JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Yes, this elegant, oversized, well written 1946 pamphlet explains in fabulous and excruciating detail how to use the telephone--and it does indeed come with a two-part heavy paper telephone receiver for the reader's practice. It is packaged in an envelope in the back of the pamphlet with a large drawing explaining how to put the two pieces together. The work is just so fulsome, wholesome, forthright, exacting and thorough that it just makes the casual reader stop in their tracks to applaud the effort of explanaion. For example, it isn't until page 13 that we get to pick up the receiver (and listen for the dial tone). I've reproduced some of the table of contents to give an idea of the extent of the telephone usage.
What brings this so close to being from out of the science fiction past is that the booklet is ten years older than your narrator. Atanasoff's ABC, Bell Labs Mark II, Bletchley's Colossus, and Harvard's Mark I machines existed, television was begnning to explode and half-doom radio for all time, and telephones were on their semi-last-leg of exploding their way into more American homes and businesses. But somehow, here on the verge of the greatest electrical revolution in history, we were getting instructions on how to pick up the telephone. But I'm really not complaining here, not at all--its just the nexus of the "how to listen for a dial tone" and the coming of the ENIAC one year after this pamphlet is published that is so startling.
Even so, this instructional is more complete and (of course) better written than any of the computer manuals that came with any of the machines that I've purchase in the last 30 years. It is a thing of great and supra-obvious beauty.
This is another example of a small job done Very Correctly.
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