More for the book… In 1957, a blind, five year old boy named Joe Engressia first realized that he could control the phone system and make long distance phone calls at no cost by whistling a specific pitch down the phone line. The AT&T phone network used twelve combinations of six audio tones as control signals. Engressia’s whistles through the mouthpiece were interpreted as the phone company’s own control tones. Engressia was one of a scattered group of technologically curious young teenagers across the United States who spent their free time experimenting with controlling the phone system. These kids called them selves ‘phone phreaks’. Many were blind and were, to some extent, socially isolated among kids of their own age. It was the phreaks, however, who first liberated themselves from reliance on their proximate peers. Theirs would be a community drawn together by the attraction of common interest rather than the strictures of geography. Continue reading
