needle vibrate, and the vibrations mean the needle is moving through the liquid. In this conductive fluid, the movements of the needle would bring it closer to or further away from the metal contact. This would actually alter the current that was flowing through that liquid and thus then through the telegraph line. So on the other end was the receiver which consisted of a simple electromagnetic setup. So you had an an electromagnet that was suspended so that it was inside the magnetic field of a permanent magnet, like a horseshoe magnet. So as current would flow through the electromagnet, the electromagnet would generate its own magnetic field, and this would interact with the permanent magnets magnetic field. So if they were opposite charges like north and south, they would attract. If they were similar like north north or south south, they would repel. And so this changing fluctuation in the magnetic field of the electromagnet would make the electromagnet move closer to or further from the permanent magnet. Remember it suspended, it's not permanently fixed. And attached to this electromagnet was a taut membrane and a kind of a sounding horn. So the electromagnet would move due to these fluctuations of the magnetic field, and that in turn would cause the membrane to vibrate. These vibrations coincided with those fluctuations, and the flexing membrane would create changes in air pressure vibrations. In other words, and we perceived that as sound, so the sounds that created the vibrations on the transmitter aka the microphone side of the system would then be replicated by the vibrations on the receiver or loudspeaker side. It was a brilliant setup. We'll talk about how this led to the invention of the intercom, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, So the invention of the telephone would really revolutionize the world, but it didn't happen overnight. It actually was a very slow process. For one thing, in the early days, not that many people had houses that were wired for electricity, let alone a telegraph line. So the earliest telephone systems were limited. They only went to a few locations, and they were all open party lines essentially, which means there was no way for two people to have a private conversation on the telephone. Anyone who was connected to that particular network or system could just pick up a receiver and listen into whatever was going on at that moment. And it also meant that if more than two people wanted to chat on the phone at the same time on the same network, there would be an issue. You would either have to have one party just sit out and wait or deal with a whole lot of crosstalk. But for our purposes, the important part is the telephone would be the starting point for a related communication system, the intercommunication device or intercom. So an intercom is typically a separate, standalone communications system for a building or other structure. So rather than being connected to a larger network that includes lots of buildings like homes and businesses and such, and intercom is something you would find inside a single location like you know, an apartment building, or even in a vehicle or in the case of a drive through the outside and the inside of a restaurant. It is independent of the larger telephone network, so you can't make calls to or from the intercom to the network at large, but it is built on similar technologies to the phone network. Now, before the electronic intercom, some buildings actually use speaking tubes. Typically these were made out of a material like brass, and they worked by channeling sound from one point to another. But you know, there was no conversion of sound into electricity or anything like that. This was just the transmission of actual vibrations. This had limitations because those vibrations lose power over distance. Right, they get weaker as they travel, so at a certain point the tube would be so long that the vibrations coming out the other side would be too weak for the typical person to hear, so you'd have people like outing their heads off at either end of the tube and only barely being heard by the other person. Also, outfitting a building with a whole bunch of brass tubes wasn't always practical. Like, maybe if you were building it with the tubes in mind from the beginning, you could do it, But if you were trying to retrofit a building with this, it wasn't always easy to do. On a similar note, like it wasn't just apartment buildings that were running into these kinds of challenges. During the First World War, the British realized they needed to create a way for piloting instructors to speak with pilots in training during training sessions. So the aircraft at this time had open cockpits. You know, there's no like glass separating you from the outside world. You're flying in an open cockpit. As you can imagine, that made it very noisy to sit in either the pilot's seat or the instructor seat, which sat in tandem behind the pilot. What's more, the British were seeing a large number of accidents that were caused by pilot error, so, equate to the website air Andspaceforces dot Com, sixty percent of the Brits combat losses were actually from pilot error. Only two percent of their losses came from enemy action like having an airplane shot down by the enemy or otherwise disabled or destroyed by the enemy. So clearly there needed to be a better way for instructors to talk with pilots in the training phases because pilots weren't learning the appropriate operation of their vehicles. So the way they solved this was kind of similar to those brass tubes I talked about in apartment buildings, except instead of brass tubes, there was a rubber hose. So on one end of the hose you had a funnel that would fit over the mouth of the instructor. The other end of the hose, originally there was a similar funnel that would fit over the student's mouth. And obviously that's not enough because right you could just be shouting into someone else's mouth. Do this must be the place by talking heads where he says, sing into my mouth, but you wouldn't be able to hear anything. So the hose had little branching elements at either end that connected over the ear flaps on the helmets that the pilot's wore. Remember these are like the days of like leather helmets. So they eventually would make these metal cups that would fit over the ears, and the tubes would fit into the metal cups so that the sound could be heard by the person you know, wearing the helmet, and that way the instructor and the student could communicate with each other. The instructor could belt out directions, the student could hear and respond and ask questions, and it really helped bring down the accident stats as well as reduced the amount of time that was needed to train up a pilot. It sped up training considerably. Now, later versions of this setup would just ditch the funnel for the student, like they would not have a mouthpiece anymore. So learning to fly would mean that you would receive instructions, but you'd have to hold all your questions until you were back on terra firma. So the instructor would still have a funnel that they would speak into, but the funnel would just go to a branching set of tubes that would go to the ear pieces set into the helmet that the student was wearing. Even by World War One, there were already examples of intercom by wire systems. It just wasn't practical to use on an airplane yet, but it was in use elsewhere. One company that gets credit for developing early intercom systems was the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company, which secured a patent back in eighteen ninety four front early system for apartment buildings and the like. This is, of course, according to a website I've found called Butterfly MX. More on that in a second. So Kellogg in this case, it's not the serial guy. Kellogg in this case refers to Milo G. Kellogg. He had worked for a company called Gray and Martin before he founded his own business. And yes, that's Gray, as in Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham, Bell's rival who filed the caveat the same day that Bell filed his patent, Gray and Barton. That company would later become the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, and later it would just be known as Western Electric. And Kellogg had worked at Western Electric until eighteen eighty nine. By the time he went on to found the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company, he had already secured more than one hundred and fifty patents to his name, and these patents became assets of his company. Kellogg would actually play a really big part in fighting the American Bell Telephone Company, which of course was named after Alexander Graham Bell, and that company was attempting to secure a perpetual monopoly over the phone system in the United States, even though Alexander Graham Bell's patents had expired in the early eighteen nineties. So once patents expire their public domain, it's fair game. But the company was trying to change that. They were trying to persuade the American government to change patent law so that the company would enjoy perpetual exclusive rights to the telephone invention. Kellogg was one of many people who fought back against that movement, and ultimately Kellogg's side would win. That story by itself is fascinating and it would give Game of Thrones a run for the money as far as deceit and betrayal goes. But we don't really have time to go into that for great detail, so I'll have to hold off on that maybe covered in a future episode, because it is a fascinating story and it involves a point where Kellogg himself got very sick and his second in command behind his back, secretly sold Kellogg's switchboard and supply company to the Bell Telephone Company, and then Kellogg would have to take the whole to court and ultimately get the decisions reversed. It's a great story. I've just summed it up, but maybe I'll go into more detail in a future episode. Now. According to BUTTERFLYMX, which by the way, is a company that makes intercom hardware and software applications for businesses and homes, Like we're talking like advanced stuff that includes things like video conferencing and connections with other home automation systems, that kind of thing. Their website says that the intercom system from Kellogg back in eighteen ninety four was really just a simple circuit that would connect handles at the front door of an apartment building that would connect to a specific circuit for each apartment inside. So there'd be one handle for like Apartment one A and another handle for apartment one B and so on. So pulling on a handle would close the circuit that would send a signal to the receiver that's in that respective apartment, and that receiver would would buzz. Essentially, it was like an alarm clock. It would cause a little hammer to hit against a bell or something, but that was the extent of this intercommunication. So essentially it was like a door bell that let someone know they had a visitor who was standing outside the building. I would argue that's not really an intercom because it didn't allow for a voice communication in either direction. However, again according to Butterfly MX quote, a few years later, the Kellogg company added an ear piece and mouthpiece to enable tenants to speak with visitors end quote. So assuming that that is correct, then this would be a very early example, you know, pre twentieth century example of an intercom system. Now, I should add I couldn't really find a love supporting documentation to give more details about this specific case when I was looking at Kellogg, I mean, obviously Kelleg Switchboard and Supply Company was a real company. They did a ton of work created elements that were used for telephone systems, so that is legit. It really was a thing. How much they did in intercoms and how early and when it changed. I can't give you details about that because I couldn't find particulars, but it is true that early intercom systems were essentially small, independent telephone systems that were confined to a specific location and did not interconnect with the larger phone network. And keep in mind, in the early days, there were a lot of separate phone networks, a lot of regional phone networks where you couldn't call anyone who was on a different network because there were no interconnections that would take time to form. So for a very long time, phone networks were really only useful for relatively local calls. Now, in general, finding a lot of hard information about the history of intercoms is tricky. Most other resources I found get pretty vague with details. For example, I found a piece that was on Techwala's article titled history of intercom Systems, and it shows that details get pretty fuzzy. There's a passage that says, quote by nineteen twelve, if not earlier, users had the choice between a telephone style handset or a desktop loudspeaker that let users keep their hands free end quote. So this is about like an interoffice intercom system and the fact that it has the phrase by nineteen twelve, if not earlier, suggests that there's a distinct lack of documentation going on here. No shade on techwallap, mind you. I'm not throwing them under the bus, because I also found it very hard to find a lot of firms supporting documentation where I can confidently say, in the year you know whatever, we saw the first interoffice intercom system. I just don't have that information. There are a lot of different people who are accredited as the inventor of office intercom systems, but usually they invented something very specific that made intercom systems better. When it comes to the actual first intercom system, the details there are a lot harder to find. Okay, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, We're going to talk about fast food and drive throughs. Okay, so we're back, and the whole point of this episode is that intercoms were definitely a thing before we ever get to In and Out Burger and Harry Snyder, because the first In and Out Burger didn't open until nineteen forty eight. However, I don't want to take away from Harry Snyder here because I don't think it's Snyder's fault that some people take a shortcut to suggest that he invented the intercom. A lot of sites are pretty good about this, where they say he didn't invent the intercom, Rather he was the first to use an intercom system to enable what would become the model for the modern drive through, which is the correct thing to say, but a lot of other sites simplify this just to say that he invented the intercom, which is not correct. But he did come up with a solution to a pretty tricky problem. So here in America, we have a very car centric culture. In America, we have this self identity where freedom plays a huge part in that self identity. Depending on how cynical you are, you might view this concept of freedom as being largely imaginary, but put that aside. Part of being free is this idea that you can travel throughout the United States whenever you want. You just have to have a way of getting around, but you can travel freely from state to state without needing papers or anything to be able to do it. And there's this kind of sense of pioneering and exploration that's kind of ingrained into the American identity. Again, how realistic that is is depended upon your point of view. Part of that meant that there was this very car centric culture, which required a couple of things to start to happen to enable that. The highway system was one of them. You had to have highways connecting different regions together in order to make these trips. The proliferation of gas stations was another. You had to have places where you could refuel while you were on the go. The creation of things like motels was another one. You had to have places where you could you could stop for the night and sleep so you could rest before you continued on your road trip, and places where you could grab food when you're on the go. So Snyder was coming up with a solution to that issue that you're going to grab food on the go. You want fast food, but it's not really convenient for you to drive to a place, park your car, get out of your car, walk up to the restaurant, go inside, place your order by talking to an actual human being face to face. That's the worst. Then paying for your food, waiting for it, bringing it back out to your car, and then you get to drive off. That's not very efficient. Now, Alternatively, you could have customers park in the parking lot, and then you could send employees out to the customers and take the customer's orders, then come back to the restaurant place the orders, wait for the food, grab the food, go back out to the customers and deliver it. Perhaps you could even have the employees wearing roller skates. This was a pretty popular method in the mid twentieth century. It still is in some places, like there's some places that do the retro thing. You know, the employees on roller skates who will take orders and bring food out to you and stuff. You could do this, but again wasn't very efficient. It also meant that you had to have more staff on your employment in order to get this done. So it would be a lot better for you if the customer could just drive up and order directly, But the noise of vehicles, the distance between customer and cook or cashier made it hard to have this work. It would create choke points, it was hard to understand folks, and the system would be inefficient. So Snyder's solution was to create an intercom system that would let one customer order at an ordering location, and then a customer further up ahead could actually be getting their food and paying for their transaction. And it made everything much more efficient, right, You weren't taking an order, prepping the food, delivering the food, and then taking money for it all at one spot. You were dividing that up so the line would move much more quickly. So he introduced this technology at his first In and Out Burger location in the Los Angeles area, technically in Baldwin Park. And from what I understand, the first intercom system was installed in nineteen forty nine, so he had only opened a year earlier, and he had built the first two way intercom system he used in his own garage and he installed it himself at the restaurant. So, according to Snyder's granddaughter Lindsey in her book The Ins and Outs of In and Out, Snyder was inspired by intercom systems that were in use on warships in the US Navy, and he decided to use that approach at his restaurants. The very first intercom system was pretty nondescript. It was just a speaker that was mounted on a post that was next to the restaurant, but customers didn't initially know how or why they should use it, so they had to put up some signage to let folks know not to just keep driving around to the takeout window and shout orders at line cooks, but instead to stop at the speaker where they could place their order. The system was very much Jerry rigged. You know, Snyder was not an electrician or an engineer. He was kind of just a tinkerer. He also was color blind, which meant he wasn't using the standard colored wires to indicate which wire would go where, which wouldn't be that big of a deal except for the fact that these speakers weren't secured to the post in a way that was unassailable. So in an effort to prevent people from stealing drive through speakers, which could be a thing. People would steal speakers so that they could use them for other stuff, he decided that his system would mean that employees would have to disconnect the speakers at the end of the day and then bring the speakers inside so they could be locked up inside the restaurant. And that meant you had to be very careful with how you stored the wires because you would really need to hook the speaker back up properly at the beginning of the next day. For business right, and since he was colorblind and wasn't using the standard wire colors to indicate, Hey, this wire goes here, that wire goes there. I mean, you had to be very careful when you were storing those wires in the speaker so that you could connect them properly the next day. Otherwise you're just going to be spending a lot of time troubleshooting and figuring out why the intercom system isn't working. Now, Snyder's innovation was a game changer for In and Out, and eventually it'd be a game changer for the rest of the fast food industry, but it would take some time for it to catch on. Business Insider has an article titled, how In and Out invented the two way speaker system and created the first modern drive through. I think the two way speaker system the invented the two way speaker system part is a little misleading, but creating the first modern drive through is absolutely on point. And that article says that competitors like Wendy's and Jack in the Box would start installing their own intercom systems and their drive throughs in the mid to late nineteen sixties, and that McDonald's didn't even get on board until the mid nineteen seventies. So since in and Out was doing this since nineteen forty nine, they had more than a decade of being the exclusive fast food chain that had an intercom drive through system, which is pretty cool. Now we can look at the drive through as kind of like that smaller component of that car culture I was talking about, right, Like, that's just one of those elements where you realize that the reason all this exists was to enable this culture in America that encouraged people to go on road trips and travel to distant places and explore the country. It was something that really cemented in the American psyche, this idea that car ownership is a big part of being an American citizen. It doesn't mean that you have to have a car to be an American citizen, but a lot of what we do does revolve around cars, and that if you don't have one, it makes participating in society a lot more challenging. There's some areas in America that have good to great public transportation alternatives, but where I am in Atlanta, Georgia, I will say that the public transportation is at best adequate, it's not great. And it requires you to make a lot of considerations and sacrifices in order to be able to get to where you're going, including leaving way earlier than you think you need to in order to be able to make all your connections. So, yeah, it's interesting. It's one of those elements that collectively really tell the story of America's concept of freedom and independence and agency. And it all has to do, in this case, with a pretty simple system that was built on top of the old telephone system. Now, obviously intercoms have advanced quite a bit since those days. Now we have ones that include things like video cameras and the ability to interact with things like electronic lock systems and all that, but that would come later. And now we have ones that work over Internet protocol, not over like the old telephone system. So the actual method of transmission has changed over time as well, but the basic idea has remained the same. And so I think it's fair to say In and Out had a pretty big impact at least on fast food culture here in the United States, and that the tasting history element wasn't completely wrong. It was just perhaps a tiny bit misleading to suggest that Snyder invented the two way inter comm system. He didn't invent it, he just found a really, really good use for it. And if you're going to in and out get some fries, get them animal style, think of me while you do it, and I will live vicariously through you. That's it for today's episode. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hate there and Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the Tech are You? So? Not that long ago, I was watching a YouTube video on Max Miller's Tasting History channel, And if you don't know what that is. Max Miller prepares historical meals, you know, like meals that people ate, you know, way back in history. So he'll pick a specific time and place and talk about a typical meal that was prepared or a special meal that's mentioned in some historical document, and he will prepare it himself as well as deliver a history lesson to go along with the food. It's a great channel. I have no connection to it. I have never corresponded with Max Miller. That bit's not important. But in this episode, Max was visiting the Mythical Test Kitchen and Josh of Mythical Kitchen. That's another YouTube channel as a connection with Good Mythical Morning, which has been a show that's been on forever, a great success in the world of online entertainment, one of the few shows that has had real staying power. But anyway, Josh of Mythical Kitchen and Max of Tasting History. We're talking about five foods that changed fast food forever. A lot of alliteration. I guess that does well in YouTube titles. During this conversation, they talked about the fast food chain in an out Burger, which is a chain I've never actually eaten at, because by the time I traveled to a place that had in an out Burgers, I was no longer eating meat, and that pretty much cuts down on what you can order there. I'm on the East coast of the United States, where in and Out just isn't a thing. You kind of had to travel further west to start encountering them. Anyway, Josh dropped a little bit of trivia that made me scratch my head. Namely, he said that the founder of In and Out, a guy named Harry Snyder, invented the two way intercom for drive through operations back in nineteen forty eight. Now, that to me can seem a little misleading. First of all, if you're talking about just inventing the intercom, that's far too late. However, you know, if we use the qualifier that he specifically invented it for the sole purpose of being able to communicate between a person in their car and a person inside a restaurant. Then really it all checks out. So it all just depends on how you word it. He didn't invent the intercom, but he did invent what would become the modern drive through. So today I thought I would talk about the actual history of the intercom, because that starts well before nineteen forty eight and Snyder's inventiveness. In fact, we have to kind of go back to the nineteenth century to talk about the telephone first, even that is super tricky to do. The simple answer as to who invented the telephone is one that I think most people know right. If you ask who invented the telephone, the answer invariably is Alexander Graham Bell. But that's not the complete answer. It's not even necessarily the most correct answer, depending upon your point of view. But we have to remember, like most inventions aren't really a stroke of genius that one person in the world experienced and then created something where nothing was before. Usually, invention is something that is built upon lots of other discoveries, and saying who is the inventor of something largely comes down to just time, place, and who was witness. So Bell would be the first to secure a patent for a technology that eventually would work. When he applied for his patent, he did not yet have a working model of a telephone. But he does deserve quite a bit of credit for being the first to really secure a patent. But other folks had mused upon the possibility of a talking telegraph and had done a lot of work toward that. The first mention I find predates Alexander Graham's Bell's patent by nearly three decades, nearly thirty years. And Tony Miucci began to experiment with a way to transmit voiceover telegraph wires all the way back in eighteen forty nine, that's before the US Civil War. He continued to experiment until he finally was able to file a caveat in eighteen seventy one. Now, in most contexts, we use the word caveat to mean a warning, right, it means beware, And in fact that was the only context I was familiar with. I had not heard of filing a caveat. But in this particular context, what it means is that you are essentially a that you have an upcoming invention it's kind of like a preamble toward filing a patent. You haven't filled out the patent yet, but you file the caveat. It's kind of a placeholder to say, I don't want anyone swooping in here and patenting a technology that I am already working on, so I'm filing this document that says I have a patent application coming now. Unfortunately, Miucci was not really in a secure financial place in his life, so he wasn't able to afford the fee to renew his caveat when it came up for expiration. So for more than a century, Miucci was largely uncredited for his contributions toward the invention of the telephone. But in fact, if he had been able to be in a financially stable place, it's possible that Miucci would be the name we would be talking about when we say who invented the telephone. But there are other people who also did a lot of early work. There was a french Man named Charles Borciul. I'm just gonna call him Charlie because I already know I butchered his last name. So Charlie worked on his own version of a telephone or a speaking telegraph. In the eighteen fifties, he was employed by a telegraph company and he was convinced he could create a device that was capable of transmitting voice across those telegraph lines. So he developed a microphone to convert sound to electrical signals, but he never quite figured out how to make a receiver that could playback sound so that you could, you know, understand it. So I imagine a phone call with his device would sound like you were talking to one of the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon that muted trumpet sound. Then there's the potentially shady story of Elisha Gray. His lawyers applied for a caveat for a talking telegraph system, and did so the very same day that Alexander Graham Bell's lawyers were applying for a patent for his telephone system. And if Gray's lawyer had been able to secure that caveat early enough, then that might have been enough for the patent office to dismiss Bell's application. But Bell's lawyer was recorded as being the fifth person in line that morning at the patent office, and Gray's lawyer was listed as the thirty ninth, And you know, first come first served. I guess now there are people who suggest that there were some shenanigans going on at the patent office, that perhaps Gray had a more legitimate claim to getting his caveat filed before Bell's patent was filed, and even some allegations that Bell perhaps lifted some of Gray's ideas in his design when Bell went on to actually make a working device, because like I said earlier, when Bell filed for his patent, he didn't yet have a working model of a telephone. And I found most of this information at the Library of Congress website, by the way, it's a fun little read, and you know, some of the other info were from other sources. But in the end, Alexander Graham Bell gets the simplified credit because he first secured a patent for the invention, and then later he was able to build a working version. His telephone had two components. It had a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter had kind of a cylindrical speaking phone device. You would speak into this cylinder and the other end of the cylinder was closed off right, the end you spoke into was open. The other end had a membrane across it. Technically a sheet of paper in the early days. And connected to this sheet of paper, on the opposite side from where you were talking in was a piece of cork that had a needle attached to it, and the needle would make contact with a conductive liquid like sulfuric acid and stuff in it. This was Gray's approach, by the way that he had described in his caveat This is the bit where some historians suggest that perhaps Bell was lifting from Gray in an effort to build a working version of his invention, and that he was essentially stealing. Whether that's true or not is still one of those historical mysteries. On the other side of the container of this liquid was a metal contact, and so the paper would vibrate due to the sound coming in through the cylinder, so that sound makes the paper vibrate. That ends up making the needle vibrate, and the vibrations mean the needle is moving through the liquid. In this conductive fluid, the movements of the needle would bring it closer to or further away from the metal contact. This would actually alter the current that was flowing through that liquid and thus then through the telegraph line. So on the other end was the receiver which consisted of a simple electromagnetic setup. So you had an an electromagnet that was suspended so that it was inside the magnetic field of a permanent magnet, like a horseshoe magnet. So as current would flow through the electromagnet, the electromagnet would generate its own magnetic field, and this would interact with the permanent magnets magnetic field. So if they were opposite charges like north and south, they would attract. If they were similar like north north or south south, they would repel. And so this changing fluctuation in the magnetic field of the electromagnet would make the electromagnet move closer to or further from the permanent magnet. Remember it suspended, it's not permanently fixed. And attached to this electromagnet was a taut membrane and a kind of a sounding horn. So the electromagnet would move due to these fluctuations of the magnetic field, and that in turn would cause the membrane to vibrate. These vibrations coincided with those fluctuations, and the flexing membrane would create changes in air pressure vibrations. In other words, and we perceived that as sound, so the sounds that created the vibrations on the transmitter aka the microphone side of the system would then be replicated by the vibrations on the receiver or loudspeaker side. It was a brilliant setup. We'll talk about how this led to the invention of the intercom, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, So the invention of the telephone would really revolutionize the world, but it didn't happen overnight. It actually was a very slow process. For one thing, in the early days, not that many people had houses that were wired for electricity, let alone a telegraph line. So the earliest telephone systems were limited. They only went to a few locations, and they were all open party lines essentially, which means there was no way for two people to have a private conversation on the telephone. Anyone who was connected to that particular network or system could just pick up a receiver and listen into whatever was going on at that moment. And it also meant that if more than two people wanted to chat on the phone at the same time on the same network, there would be an issue. You would either have to have one party just sit out and wait or deal with a whole lot of crosstalk. But for our purposes, the important part is the telephone would be the starting point for a related communication system, the intercommunication device or intercom. So an intercom is typically a separate, standalone communications system for a building or other structure. So rather than being connected to a larger network that includes lots of buildings like homes and businesses and such, and intercom is something you would find inside a single location like you know, an apartment building, or even in a vehicle or in the case of a drive through the outside and the inside of a restaurant. It is independent of the larger telephone network, so you can't make calls to or from the intercom to the network at large, but it is built on similar technologies to the phone network. Now, before the electronic intercom, some buildings actually use speaking tubes. Typically these were made out of a material like brass, and they worked by channeling sound from one point to another. But you know, there was no conversion of sound into electricity or anything like that. This was just the transmission of actual vibrations. This had limitations because those vibrations lose power over distance. Right, they get weaker as they travel, so at a certain point the tube would be so long that the vibrations coming out the other side would be too weak for the typical person to hear, so you'd have people like outing their heads off at either end of the tube and only barely being heard by the other person. Also, outfitting a building with a whole bunch of brass tubes wasn't always practical. Like, maybe if you were building it with the tubes in mind from the beginning, you could do it, But if you were trying to retrofit a building with this, it wasn't always easy to do. On a similar note, like it wasn't just apartment buildings that were running into these kinds of challenges. During the First World War, the British realized they needed to create a way for piloting instructors to speak with pilots in training during training sessions. So the aircraft at this time had open cockpits. You know, there's no like glass separating you from the outside world. You're flying in an open cockpit. As you can imagine, that made it very noisy to sit in either the pilot's seat or the instructor seat, which sat in tandem behind the pilot. What's more, the British were seeing a large number of accidents that were caused by pilot error, so, equate to the website air Andspaceforces dot Com, sixty percent of the Brits combat losses were actually from pilot error. Only two percent of their losses came from enemy action like having an airplane shot down by the enemy or otherwise disabled or destroyed by the enemy. So clearly there needed to be a better way for instructors to talk with pilots in the training phases because pilots weren't learning the appropriate operation of their vehicles. So the way they solved this was kind of similar to those brass tubes I talked about in apartment buildings, except instead of brass tubes, there was a rubber hose. So on one end of the hose you had a funnel that would fit over the mouth of the instructor. The other end of the hose, originally there was a similar funnel that would fit over the student's mouth. And obviously that's not enough because right you could just be shouting into someone else's mouth. Do this must be the place by talking heads where he says, sing into my mouth, but you wouldn't be able to hear anything. So the hose had little branching elements at either end that connected over the ear flaps on the helmets that the pilot's wore. Remember these are like the days of like leather helmets. So they eventually would make these metal cups that would fit over the ears, and the tubes would fit into the metal cups so that the sound could be heard by the person you know, wearing the helmet, and that way the instructor and the student could communicate with each other. The instructor could belt out directions, the student could hear and respond and ask questions, and it really helped bring down the accident stats as well as reduced the amount of time that was needed to train up a pilot. It sped up training considerably. Now, later versions of this setup would just ditch the funnel for the student, like they would not have a mouthpiece anymore. So learning to fly would mean that you would receive instructions, but you'd have to hold all your questions until you were back on terra firma. So the instructor would still have a funnel that they would speak into, but the funnel would just go to a branching set of tubes that would go to the ear pieces set into the helmet that the student was wearing. Even by World War One, there were already examples of intercom by wire systems. It just wasn't practical to use on an airplane yet, but it was in use elsewhere. One company that gets credit for developing early intercom systems was the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company, which secured a patent back in eighteen ninety four front early system for apartment buildings and the like. This is, of course, according to a website I've found called Butterfly MX. More on that in a second. So Kellogg in this case, it's not the serial guy. Kellogg in this case refers to Milo G. Kellogg. He had worked for a company called Gray and Martin before he founded his own business. And yes, that's Gray, as in Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham, Bell's rival who filed the caveat the same day that Bell filed his patent, Gray and Barton. That company would later become the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, and later it would just be known as Western Electric. And Kellogg had worked at Western Electric until eighteen eighty nine. By the time he went on to found the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company, he had already secured more than one hundred and fifty patents to his name, and these patents became assets of his company. Kellogg would actually play a really big part in fighting the American Bell Telephone Company, which of course was named after Alexander Graham Bell, and that company was attempting to secure a perpetual monopoly over the phone system in the United States, even though Alexander Graham Bell's patents had expired in the early eighteen nineties. So once patents expire their public domain, it's fair game. But the company was trying to change that. They were trying to persuade the American government to change patent law so that the company would enjoy perpetual exclusive rights to the telephone invention. Kellogg was one of many people who fought back against that movement, and ultimately Kellogg's side would win. That story by itself is fascinating and it would give Game of Thrones a run for the money as far as deceit and betrayal goes. But we don't really have time to go into that for great detail, so I'll have to hold off on that maybe covered in a future episode, because it is a fascinating story and it involves a point where Kellogg himself got very sick and his second in command behind his back, secretly sold Kellogg's switchboard and supply company to the Bell Telephone Company, and then Kellogg would have to take the whole to court and ultimately get the decisions reversed. It's a great story. I've just summed it up, but maybe I'll go into more detail in a future episode. Now. According to BUTTERFLYMX, which by the way, is a company that makes intercom hardware and software applications for businesses and homes, Like we're talking like advanced stuff that includes things like video conferencing and connections with other home automation systems, that kind of thing. Their website says that the intercom system from Kellogg back in eighteen ninety four was really just a simple circuit that would connect handles at the front door of an apartment building that would connect to a specific circuit for each apartment inside. So there'd be one handle for like Apartment one A and another handle for apartment one B and so on. So pulling on a handle would close the circuit that would send a signal to the receiver that's in that respective apartment, and that receiver would would buzz. Essentially, it was like an alarm clock. It would cause a little hammer to hit against a bell or something, but that was the extent of this intercommunication. So essentially it was like a door bell that let someone know they had a visitor who was standing outside the building. I would argue that's not really an intercom because it didn't allow for a voice communication in either direction. However, again according to Butterfly MX quote, a few years later, the Kellogg company added an ear piece and mouthpiece to enable tenants to speak with visitors end quote. So assuming that that is correct, then this would be a very early example, you know, pre twentieth century example of an intercom system. Now, I should add I couldn't really find a love supporting documentation to give more details about this specific case when I was looking at Kellogg, I mean, obviously Kelleg Switchboard and Supply Company was a real company. They did a ton of work created elements that were used for telephone systems, so that is legit. It really was a thing. How much they did in intercoms and how early and when it changed. I can't give you details about that because I couldn't find particulars, but it is true that early intercom systems were essentially small, independent telephone systems that were confined to a specific location and did not interconnect with the larger phone network. And keep in mind, in the early days, there were a lot of separate phone networks, a lot of regional phone networks where you couldn't call anyone who was on a different network because there were no interconnections that would take time to form. So for a very long time, phone networks were really only useful for relatively local calls. Now, in general, finding a lot of hard information about the history of intercoms is tricky. Most other resources I found get pretty vague with details. For example, I found a piece that was on Techwala's article titled history of intercom Systems, and it shows that details get pretty fuzzy. There's a passage that says, quote by nineteen twelve, if not earlier, users had the choice between a telephone style handset or a desktop loudspeaker that let users keep their hands free end quote. So this is about like an interoffice intercom system and the fact that it has the phrase by nineteen twelve, if not earlier, suggests that there's a distinct lack of documentation going on here. No shade on techwallap, mind you. I'm not throwing them under the bus, because I also found it very hard to find a lot of firms supporting documentation where I can confidently say, in the year you know whatever, we saw the first interoffice intercom system. I just don't have that information. There are a lot of different people who are accredited as the inventor of office intercom systems, but usually they invented something very specific that made intercom systems better. When it comes to the actual first intercom system, the details there are a lot harder to find. Okay, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, We're going to talk about fast food and drive throughs. Okay, so we're back, and the whole point of this episode is that intercoms were definitely a thing before we ever get to In and Out Burger and Harry Snyder, because the first In and Out Burger didn't open until nineteen forty eight. However, I don't want to take away from Harry Snyder here because I don't think it's Snyder's fault that some people take a shortcut to suggest that he invented the intercom. A lot of sites are pretty good about this, where they say he didn't invent the intercom, Rather he was the first to use an intercom system to enable what would become the model for the modern drive through, which is the correct thing to say, but a lot of other sites simplify this just to say that he invented the intercom, which is not correct. But he did come up with a solution to a pretty tricky problem. So here in America, we have a very car centric culture. In America, we have this self identity where freedom plays a huge part in that self identity. Depending on how cynical you are, you might view this concept of freedom as being largely imaginary, but put that aside. Part of being free is this idea that you can travel throughout the United States whenever you want. You just have to have a way of getting around, but you can travel freely from state to state without needing papers or anything to be able to do it. And there's this kind of sense of pioneering and exploration that's kind of ingrained into the American identity. Again, how realistic that is is depended upon your point of view. Part of that meant that there was this very car centric culture, which required a couple of things to start to happen to enable that. The highway system was one of them. You had to have highways connecting different regions together in order to make these trips. The proliferation of gas stations was another. You had to have places where you could refuel while you were on the go. The creation of things like motels was another one. You had to have places where you could you could stop for the night and sleep so you could rest before you continued on your road trip, and places where you could grab food when you're on the go. So Snyder was coming up with a solution to that issue that you're going to grab food on the go. You want fast food, but it's not really convenient for you to drive to a place, park your car, get out of your car, walk up to the restaurant, go inside, place your order by talking to an actual human being face to face. That's the worst. Then paying for your food, waiting for it, bringing it back out to your car, and then you get to drive off. That's not very efficient. Now, Alternatively, you could have customers park in the parking lot, and then you could send employees out to the customers and take the customer's orders, then come back to the restaurant place the orders, wait for the food, grab the food, go back out to the customers and deliver it. Perhaps you could even have the employees wearing roller skates. This was a pretty popular method in the mid twentieth century. It still is in some places, like there's some places that do the retro thing. You know, the employees on roller skates who will take orders and bring food out to you and stuff. You could do this, but again wasn't very efficient. It also meant that you had to have more staff on your employment in order to get this done. So it would be a lot better for you if the customer could just drive up and order directly, But the noise of vehicles, the distance between customer and cook or cashier made it hard to have this work. It would create choke points, it was hard to understand folks, and the system would be inefficient. So Snyder's solution was to create an intercom system that would let one customer order at an ordering location, and then a customer further up ahead could actually be getting their food and paying for their transaction. And it made everything much more efficient, right, You weren't taking an order, prepping the food, delivering the food, and then taking money for it all at one spot. You were dividing that up so the line would move much more quickly. So he introduced this technology at his first In and Out Burger location in the Los Angeles area, technically in Baldwin Park. And from what I understand, the first intercom system was installed in nineteen forty nine, so he had only opened a year earlier, and he had built the first two way intercom system he used in his own garage and he installed it himself at the restaurant. So, according to Snyder's granddaughter Lindsey in her book The Ins and Outs of In and Out, Snyder was inspired by intercom systems that were in use on warships in the US Navy, and he decided to use that approach at his restaurants. The very first intercom system was pretty nondescript. It was just a speaker that was mounted on a post that was next to the restaurant, but customers didn't initially know how or why they should use it, so they had to put up some signage to let folks know not to just keep driving around to the takeout window and shout orders at line cooks, but instead to stop at the speaker where they could place their order. The system was very much Jerry rigged. You know, Snyder was not an electrician or an engineer. He was kind of just a tinkerer. He also was color blind, which meant he wasn't using the standard colored wires to indicate which wire would go where, which wouldn't be that big of a deal except for the fact that these speakers weren't secured to the post in a way that was unassailable. So in an effort to prevent people from stealing drive through speakers, which could be a thing. People would steal speakers so that they could use them for other stuff, he decided that his system would mean that employees would have to disconnect the speakers at the end of the day and then bring the speakers inside so they could be locked up inside the restaurant. And that meant you had to be very careful with how you stored the wires because you would really need to hook the speaker back up properly at the beginning of the next day. For business right, and since he was colorblind and wasn't using the standard wire colors to indicate, Hey, this wire goes here, that wire goes there. I mean, you had to be very careful when you were storing those wires in the speaker so that you could connect them properly the next day. Otherwise you're just going to be spending a lot of time troubleshooting and figuring out why the intercom system isn't working. Now, Snyder's innovation was a game changer for In and Out, and eventually it'd be a game changer for the rest of the fast food industry, but it would take some time for it to catch on. Business Insider has an article titled, how In and Out invented the two way speaker system and created the first modern drive through. I think the two way speaker system the invented the two way speaker system part is a little misleading, but creating the first modern drive through is absolutely on point. And that article says that competitors like Wendy's and Jack in the Box would start installing their own intercom systems and their drive throughs in the mid to late nineteen sixties, and that McDonald's didn't even get on board until the mid nineteen seventies. So since in and Out was doing this since nineteen forty nine, they had more than a decade of being the exclusive fast food chain that had an intercom drive through system, which is pretty cool. Now we can look at the drive through as kind of like that smaller component of that car culture I was talking about, right, Like, that's just one of those elements where you realize that the reason all this exists was to enable this culture in America that encouraged people to go on road trips and travel to distant places and explore the country. It was something that really cemented in the American psyche, this idea that car ownership is a big part of being an American citizen. It doesn't mean that you have to have a car to be an American citizen, but a lot of what we do does revolve around cars, and that if you don't have one, it makes participating in society a lot more challenging. There's some areas in America that have good to great public transportation alternatives, but where I am in Atlanta, Georgia, I will say that the public transportation is at best adequate, it's not great. And it requires you to make a lot of considerations and sacrifices in order to be able to get to where you're going, including leaving way earlier than you think you need to in order to be able to make all your connections. So, yeah, it's interesting. It's one of those elements that collectively really tell the story of America's concept of freedom and independence and agency. And it all has to do, in this case, with a pretty simple system that was built on top of the old telephone system. Now, obviously intercoms have advanced quite a bit since those days. Now we have ones that include things like video cameras and the ability to interact with things like electronic lock systems and all that, but that would come later. And now we have ones that work over Internet protocol, not over like the old telephone system. So the actual method of transmission has changed over time as well, but the basic idea has remained the same. And so I think it's fair to say In and Out had a pretty big impact at least on fast food culture here in the United States, and that the tasting history element wasn't completely wrong. It was just perhaps a tiny bit misleading to suggest that Snyder invented the two way inter comm system. He didn't invent it, he just found a really, really good use for it. And if you're going to in and out get some fries, get them animal style, think of me while you do it, and I will live vicariously through you. That's it for today's episode. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. 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