Tom Scott and Adam Savage having an extended conversation about outdated phone technology is a dream I never knew I had until this moment

So, this also happened to me. I knew statistically I couldn't be the only one. As a teenager, about 16, a friend misdialled, transposed two numbers, and happened to call a payphone I was just walking past. I answered the payphone as a joke, and my friend just started talking as if nothing was wrong, until I asked him how the hell he knew where I'd be. Back then the local area was six digit numbers, and it was densely populated, transposing two numbers you'd always end up calling something in the same vague area. It just so happened that the payphone near the local shops was the magic transposed number this time. As a kid I fully freaked out, and spent the next two days thinking I was on the Truman show. But then I calculated the odds, that it must happen to someone somewhere, with all the billions of calls and the billions of wrong numbers. Now I can feel justified that it wasn't just me. In another coincidence, my middle name is William, and it was a Jason that was calling me, not a Justin.

As a kid we had a phone number that was just 1 number off of the number for Dominoes. After so many, "Sorry wrong number." and "Don't lie to me, I know this is Dominoes" I just started taking orders. If the person was cool, I'd then call Dominoes and forward the call. If not I'd just leave it. By this time I'd been calling the store nearly every night, and one night after the 5th time the store manager asked me why I kept calling with pizza orders to all different addresses. I explained about or nearly identical numbers and said that I had gotten sick of arguing with drunks thinking they had not dialed the number wrong, I just started taking orders. The manager then asked me if I wanted a free pizza. I did, and it was the manager who delivered it. He handed me the pizza and offered me a job after I told him I was 18. Believe it or not, this was my 2nd most weird job interview. I applied for a job as a ski lift operator at the same ski area where I had worked 10 years earlier. One of the managers asked if I had been the guy who would stick his fake leg and ski down "3-track." I said I was and he said, "Oh yea, you're hired."

Never in my life did I ever expect to see Tom Scott, Adam Savage and Sam Reich on the same screen at the same time.

I like how the first 3 minutes of this is just tom and adam listing niche telephone facts and anecdotes

Tom: Describing an obscure game show Sam: Write that down! Write that down!

Who knew Adam Savage invented the banana phone... ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, banana phone!

In the UK, "This Museum is Not Obsolete" in Ramsgate has a full old-school phone exchange you can play with

I was expecting a story where William was just picking up the phone, just as all the electrical contacts were made for Justin's call to be completed. Once William picked up, the call was established with no ringing on his end, and Justin just thinking everything was normal. This would make William confused (no dial tone, and his friend on the other end), Justin acting normally, and then both amazed when they realize what happened.

As someone whose special interest can be summed up as “classic TV moments”, I live for Tom Scott’s encyclopaedic knowledge and technical explanations of golden era British TV that you might not necessarily find on KZfaq. Vaguely heard of The Golden Shot bc of Charlie Brooker but never knew they tried to bring it back - must have seemed like a good idea when they came up with it, but not on digital TV 😂

My head immediately went to a situation I experienced back in elementary school - my friend and I had to talk to converse about a project, so I went to call him. When I picked up the phone, instead of dialtone, he was already on the other end - I had managed to pick up the phone to dial just after his call to me had connected, but just before my side had a chance to ring.

Now that I've discovered calls on Discord I have definitely found a new enjoyment of interacting via voice with my friends long distance. Cell phone calls and Skype calls are hard to hear, cut out a lot, small sighs and chuckles don't come through well, and the delay makes exchanging a back and forth difficult. So I think they may totally be on to something saying that the delay in telephone calls today discourages people from calling that way.

Back in the 80s, my step brother was talking on the phone with his friend, suddenly they could hear cross talk of two other people talking. We did not have a party line. So my step-brother starts yelling hello to them and they replied back. Turned out to be two of their friends on the other line, so they all had a good time together sharing a four way land line call. Analog has its fun.

The Connections Museum also has an active KZfaq channel, it’s worth checking out. I’d love to see a video of Tom and Adam visiting it and geeking out.

1:25 and here we see Sam Reich planning a new bit for Game Changer

I watched this with my wife who is 24 and she has a memory like this. Someone tried calling their land line, missdialed by a number and called her grandmother's line instead, but they happened to be visiting.

I always love reliving Adam's banana phone story

I once went to call my brother, we had a cordless landline that you could first press a button on to get a dial tone. I pressed the button, and held the phone to my ear to listen for the dial tone, and "hello?" my brother answered the phone!! He had, by complete chance at that very moment called me, and in between me picking up the phone to listen for the dial tone I had answered his call. All I could manage was: "But I haven't put in the numbers yet..."

"Not the banana phone, silly pants." - Gary Brannan

Delay can kill too. In Texas a pilot with his family aboard his light plane had a weather radar so though there were many large thunderstorms in the area he was confident that he was safely threading his way though the storms. But he did not have a radar set on his plane. Instead was using a service that transmitted a ground based radar to the plane, correcting so the airplane was always centered, just as if he did have radar on board, What the pilot did not know was the images he saw on the screen were not really live. They were almost live, between 2 and 9 minutes old. At this time the image was delayed by 5 minutes. Rather than staying well clear of even the green bit, he went into the middle of the red. At once the plane was being pummeled with baseball sized hail and violently thrown about. First one wing separated from the aircraft then the other. The turbulence was so strong even after losing both wings the plane gained several thousand feet before startling it's final decent. Witnesses reported seeing only burning wreckage come out the bottom of the plane.

I've actually deliberatley done something when I was a telecoms consultant as part of demoing a geolocation solution to a client (if they were in location A calls would route to location A, if they were in location B calls would route to location B, if they weren't in either calls would route to their mobile)

True story that happened to me in 90's in St. Petersburg. My landline phone rang and someone on the other end thought that they dialed wrong number, but they tried again and again was repeatedly connected to me. I asked what number they tried to reach and they tell me a number in my friends' flat in a building a kilometer away. (I dialed that number regularly so I recognized it right away). I tried to dial that number on my phone and got a busy signal. Then a crazy idea appeared in my head and I dialed my own number, and instead of busy signal I heard my friend's voice. I told him about this ridiculuos situation and then I received another call from a person who was repeatedly connected to my line and told them my own number so that they could reach my friend's mum. The craziest part in this situation for me that our phone numbers differed not by one but by four digits.

These three need to be on this show as much as possible

I was over here thinking Justin pulled off the esoteric move of CALLING AN ELEVATOR that William's office building has.

6:20 Tom had this exact moment on a Citation Needed episode but it was Benjamin instd of William (ope, put George before, it was Benjamin)

Did anyone else think this was going to be about a phone call during a power cut (at the receiver's location, I guess) and then both being amazed that the landline still worked?

A similar freaky thing that happened in my family in the early 80s, my mother in Victoria went to call her sister in Winnipeg. She picked up the phone and her sister was on the line. Her sister had called her, the call was connected, and my mother happened to pick up the receiver before the first ring. It took them a couple of minutes to figure it out.

This reminds me of my first IT-job. I was on an assignment at a customers office, over 500km from home. While checking on a phone modem I called the number of the landline that was written on the outlet, just to check that it was working. Someone picked it up, which ofcourse was not meant to happen. To my utter confusement the person at the other end presented himself with the same surname as my doctor (MD) at home. A name that is very uncommon. It was his son living somewhere in the vicinity. NOT very likely. Got a good laugh out of that. 😀

What a wonderful collection of people in this episode.

Adam, thank you for bringing up Trudeau and Prince William. That was immediately where my brain went.

Tom you forgot about William Osman who has been a guest on the podcast before

I always hated it when I'd call my friend, but my mom would pick up and I had to ask her to give my friend the phone.

My parents' phone number was only one digit different from several of their neighbors' phone numbers because they all moved into a newly-built neighborhood at about the same time and Pennsylvania Bell gave them numbers from the latest block of unused numbers for that area--and exchanges were very geography-specific, because depending on your phone plan only certain neighboring exchanges were local calls. "Local long distance" calls--within the same area code but outside your local dialing area had some of the highest per-minute rates, higher than some cross-country calls. So I can see how you might be at someone's house and they're out of the room when the phone rings and they ask you to answer it for them, and it happened to be someone who misdialed your number.

There were definitely delays in the old telephone system. In fact, some of the first tones a modem makes when answering a call are to signal to the network to turn off the echo cancellers. Some of this was due to calls being digitized. But at some point, the speed of light has a non-trivial impact, especially if you're bouncing a call off a geostationary satellite.

Dammit, now I have 'Banana Phone' stuck in my head!

in germany there was a kids TV show called HUGO, which was also interactive. but more sophisticated than what Tom described there. kids would call in, then the moderator would start a video game, and the caller would control the videogame by dialing numbers that corresponded to the controls shown on screen. so 4 for going left, 6 for going right, 2 to jump, etc. that's also something that wouldn't even come close to being possible today with digital phones and digital TV signals. those games were also available on PC, I wonder if people uploaded them somewhere

I feel like my brain didn't allow for a world that Tom Scott, Adam Savage and Sam Reich all exist in the same spot. Jarring, but I love it! (Sorry, I wasn't previously familiar with Ashley!)

Without knowing *_where_* William was at the time, it's hard to say how amazing or unusual this is. In an office building, for example, it's pretty common for phone numbers to be sequential, so if he was in the office right next to his own and Justin just got the last digit wrong, that's probably where the call would end up. The fact that William answered the phone suggests he was somewhere familiar.

My early guess - William was picking up the phone to call Justin and by total coincidence answered Justin's call before it rang.

I'm still a little bit confused about the answer 😅

This is so nerdy and I'm all for it!

That's a coincidence that has probably happened multiple times. Because landline numbers are area-specific, getting the first 3-5 numbers right guarantees you're calling a phone near to where the target person lives, and most people spend most of their time near where they live. So the chance that any given person who isn't at home is still within answering distance of a landline with the same area code is relatively high.

Tom Scott and Sam Riche was not a collab I realized I needed

Just finished watching Adam on his Tested channel and this popped up and hey presto another episode featuring Adam!

I thought maybe William was in space. Brings extra meaning to Justin's "landline"! 😂

Clicked on this for the thumbnail with Tom and Adam, then I see Sam, and they reference Connections Museum, what a great video!

In the 50s and 60s, the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (recently renamed the GRIFFIN Museum of etc.) had a tic-tac-toe game in which you played against a mechanism that was controlled by electromechanical phone switches. You entered your move on a phone-type dial, some switches would move, then the mechanism would make its move. I don't remember whether you or it made the first move. It never lost, of course.

1:08 We had a TV show in the early 90s where you could play Super Mario on NES through the phone line from home and win prizes. A special device was brought to the player prior to the show that connected to the phone line. The host of the show explained that it worked similar to fax, so I'm guessing it was some kind of modem modified for this purpose.

This story is equivalent to the new guy at work who told me "one time, someone asked me what time it was, and I guessed, and when I looked at the clock I was right." except that that only took 10 SECONDS

Little did we know, but Adam Savage is BananaMan! 😆

I remember this story, I heard of it in elementary school 25 years ago and it stuck with me because the chance of that happening sounded so astronomical. I thought it wasn't real.

Ok I got this one first try, I would complain about how long it took them but they were just being nerds talking about random phone/tv trivia most of the time... love it

Tom telling me about a museum in my own city that I've never heard of. Going next weekend!

Ring, ring, ring... bananaphone!

I watched the golden shot when I lived there. Up a bit...down a bit...left a bit...right a bit. Great fun

We have a living museum called Den Gamle By in Denmark (The Old City). In the newer part (1970s and 2003?) there are phones in the shops, apartments, etc. You can call between them. My MIL is always hilarious and will pick up roleplaying according to the location, like the hairdresser etc. Also, I can still remember the landline number I grew up with. It's weird.

Ah, yes broadcast lag. The early adopters of digital TV where somewhat pissed, that the whole neighborhood cheered before they knew there was to be a goal on TV.

Ring ring ring ring... Banana Phone!

I was 14, (51 now, this is in the 1980s) I picked up the phone to call a friend of mine, and while I was dialing their number, they suddenly say, "hello!". They had called me at almost exactly the same moment, and because mine was already dialing his number, it just connected him through without ringing. Took us 15 minutes to figure out, lol.

I hope we get more clips from this episode. I forgot the question related to it but i really want to see the artifact that adam re-created and now uses as an "everyday item" (trying not to spoil the surprise for anyone who hasn't seen it). :)

I remember, as a child, picking up the phone to call a friend in the middle of the night and being very confused when I got a crackle instead of a dialtone. I wiggled the wire in the bottom of the handset thinking it might have come loose. I started dialling the number anyway to see if it was working at all as you could hear the numbers being input... I immediately got a "Hey! Stop that!" I was terrified for exactly one second until I realised that the voice on the other end belonged to the very person I was trying to reach, who had just happened to call in the exact instant I picked up the phone. For that one second we both had very different experiences though. They thought I was trying to scare them by breathing in to the mic and playing the sound of their own phone number to them. I thought they were a home intruder on the other landline in the house.

Oh I do know this one, it's a classic Reddit story that gets shared every once in a while

The banana phone thing was in an olf Garfield comic strip, except he peeled the banana. Then went across the street to phone home. "AIIIEEEEEEE!" "It was worth the quarter."

TIL: Adam Savage is responsible for the song Banana Phone.

Amberley Museum, Sussex, UK (set in an old quarry) also has a working phone system that you can play with. There are extensions all round the museum so if you remember the numbers you can call any other visitors at random and claim to be an engineer / operator. "We're trying to check a fault, would you mind standing on one leg and whistling please?" etc.

I immediately assumed it was just the first telephone. Dude got called on a regular telephone, acted normally to test it, both people were amazed it worked.

Stand Up Math would have comments on the probability.

Is there full length video with cams of the lateral episodes anywhere?

I thought it was gonna be that William was having a power outage and was very surprised that his phone rang

That "Golden Shot" reboot clearly missed the mark... :D

My brother and his friend dialed each other simultaneously and it connected without ringing at all. I assumed that was a part of the answer.

So great. Adam Savage, Tom Scott, and Sam Reich with the box of doom over his shoulder. Clearly I need to listen to the whole thing and check out Ashley Hamer if she can hang with this crew.

I remember a radio show talking about odd coincidences coming up. The phone that rang was a pay phone the guy was walking past at the time.

ive had this exact thing happen to me as well years ago. because landlines are tied to locations similar numbers are from similar locations and two friends of mine had a number that was just one single digit off

I was actually expecting it to be an apartment intercom that was for some reason going through the phone network for ease of setup, but that would actually be way more complicated to set up in most cases

I totally thought it was going to be about Caller ID because I've had experience close to what was phrased in the question just without the landline. (If you're wondering, my phone on rare occasions mixes up caller IDs so sometimes I'd be prepared to talk very professionally with somebody and instead it would be my mom or something.)

I had similar when I was about 17. My mum was due to pick me up from the train station, but I missed the train. No mobiles, so used the payphone outside to call mum and let her know I'd be on the next train. Forgot to enter the area code (didn't realise at the time) and connected to a woman who was expecting to collect her son, who had the same first name, from the train station I was stuck at. Cue a great deal of confusion.

I also once called a number, surpirsed someone and we were amazed, but not in the same way. I was at uni and we were learning about a PABX phone exchange, I told the teacher I could call another phone on that PABX by fiddling with the button that hangs up the phone, he was sceptical... Sure enough, I typed on that button the number I wanted to call and the other phone rang! We had "modern" landline phones with those beeping keypads (DTMF) and what I just did there was simulating a call from an old rotary dial phone, by interrupting the line in rythm

My dad misdialed his aunt (names also matched as well as name of aunts daughter since they talked about her as well!). After 1 hour of conversation my dad asked about uncle, and then all fell apart. That "wrong" aunt did not had any brothers. But everything else matched, FOR AN HOUR!

William T. Riker indeed the 1st I thought about as well.

Also happened to me but through a 911 call. My friend called 911 after I dropped him off at his home after witnessing a car hit a bike. As I drove home, I saw that the driver of the car had the bike and rider loaded in his car and was taking him away. When I got home, I get a call from 911 about the accident. They asked for my friend (who's land line number was 1 away from mine). I told them they called the wrong number but I knew him and had more information on the accident. The 911 operator didn't believe me, and called the right number and my friend (found out that his number was originally the second line in the house I rented which we removed the same day he moved into his apartment a few blocks away... lots of coincidences).

What a lineup... Full starstruck here

I've been in close to this situation before. My work phone (and the others in the building I worked in) started with the same digits as the international dialling format for a mobile phone number. So we got several phone calls from people trying to call their friends' mobile phones, but not correctly dialling the international format. Took me quite a while to figure it out.

Check out “This museum’s not obsolete” in the UK

I have a feeling William is in an office where you can have a range of numbers going to one room. My office has 6 phones and the last number just increases by 1 for each phone.

I assumed they thought Justin was dead

I've never wanted Tom to guest star on Gamechanger more than this episode of Lateral 😭♥️

So that's how the banana phone meme started xD

I remember, when I was a kid in the 70s in Germany, something odd happened: I picked up the fone and about a dozend people, mostly kids where talking at once in confusion like in conference mode. We had a lot of fun. I guessed that time it was due to a cloudburst happening shortly before that a junktion box had getting to much water. I also remember this tv show. Der goldene Schuss it was called over here. Famous quote: "Peter, den Bolzen!"

Toms back!

I feel like I saw this a little while ago??

I thought it was gonna be something similar to that other story where a guy called his friend who was at work who has a landline next to him, but for a plethora of reasons they (Company X) had to disconnect the landline at almost all times, and just by pure luck and chance the landline was connected for a few minutes after almost 2 years of not being online, and the phone got the call from the guy to his friend.

Please upload the french duel one!

Doesn't sound that amazing to me, I mean companies often buy blocks of numbers. For landlines that often meant that all numbers in the company were the same apart from the last few digits. If you make an error in those last few digits there is a reasonable chance you end up in the same office. In one place where they had a predictable pattern in how they had patched the internal numbers we actually used it as a strategy if we couldn't get through. Just add or subtract 1 from the phone number and you would most likely get the neighbor of the person you wanted to speak.who could then pass a message.

"I could talk about this for a long time with everyone on this call." Please do 😅

When my parents originally got their cellphones, they specifically chose numbers that were close to their landline, so in that instance, it wouldn't be as surprising, if they got through, despite pressing slightly wrong...

awesome.. i remember something that kind of happened to me like that in the 90s.... i wanted to call a friend of mine... so i picked up the phone, and i didnt hear the beep the phone makes.. and i heard my friend on the other side... apparently he had just called me and i picked up the phone before it rang...

Haven't used landline telephone for more than 10 years.

It was common that businesses would have a main published phone number and have a blocked out range of telephone number that can be mapped to phone. so 3860 to 386x would be routed by the PABX Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX).

It is so true that analogue land lines were more satisfying. I would go further than just the lack of delay. To be clear, when we did radio progs with telephone calls, if we accidently fed the signal back, the delay was so short, it phased slightly. With the digital network, we got an echo. It could be distractingly long too! Enough that if you heard yourself coming back, it made talking almost impossible. But the other thing about old analogue phones were the handsets. Especially the nicely curved ones. The big round earpiece sat warmly over your ear, and the mouthpiece was close to your mouth. Everything sounded so much more intimate. And no delay, of course. It made conversations easy and pleasant. More so than with mobiles which are uncomfortable to hold and where the mic is often some distance away, making it all annoyingly roomy. It is a huge headache in recording studios too. I am constantly fighting with "latency" - the delay caused by the computer and other digital converters. Nothing is truly instant. We have to find clever workaround which are far from instinctive. With old analogue studios, we never had latency. The word never came up. Don't get me wrong, digital is better in so many ways, but the delay is a constant problem.