One of the downsides of having written here for six years now is that my messy, ever-growing text file of topics for future articles contains a bunch of ideas that have been there for about six years. Part of the problem is that I just have to scroll so far up to even see them now, part of it is that some of them are on topics where I do not feel equipped to write a good formal treatment. So let's consider this an easy, breezy episode of Computers Are Bad as I knock out one of those items. One of these O. G. topics, line three, is "avalanche technology." I will admit that I am a little fuzzy on what this originally meant, but I have a few good guesses. First, though, let's just take a step back and talk a little bit about the practicalities of the avalanche. For a lot of you, avalanches are probably a pretty abstract issue. For me, as well—I snowboard but I'm not that good at it, and the kind of mid-tier ski area where you will find me tumbling down the hill (Ski Santa Fe, towards Totemoff's) manages their slopes to avoid the potential for avalanche as much as possible. This requires some expertise in avalanche risks and it's never quite perfect, but it's pretty good. Snow that is regularly groomed by machines like PistenBullys will become coherently packed such that avalanches can't really propagate. The bigger risk on groomed ski slopes generally comes from up above, and here in New Mexico our mountains are of such a height that we're usually starting down from the very top anyway. Still, avalanches pose a real hazard. The Department of Homeland Security, when it can be distracted from terrorizing well-meaning migrants, tells us that avalanches claim about 28 lives each year in the United States. Globally, the number is much larger, and avalanche fatalities seem to be generally more common in Europe. I'm not sure if that reflects European weather, geography, or recreation habits more, but it's the way things pan out and means that Northern Europe tends to be the center of avalanche technology (as it is in alpine technology in general). We tend to associate avalanche hazard most of all with recreation, and that's definitely fair: the highest risk of avalanche probably comes about in cross-country skiing, where it's fairly common to traverse the lower part of slopes that have otherwise received very little disturbance. Most avalanches occur during storms, as the snow falls and piles up, which is of course not when recreationists are most likely to be present. You can't rely on this, though. One of the ways that an avalanche can initiate is when lots of snow is piled up on a slope on a nice sunny day—good recreation conditions! Various things like water following the ground or stratigraphic layers of different types of snow from different storms can create a condition of uneven melting. Snow that is under the surface might liquefy faster than snow that is closer to the surface. This "detaches" the upper level of snow from the ground, and when it happens over a wide area, that upper level of snow can let loose all at once. This type of avalanche is relatively rare, but they happen without warning in otherwise good weather, so it's much more likely that people will be caught. Further complicating the situation, the proximity of people can be a factor in initiating these avalanches. Here in the Mountain States, though, avalanche risk often manifests in another context: transportation. As Americans, cars and highways are among our most esteemed achievements, and decades of engineering accomplishment allows us to drive through, over, and even under much of the Rocky Mountains even during the winter. Landscape modifications, chemical measures, and the brute force of snowplows keep roadways clear—but not the slopes above them. Avalanches cascading down onto highways are a major concern in the Mountain States, especially Colorado which has the most impressive set of mountains and mountainous highways. Forecasting Some of the things, then, that we might call "avalanche technology" are the techniques used to prevent, mitigate, and warn of potential avalanche. Much of the work is institutional. On the recreational front, this falls mostly with the US Forest Service's National Avalanche Center and a loose confederation of regional organizations such as our own Taos Avalanche Center, here in New Mexico. One of the main functions of these organizations is education: posting warning signs, spreading awareness, offering training courses and materials, and so on. They also tend to employ avalanche specialists, who use a combination of meteorology and specialized snow observations to determine when avalanches are most likely. This can lead to posting warnings or closing areas entirely. Avalanche specialists in the recreational field are, in this area, joined by a substantial cadre of avalanche specialists employed by state Departments of Transportation. They apply the same techniques with an eye towards avalanches that could affect mountain pass highways. Those highways may be closed in extreme circumstances, but in transportation even more than in recreation it is common to use, shall we say, "active measures" to prevent avalanches. We will discuss this later, but first, let's briefly talk about how avalanche hazards are forecast. I am not going to go into much detail here, because I frankly do not know much about it, but I do want to touch on a couple of things that are solidly in my wheelhouse. One of these is SNOTEL. Forecasting avalanche risk requires a solid understanding of the general amount of snowpack in the mountains, which can be very tricky to acquire since when snow is heavy getting up there to take measurements becomes a very time-consuming and potentially hazardous venture. Avalanche forecasting is just one of many functions served by the SNOTEL or Snow Telemetry system, a 1960s-era network of hundreds of sensor sites throughout mountainous parts of the United States. SNOTEL was originally designed to help with forecasting spring meltwater flows, which is why it falls under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture, but as with any good sensor network there are now a lot of different stakeholders. The tricky thing about SNOTEL, and remember here that it dates back 60 years, is the snow. SNOTEL sites are way up there, inaccessible during winter, so they are designed to be installed and serviced during summer and to operate autonomously until the next summer. SNOTEL instruments are solar powered, but more interesting are the communications arrangements. The initiation of the SNOTEL project predates a robust set of earth observation satellites, to say nothing of cellular or other digital radio networks. But the whole purpose of SNOTEL is to provide snowpack data when the snow is still there, so real-time reporting is critical. SNOTEL was thus one of the first applications of meteor scatter, a fascinating form of radio communication that will probably get its whole own article one day. Here is the summary: SNOTEL data collection sites, in convenient locations like towns, transmit a VHF carrier or "pilot" signal up towards the sky. Occasionally, but more often than you would think, a meteor enters the Earth's atmosphere and burns up, leaving a trail of ionized gas behind it. This ionized gas is, if you remember previous discussion of troposcatter, reflective to RF energy. Some of the "pilot" signal is thus scattered back down towards earth. When a SNOTEL site receives the pilot signal, it knows that a meteor has just entered the atmosphere and this scattering is happening, so it quickly transmits a data packet towards the sky. Ideally, this data packet is reflected by the same meteor trail such that the data collection site can receive it. If this all sounds rather stochastic and chancey, it is, but enough meteors enter the atmosphere and data packets can be sent quickly enough (and tried multiple times) that it works pretty reliably for low-bandwidth telemetry data. Unfortunately, as interesting as meteor scatter is, it's mostly been obsoleted by general technological advances in radio communications. SNOTEL was probably the largest meteor scatter network in the world1, but is no longer: all SNOTEL sites now use other means of reporting data. The most common is probably the generic data collection capability of GOES, NOAA's main fleet of "weather satellites." GOES satellites actually serve many purposes related to earth observation, and one of them is telemetry collection from instruments on the ground. If you've ever come across a USGS stream gauging station or another mysterious hut in the middle of the woods with a cylindrical or conical antenna pointed at the sky, it's transmitting data upwards for reception by a GOES satellite. The GOES earth segment collects all of the little data packets the satellites receive into files which are distributed to the various organizations that report data this way. If you are so inclined, you can also receive this data yourself as the satellites rebroadcast it in batches, but most users don't bother since NOAA will do that part for you. Even that might be fading away: newer SNOTEL sites apparently use the cellular network for data reporting, unless it's not possible to get a signal, but that's becoming less common over time even in the Colorado mountains. The major benefit here is that the cellular network is low latency and very high bandwidth, which makes it feasible for example to view cameras installed at the SNOTEL sites. With the data part discussed, let's take a quick second look at the data collected. Temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, liquid precipitation are all measured as usual, but SNOTEL adds a couple of specialty features. Soil moisture and evapotranspiration (basically evaporation rate of water from soil) sensors provide more data on how saturated the ground is, an ultrasonic or optical instrument pointed down from atop a post measures how deep the snowpack is, and a funny looking contraption called a snow pillow takes perhaps the most important measurement. The snow pillow is basically a big rubber balloon that gets inflated on the ground, and then covered with snow. By measuring the air pressure from the snow pillow, the SNOTEL station effectively weighs the snowpack, which combined with its height gives the density or water content of the snow. This varies widely depending on the specific weather when the snow falls, and remember that stratigraphic differences in density are one of the factors that's important in the likelihood of a surprise avalanche, so collecting this water content information as snow falls allows forecasters to remotely estimate whether or not the snow conditions are hazardous. That is, of course, supplemented by good old fashioned techniques like sending out avalanche specialists with shovels and meter sticks to take a look at the snow themselves. DOTs often have technicians doing a regular tour of mountain pass sites, where they curate plastic tubs and boxes of snow from various storms so that they can get a hands-on impression of what the different layers under the snowpack are like. They also take samples to weigh, perform some tests to measure mechanical properties of the snow, there's basically a whole bag of tricks, but ultimately there is also a subjective element of how "good" or "bad" things look. This is born of experience and is one of many reasons to value our state employees. Mitigation Within the recreational context, one common approach to mitigation is simply to avoid the area. Especially for backcountry skiing areas, avalanche centers might post warnings or work with the operator to close the area entirely when forecasting shows that conditions are favorable for an avalanche. Warnings might be more useful than you think, since besides reducing the number of people in the area they should also prime people to recognize particularly risky slopes or signs of snow that is becoming unstable. Avalanches can occur without any surface signs of instability, but in practice there often are some signs, so of course keeping an eye out is better than nothing. Warnings also make people more likely to carry safety equipment, discussed later, which improves the chance of self-rescue if things really do go wrong. But there are also, shall we say, kinetic options. Many of the methods of modern alpinism evolved during the Second World War, and so did a good portion of the mitigation equipment. Once snow becomes unstable enough that an avalanche could occur, it is basically waiting for something to set it off. Popular media concepts that loud noises will trigger avalanches are, well, fictional, but the point stands that people moving around or especially operating vehicles can trigger avalanches, as can basically random happenstance. You can mitigate the risk of an avalanche by going to unstable areas and intentionally triggering them, or at least trying to, basically the same way that a bomb squad might handle an unstable explosive by exploding it. Better that it go off when you expect it than when you don't. A classic method, still in some use today, is repurposed artillery. State DOTs and ski area operators own a surprisingly large inventory of M101 Howitzers, a 105mm artillery gun that dates more or less to a 1910s German design but was widely fielded by the US during the Second World War. The avalanche application is simple: when you find a slope with unstable conditions that could pose a hazard, you shoot at it. The concussion from the impact, and often from an explosive round, puts a lot of pressure on the snow that will likely break it loose if it's possible to do so. You just have to make sure you set up outside of the resulting avalanche. The main problem with this method, which everyone agrees is a whole lot of fun, is that the M101 has not been manufactured since 1953 and, in general, the supply of cheap Army-surplus artillery has dried up. The Howitzers are aging out, and other methods are replacing them. Some of these are similarly dynamic: dropping small improvised bombs from helicopters, for example, which is a very common method in Colorado today. Even just hovering a helicopter over a slope can sometimes trigger an avalanche, although a bit of dynamite makes this a lot more reliable. If you have noticed the surfeit of high-explosives bunkers and unexploded ordnance warnings in some parts of the Colorado mountains, well, now you know why. It can feel a little bit like a very slow-running war. Even these methods are being replaced by more modern and cost-effective ones, though. A French alpine engineering company called MND manufactures a system called Gazex, which is a bit like an airport bird canon on steroids. Gazex units are pre-installed in avalanche risk areas (by helicopter, for example), and then, under remote control, they mix oxygen and a combustible gas and set it off in a big tube pointed at the ground. The force created is similar to an explosion, but the whole thing is easier to handle (since it uses gas cylinders rather than high explosives) and remote control makes everything cheaper for the operators. MND recently introduced a new version of the system called O'bellx (I assume this reads better in French), which is even more portable, albeit comically egg-shaped. This seems to be catching on with ski areas, and MND also emphasizes that the portable design and low-impact installation makes it suitable for areas like national parks with acute natural preservation concerns. Basically, you can remove them at the end of every winter, so that you aren't leaving equipment scattered around your beautiful mountains. There are also a number of other mitigation approaches that are less fun, so I will devote less attention to them, but you can find them done around here. Structures similar to snow fences, built high up on a slope, provide an "anchor" for the snow that prevents it coming loose enough for an avalanche. There are many variations on this idea, for example using steel cables supporting nets. Another approach is to permit the avalanches to start but prevent them from reaching areas where they cause harm, either by building wall or dam-like structures (I do not believe this is common in the US as I am not aware of any examples) or by putting corridors like highways inside of "snow sheds" that are sturdy enough to allow the avalanche to simply flow over. This latter method is much more common in Europe than here, but you can find some examples on US railroads, which are often in more difficult terrain than highways. Warning One of the more interesting developments in avalanche technology are warning systems. Avalanches wouldn't pose much hazard if people knew that they were coming; what makes melt-triggered avalanches so dangerous is that they can be very unexpected. One of the methods that avalanche safety courses teach is to recognize signs of snow masses that have already started to slide, shift, or collapse on themselves. This would indicate that conditions are favorable for an avalanche and that disturbing or going below the snow is quite dangerous. The usual surface signs are cracks, caused by the snow starting to slide apart, but these cracks can be tricky to see even when they are present. Another indication of avalanche potential is subsidence, or the snow surface starting to drop in level, or any motion of the snow surface downslope. These effects can start minutes or hours before the real avalanche occurs, but they are subtle and often slow, so humans are unlikely to notice them. Fortunately, machines are well adapted to this task. Several vendors offer radar systems that monitor snow slopes for any shifting, and can sound a siren or another alert if things start to move. Like earthquake warning, the actual lead time provided by these systems is not very well known and could be quite short, but something is better than nothing. Other technologies, like LIDAR and acoustics (e.g. geophones), can be applied to a similar task. I have even heard of older systems that used thin wires or brittle metal bars embedded in the snow, as part of an electrical circuit that would break if the snow started to move 2. Such systems can be quite sophisticated, and MND's sales materials suggest things like closing gates on highways when an avalanche is detected. The current state of the art in radar detection uses pulsed Doppler operation, which can be very sensitive to movement in all kinds of directions. All that said, these don't seem to be popular in the US. I couldn't readily find any installations in this country. As a final note on this topic, national alerting systems like NAWAS and the Emergency Alert System have defined message types for avalanche warnings. In practice, these are very rare, as it doesn't usually make sense from a time or area perspective to put out an avalanche warning through mass media channels. That said, they do happen, usually on the (fortunately rare) occasion that forecasters predict a high risk of avalanche in a town or other populated area. In that case, the procedure is to evacuate the town, and that's exactly the kind of situation that NAWAS/EAS/NWS All Hazards/etc. are intended for. Rescue And finally, we reach the topic that I believe led me to put "avalanche technology" on the list to begin with: technical aids to rescue. Avalanches are, in a certain sense, not that dangerous. They can move at formidable speeds (60+ miles per hour often reported), but snow is relatively soft and low-density. Injury from being crushed or striking against something is certainly a possibility, but the bigger hazard of avalanche is usually when you become buried. If you are buried in snow, and there are no rescuers or they cannot find you, it can be extremely difficult to work your way out and you are likely to succumb to some combination of exhaustion and hypothermia in the process. That might sound silly but keep in mind that you have just been buried by an avalanche, probably have a variety of minor injuries, have become disoriented, etc., and you try to dig yourself out of feet of snow in that situation. You really need someone on the surface to come help you out. That's why standard avalanche safety equipment includes a probe and a shovel—a probe for finding people (just a metal rod you use to poke under the snow, basically), and a shovel for getting to them. The problem is that probing a large area of snow is a very slow process, and even if you were right next to someone before an avalanche, you probably don't know where they ended up afterwards. This is an area where radio technology can be extremely helpful. The concept of avalanche beacons or avalanche transponders dates back to at least 1968. Dr. John Lawton was an engineer at an aerospace research lab now known as the Calspan Corporation, where he worked on a variety of interesting aviation problems ranging from weapons targeting to meteorological research. Lawton was quite an aviation enthusiast, making the news in 2013 for celebrating his 90th birthday by flying his Cessna Skyhawk over the US-Canada border 90 times. That's a bit of a peculiar way to entertain yourself, but anyone who is still flying themselves around at 90 has clearly found a way to stay vital. His lifelong investment in aviation is emphasized by the fact that he started his winding cross-border journey at the airport he owned. What is not so well documented is his interest in alpinism, but he must have had some affection for the mountains. He did some kind of research work in Europe related to triggering avalanches by dropping explosives from light aircraft, and whether that put the topic on his mind or something else, he also came up with the first commercial avalanche beacon. Commercialized by his company Lawtronics, the "Skadi" transmitted a tone at 2.275 kHz. Groups of people traveling in the mountains could each carry a Skadi unit, and if anyone was lost in an avalanche, any of the other units could be switched to a receive mode and the person located by simple amplitude search. That is, walking around the snow until you find the spot where the tone comes in the loudest, at which you point you start probing and digging. This same method is still used today, although the radio system has been standardized at 457 kHz. Modern avalanche rescue systems like the "Barryvox" from Mammut or the Black Diamond Recon X are direct descendants of Lawton's Skadi device, using 457 kHz and digital direction finding techniques (like the use of multiple perpendicular directional antennas to compute a likely heading to target) to speed things up and make radiolocation more user friendly. Because the 457 kHz system is an international standard, they ought to work about the same regardless of manufacturer. That's important in real-world scenarios where the people doing the rescuing might be from a whole different group than the one affected by the avalanche. Modern avalanche beacons are probably one of the closest real-world products to the way that "radio beacons" tend to work in movies and videogames. The reality is of course messier, especially if there are multiple victims, but in principle a digital avalanche beacon in receive mode can show an arrow on screen that you follow until you are standing on top of the buried person. You know if you're getting closer when they beep more. Neat. Technological development continues apace, and some newer avalanche beacons also support a second protocol called W-Link. W-Link is actually surprisingly poorly documented, presumably because it appears to be proprietary to Mammut (the only non-Mammut beacons that support it seem to have been joint venture projects with Mammut). W-Link is a digital protocol that operates in the ISM band, introducing the downside that ISM bands are not internationally standardized. This means that US and European-market beacons will always be compatible for conventional 457 kHz operation, but two beacons with W-Link support may not be able to use that protocol if they were sold for different regulatory markets. The upside of W-Link is that the digital protocol lets the beacon send significantly more information. This includes a unique serial number for the beacon, which allows the receiver to discriminate between pulses being received from two or more beacons at the same time—a radical improvement in the ease of locating multiple people, as conventional direction finding techniques really struggle when you cannot discriminate between multiple targets. You can end up with a "swinging needle," while the W-Link devices are capable of locking to a single target at a time. As this implies, you can also determine how many people are buried, and ignore beacons that turn out to be unimportant (because they are discarded on the surface, or carried by a rescuer, etc). Perhaps the most interesting feature of W-Link is that some W-Link beacons will use an accelerometer to detect motion, and report whether or not any motion is present. In theory, this allows rescuers to prioritize their efforts by focusing on beacons that report motion, meaning that they are carried by people who are still alive. These enhanced capabilities of W-Link seem to have led to enough controversy that the Wikipedia article devotes much of its length to ethics discussions, and manufacturers have put out position papers on their decisions to implement or not implement certain W-Link features. The concern is that W-Link may give rescuers more information on which to prioritize rescue in a discriminatory way, perhaps by searching for victims with (more expensive) W-Link beacons before less expensive conventional beacons, or by using knowledge of W-Link serial numbers to prioritize the search for specific people. In practice, I think these ethical concerns are more theoretical than actual, because penetration of W-Link technology doesn't seem all that high and most actual beacons only implement the very most basic features. The ability to display the serial numbers of individual beacons, for example, is pretty much limited to a USB dongle/software package that Mammut sells to organizations like ski patrols that loan out avalanche beacons and need to keep track of their inventory, check battery levels, etc. Avalanche beacons are not the only radio-based approach to avalanche rescue. Around a decade after Lawton developed Skadi, a Swiss engineer designed a system called RECCO. If you have read my articles on loss prevention, I can succinctly explain RECCO by saying that it is just RF electronic article surveillance applied to the outdoors. If you have not, let's get into a little bit more detail. I put a lot of time into writing this, and I hope that you enjoy reading it. If you can spare a few dollars, consider supporting me on ko-fi. You'll receive an occasional extra, subscribers-only post, and defray the costs of providing artisanal, hand-built world wide web directly from Albuquerque, New Mexico. If you make an antenna that is a small loop, and then put a nonlinear device like a p-n diode in it, you end up with an antenna that behaves asymmetrically with regards to the phase of the radio wave passing over it. Intuitively, we can say that energy freely flows one way around the antenna, but not the other. The energy going that way becomes trapped, and gets re-emitted at at a harmonic frequency to the one that excited the device. This general principle is known as non-linear junction detection, and it has all kinds of interesting applications in fields like technical security, but its most common application is as one of the common types of retail anti-theft tagging. RECCO is basically a retail loss prevention system aimed at the ground. RECCO tags, called "reflectors" in RECCO parlance, are a simple foil antenna and diode, which makes them cheap and durable. They are so cheap, and compact, that some brands of alpine gear (especially in Europe) build RECCO tags right into products like snow pants and ski boots. Dainese even offers a bicycle helmet with one. The RECCO detector emits a powerful and very directional RF field in an ISM band, and then monitors for the characteristic harmonics emitted by an excited tag. This technology is not RFID, although it is conceptually similar, and has some of the same downsides such as a tendency for tags to be undetectable if they fall in the wrong point in the phase of the exciting field. For that reason, RECCO recommends that you have two reflectors at different locations on your person. The other main downside of RECCO is that it shifts most of the complexity into the detector, so they are relatively large and expensive. That's not so bad when you consider that detectors only need to be carried by ski patrol and SAR organizations. Rescuers basically aim the detector around until it picks up a signal, and then walk that way until they are aiming the detector straight down. That's where they dig. RECCO has even designed a detector that can be underslung by a helicopter, although its 100 meter range will require some sporty flying. The RECCO system is generally much more popular in Europe than in the US, but penetration is increasing here, and RECCO publishes a list of SAR organizations with detectors that now includes a number of helicopters in the US and many major ski areas. I view RECCO as having a bit of a belt-and-suspenders relationship with traditional avalanche beacons. Avalanche beacons are more common, and all beacons also function as receivers, so "buddy rescue" by a bystander is far more likely with beacon technology. On the other hand, RECCO is usable over a longer range (although not radically longer) and the detectors are more directional and potentially faster to use. Most avalanche centers seem to recommend that you carry both, although the traditional avalanche beacon is more important. Finally, let's consider a couple of other pieces of avalanche safety equipment, which will lead us to consider efficacy. The core avalanche PPE consists of a probe and a shovel, and both are available in collapsible form for portability. Besides locating technologies, though, the major innovation in avalanche safety is the avalanche airbag. These are backpacks that you wear with a parachute-like ripcord. When you pull it, the bag inflates into a big airbag behind you. There are two ways this is helpful: first, the airbag will tend to float on moving snow, making it less likely that you are buried. Second, if you do become buried, you can deflate the airbag to leave you with a void in the snow. This gives you more air to breath, and room to move, making it more likely that you can dig yourself out. Avalanche airbags remind me a bit of the motorcycle airbags, as far as being very cutting-edge but also, you know, kind of questionable when it comes to efficacy. Manufacturers of airbags often advertise a 50% reduction in fatalities, but we have to take those numbers with a grain of salt. One of the problems with safety technology for extreme risks is that the actual risk event just doesn't happen very often. In less abstract terms, people are not caught in avalanches all that often, so the total number of people who have been caught in an avalanche while wearing an avalanche airbag just isn't that big. This limits the confidence we can have in efficacy findings. Well, I tracked down the paper that the 50% number comes from, and it's not actually that bad. They identified 424 people caught in severe avalanches, roughly half of which had avalanche airbags, and found that the airbags reduced mortality by 50% for people who successfully deployed them, and 41% overall given that there were various situations where they were not triggered or failed. The sample size is not huge, but it's bigger than I expected, and even at the bottom of the 95% confidence interval you still see a meaningful mortality reduction of around 10%. So, avalanche airbags seem to work, but they do cost around $1,500, so make of that what you will. Another interesting number from that paper is actually a bit of an aside: of the sample of people considered, 99% had avalanche beacons! A basic avalanche beacon can be had for about $250, which is pretty similar to cheap satellite messenger or very basic PLB 3. On the other hand, the passive nature of RECCO tags translates to a price advantage: a standalone reflector that you can clip to your pack only costs $30, which frankly still feels like a ripoff considering the simplicity of the design. I wonder if a RECCO detector would pick up enough RF EAS tags sewn into your clothing. Or shoplifted. One of the amusing things, though, is that despite being the cheap option (or perhaps beacuse of it), RECCO is relatively poorly backed by data. The number of actual rescues using RECCO remains small, although the development of the helicopter-based detector will probably lead to more successful uses. Or, you know, just stay out of the mountains. They may be calling, but you don't have to go. Researching SNOTEL's history starts getting you into military R&D reports and formerly classified documents pretty quickly, and it's clear that both the US and other militaries have used meteor scatter for communications in the past. Possibly they still do today. If I were to place a wager, I'd say that SNOTEL is likely smaller than or on par with the military network that its equipment seems to have been adapted from. Unfortunately there is very little information in public about this military application (one of the reasons to suspect that meteor scatter is still relevant in the military context), so I can only speculate.↩ This is at least vaguely similar to a common safety device employed on the towers of ski lifts, where a brittle metal bar is placed under the sheaves that support the rope. The lift's safety loop is passed through the bar. If the lift badly deropes at the tower (that is, the cable falls off of the sheaves), it falls on the bar, snapping it. That interrupts the loop of wire that runs from the drive end to the opposite end and back, which shuts off the motor and releases magnetic brakes.↩ PLBs, or Portable Locator Beacons, are beacons made specifically for detection by the COSPAS-SARSAT satellite constellation. They are probably the gold standard in general search and rescue technology, and since they rely on a system operated as an international joint venture there are no service fees or subscriptions involved. Oddly, though, PLBs are actually pretty expensive. Here's the reason: authorities that mandate PLBs in various situations (e.g. the Coast Guard) have also specified rather exacting standards for service life, waterproofing, shock resistance, etc. This has the counter-intuitive result that two-way satellite messengers like Spot X or Garmin InReach can actually be cheaper to buy, but you will have to pay a service fee, and they are unlikely to survive the kind of "plane crash/sinking boat/car wreck" physical abuse that PLBs are tested for. As successive generations of more sophisticated COSPAS-SARSAT satellite payloads have launched, the system has also become very reliable, and in most circumstances PLBs are more likely to work than other types of satellite communicators. What I'm saying is that if you recreate in the middle of nowhere, you should consider buying a PLB, even though a good one can cost $500. At a five year rated lifespan, that's cheaper than a Spot or InReach plan even without the hardware purchase.↩

During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of definition. The Internet, I think we can all agree, is not a single machine but a system of interconnected ones. The telephone network, though, felt a lot more like one device. "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" was once the slogan of AT&T, a message that the telephone network is more than just a sum of parts. The third of these principles, "Universal Service," is a key point around which telecom policy pivots even today. As the telephone system was at its apex, Universal Service became its undoing. We know the Internet to be a network of independent devices in part because of the wide variety of ways that we access it. Computer networks, almost to their origin, have emphasized independent implementations of standardized interfaces. Computers, as network nodes, are interchangeable. As a result, much of the complexity must be pushed to the edge, where end-user systems are most able to adapt to the unique needs of, well, the end-user. The telephone system was much different: few types of telephone instrument existed, largely from a single manufacturer. Complexity was drawn into the center where telephone offices could house the huge machinery required by mid-century automation. All of it was, for a very long time, hard-wired: central office switches and customer telephones were designed and installed to suit each other. This core difference, between the flexibility of computer networks and the central caretakership of telephone networks, was a core issue in the series of changes that rocked the telephone business in the early 1980s. 1984 is the K/T line of telecommunications, the year the sea peoples came. It is difficult to overstate the extent to which telephone technology, the communications industry, and the basic concept of what a telephone is changed between the 1970s and the 1980s. This was not a single, well-planned, carefully executed reform the way some accounts of divestiture can make it out to be. In practice, it was chaotic, messy, and often drawn out. The deregulation, re-regulation, and fundamental reshaping of the American telecommunications industry is a complicated story. There are different actors, different agencies, different motives, and different outcomes. Nothing went quite as expected, and some of the consequences still remain to be seen. It is a hard story to tell. We can begin to understand it, though, by focusing in on just one part: the part in your house, the Customer Premises Equipment. Like the "Standard Oil" gas stations that you can still find here and there, the breakup of the Bell System left behind marks. More than anything else, it left behind telephones. From the genesis of the Bell System, telephones were considered just as much part of the telephone system as the central office equipment that supported them. Despite some early uncertainty, AT&T quickly settled on a pattern in which most telephone users paid a single monthly rate that included local calling, maintenance of the local loop to their premises (which we might call "access"), and the telephone itself. When you signed up for service, Ma Bell sent someone to install your phone. When you had trouble, they sent someone again to fix it. When you canceled, or fell delinquent on the bill, they sent someone by to take the phone away. From our modern perspective of the telephone as "consumer electronics," it's hard to picture paying rent on one. There were a number of reasons for leasing, which varied in prominence over time. Some of the uglier parts of the early 1980s involved disputes over which of these motives really mattered. Phones, we will see, were leased to consumers for many of the same reasons that early computers were mostly leased to businesses. This reflects a parallel shift in the computer industry, from "computer centers" to "personal computing," that happened around the same time and in a similar context. Before we get there, though, we need to understand how it came to be that telephones were "Bell System Property—Not For Sale." First, we need to understand the nature of telephones and telephone wiring when the practice of telephone leasing was established. Consider, for example, that the first phones in common use were not yet "common battery"—they had local batteries, a wooden box full of big dry cells that required regular changes. Telephones were much more maintenance-intensive, and those maintenance requirements produced a troubling question of responsibility. Most people, if they attempted a telephone call and couldn't understand the other party, would blame the phone company. They'd blame the phone company even if it was the fault of the caller or callee, for not changing their phone batteries. Consider these two facts: telephones required regular service, and if they didn't receive it, the result would reflect poorly on the reputation of the phone company. For both consumer convenience and the integrity of the telephone system, it made sense for the phone company to take responsibility for the end-user's equipment. Consider also the issue of compatibility. The type of telephone to be installed, the wiring conventions, and the configuration of the "network" of electronics in the phone could all depend on the type of exchange office it was connected to. Up until around 1970, party lines were very common (the majority of all telephones in the mid-century). They remained in use here and there into the 2000s. The problem was even more acute for party line customers: there were a half dozen fundamentally different selective ringing systems for party-line phones 1, and different basic wiring schemes to match. One of the dominant discussion topics in telephone collecting circles is how to wire and re-wire vintage phones to work with specific equipment. Bell System Practices told technicians which wires to connect to which terminals, and which terminals to strap to which other terminals, to get a standard phone model to work in a given situation. Some scenarios required add-on boards, external cabinets, or modifications. This could all be true even of simple single-line phones, but the moment a business or large residence wanted a more complex system (e.g. with intercom calling), the complexity multiplied. What was even worse, especially in the case of party lines, is that a single malfunctioning or incorrectly installed phone could impact service along the entire phone line. In the worst case, even a humble single-party line could sap the capacity of the exchange's switching equipment if it stuck off hook. I should also make sure to emphasize the way that telephones were connected. Today, all telephones use "modular connectors" that simply plug into a wall socket. We shouldn't take modular wiring for granted; telephones were usually hard-wired to screw terminals until the 1960s, and even once connectorized the connectors were not standardized until 1974. In 1980, as a dark storm rose over the horizon, many telephones were still hard-wired, some still to complicated wall ringers or terminal boxes. Considering all these factors, it makes sense that telephones were professionally installed: it would have been difficult to instruct most telephone users on correct installation, and if they did it wrong you might have to send someone to urgently fix it anyway. Since telephone wiring of the era could physically pass through multiple residences, and telephones could impact the function of other parts of the system, the telephone company viewed access to customer premises and their equipment as a necessity to ensure good service. When it came to third-party equipment, well, nothing made Ma Bell more nervous. Western Electric telephones were carefully manufactured, thoroughly tested, and precisely adjusted for reliable and compatible operation. At the first sign of trouble with a telephone, the company would swap it out for a good one. If consumers connected equipment that didn't belong to the phone company, they would lose the ability to maintain and repair a key part of their product. Besides, people liked it, or at least so the phone companies argued. Technology was quickly improving. If your local exchange went from pulse dialing to touch-tone, for example, it was convenient that the phone was leased and would be changed out for a new one at the telephone company's expense 2. When Western Electric introduced new, compact designs like the Princess and Trimline, customers had the option of upgrading their bulky phone to a slick modern one, for only a modest increase in their monthly rate (the Princess phone, introduced 1959, is also a late example of a phone that required a special wiring arrangement to power the lighted dial). When a customer redecorated, they could contact the phone company and ask that their phone be changed out for one of a different color—usually at no cost at all. Up until the 1970s, when telephone leasing started to show weakness, most of these services were accomplished by sending a technician straight to the customer's home. As you can imagine, this level of service wasn't exactly cheap. The cost of leasing the phone was incorporated into your phone bill. If you wanted more phones, called extensions, you paid more—even if they were on a single line. If you wanted a fancier phone, you paid more. By the 1960s, leasing had clear downsides. Telephones were manufactured by Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T just like the operating companies, so any need to send a technician to service a phone was a hit to the shared bottom line. Western Electric emphasized reliability above all else, leading to phones that were fairly expensive to manufacture but could easily last 25 years in service. Bell operating companies, looking to cut costs, shifted towards a retail model in the 1970s in which customers were highly encouraged to take their phone to a PhoneCenter for exchange, rather than waiting for a technician to visit their home. The adoption of modular connectors was motivated in good part by the development of PhoneCenters. If a telephone was something that you could pick up at a store, and then take home and plug in yourself, did it really make sense to lease? Did consumers have any reason to lease phones besides Ma Bell giving them no other option? AT&T was never a stranger to antitrust action. The Department of Justice filed a suit in 1949, alleging illegal monopolization under the Sherman act. It was generally acknowledged that telephone service was a "natural monopoly," meaning that the cost of installing and maintaining the outside plant made it inevitable (and, on grounds of economic efficiency, preferable) that a single company would dominate each market. The Sherman act and the Department of Justice did not necessarily object to this form of monopoly. The problem, what Justice considered anti-competitive behavior, was when the phone companies used their natural monopoly on phone service to force customer's hands in markets that might otherwise be competitive. One of the tricky problems, even in 1949, was interconnection of equipment. A vast and increasingly global electronics industry had come up with all kinds of new ways to use communications lines, but telephone customers could only use the equipment their phone company provided, and at rates set by the phone company. A fervent argument ended in the conclusion that AT&T had valid reasons to require customers to lease telephones, but that the anti-competitive impacts needed to be mitigated. This case, the first of a series of challenges to the Bell System, ended in a consent decree that shaped the future of both AT&T and, I do not think it is unfair to say, the entire American electronics and communications industry. AT&T would continue as a monopoly telephone carrier under state regulation (the principle of "common carrier"), but it would be prohibited from entering any industries in which it was not regulated. In other words: telephone service was a regulated industry, with rates and service terms set by state public utility commissions, and the system of regulation was felt to be sufficient to temper AT&T's desire for domination. On the other hand, if AT&T entered an unregulated industry, there would be no public commission to slow them down—and they would inevitably use their foothold as a regulated monopoly to promote, perhaps even mandate, use of their unregulated service. I have so far described the settlement in abstract terms, but even at the time it had an obvious practical implication: "computers," in the modern sense, had only just been conceived. But they were rapidly advancing, and AT&T's considerable leadership in electronics, massive R&D center (Bell Laboratories), and integrated manufacturing (Western Electric) made the telephone company an obvious contender for the nation's leading manufacturer of computers. Too bad: computers were an unregulated industry, so AT&T had to keep their hands off. The consent decree forbade AT&T selling general-purpose computers, broadly limiting their involvement in the electronics industry to telephone switching equipment and government contracts. AT&T mainframes never happened; instead we got IBM. The capability was still there, though, and complex needs of the telephone kept AT&T a leader in computer technology even with zero sales. Consider, for example, UNIX: perhaps the single most influential operating system ever developed, but a product of a company that was expressly prohibited from selling computers. In an era where software was virtually always bundled with hardware sales, that put AT&T in a very odd position, and forced the odd licensing terms of UNIX that allowed it to proliferate and organically grow. The 1949 consent decree held for decades, but it was always a bit uncomfortable. By the 1970s, AT&T's key regulator, the FCC, came to feel that it no longer made sense. The computer industry was much larger than before, interconnection of computers via telephone was becoming a common practice, and it was apparent that computers could both provide a communications service and be users of a communications service. AT&T built and used computers extensively, and one could argue that a telephone on an Electronic Switching System (ESS) was akin to a terminal on a mainframe computer. The first time-sharing services, such as BBN's introduced in 1962, might use the telephone network for communications but could also offer communications themselves in the form of electronic mail. Was the telephone system a computer service? Was time sharing a communications service? These were important questions that the existing regulatory and legal framework did not comfortably address, and they were only becoming more important as both AT&T and its competitors signaled a desire to try out the other side of the fence. Moreover, the FCC was concerned that the regulatory environment was holding the industry back. AT&T's complete control over the phone system had already started to crumble, first when an appeals court overruled the FCC to allow the use of non-electrical third-party telephone accessories in Hush-A-Phone v. United States in 1956, and then again when the FCC's own Carterfone decision extended the privilege to even electrical equipment in 1968. While the Carterfone itself was a special-purpose device, the decision set a precedent that was immediately leveraged by third-party telephone manufacturers. Given the dominance that AT&T has held in this discussion so far, and that it holds in telephone history in general, "third-party telephone manufacturers" might come as a surprise. Of course there were telephones made overseas, for example by Ericsson, and some were imported to the US. But the US had its own competitive telephone industry: Automatic Electric was the Western Electric of GTE, AT&T's main competitor, and manufactured the telephones they leased. GTE looked at the possibility of selling telephones to AT&T's much larger customer base and saw green. Railroads and independent telephone companies needed equipment, and while they did buy from Western Electric, they also supported other manufacturers like ITT. Enterprising retailers started selling telephones from these companies outright (it is hard to tell who was first, but new department store chain Target was early to the game). The Bell System, in response, introduced harsh rules: customers could use third-party equipment, but only by connecting it to a device called a Protective Connecting Arrangement (PCA) leased from AT&T. The PCA was about as expensive as a telephone and installed the same way, requiring a separate PCA for each extension and preventing customers (or their chosen contractors) doing any work on the inside wiring, which remained Bell System property. This in-between state technically opened the telephone set market to competition, but in practice the rules and fees around PCAs were so onerous that few consumers were better off owning their own equipment. Pressure from telephone manufacturers and consumer groups, and no doubt some fear of another appeals court loss after Carterfone's clear precedent, the FCC promulgated new rules for third-party telephones in 1975. These are basically the same rules we follow today: the customer owns inside wiring past the network interface device (often called a demarcation point for this reason), and can do whatever they want with it, subject to a requirement that interconnected electrical equipment be certified as compliant with Bell System technical rules and registered with the FCC. This was the true beginning of the customer-owned telephone era: many customers would sign up for telephone service, buy a phone, and then simply report the FCC registration number of their own telephone to the phone company. That was all that was required to have service connected. Yet it creates a strange situation. You would have two options: you could pay the rate advertised by the phone company and receive a phone on lease, or you could buy your own phone and pay a somewhat lower rate. The latter was almost certainly a better deal, especially as the sudden creation of a retail telephone market drove prices radically lower. The former could look like a better deal, though, since the phone was "free" and its cost partially concealed in the phone bill. It could easily become even more confusing: let's say that you leased a phone from the phone company for years, and then went to check out this newfangled Target and set your eyes on a slick new ITT telephone. You buy it, take it home, and if you are lucky enough to have modularized connectors, you plug it right in (post-1975 wiring conversion kits were also readily available). Now you have a phone that you own, but you're still paying for the one that you leased, perhaps without even knowing. Hopefully you kept it: when you notice the overpayment and call the phone company to cancel the lease, they will expect you to return the phone, or otherwise pay them back for it. And thus came the first blow to telephone leasing: state regulators increasingly required telephone companies to separately itemize the cost of a telephone lease on bills. At the same time that Carterfone and its consequences shook up the rules around third-party equipment, the FCC initiated a more radical rework of telephone regulation. The computer had raised many questions, and especially the rise of time-sharing services and the nascent field of "information services" seemed to create a second, shadow communications industry that was unregulated (and thus competitive) but incredibly vulnerable to the whims of the regulated (and thus monopolized) telephone industry that provided the actual wiring. In keeping with the political winds, the FCC strongly favored market competition. It feared that AT&T had become "too big to regulate" and would use its chokehold on the nation's primary communications infrastructure to stamp out computer-based competition before it could bloom. To consider this thorny problem, the Commission had opened a broad docket called the Computer inquiry in 1966. Among the conclusions of that multi-year series of working papers and hearings was a new regulatory framework that differentiated between "communications" and "data processing" as industries. "Communications" was a natural monopoly like the phone system, and would carry on under regulation. "Data processing" was an increasingly competitive industry with lower barriers to entry, so it would remain unregulated. The FCC's largest concern, as in the 1949 Sherman act case, was what would happen when one company drove in both lanes—as AT&T still wanted to do. Such a company could probably use its regulated monopoly services to subsidize its competitive service (even if regulators tried to stop it, since accounting for what investment went where would be very difficult), unfairly blocking the efforts of competitors and driving up prices for consumers that had no other choice. On the other hand, completely prohibiting regulated common carriers from participating in competitive markets was, by this time, clearly having a negative impact on the development of computer technology. AT&T was a major center of expertise in computers that had to keep most of that expertise to itself, and innovative computer companies like Tymshare were nervous about offering communications features (and sometimes prohibited or arbitrarily limited them) for fear of straying into common carrier territory and, ironically, being forced to abandon their original unregulated services. The FCC attempted to address this conundrum through a rule of separation. One company would be allowed to participate in both regulated and unregulated markets if, and only if, the two activities were strictly separated into two different entities (one presumably a subsidiary of the other) with accounting and policy firewalls between them. In practice, the Computer inquiry was a mess. The information services industry was still in its infancy in the 1960s, so the FCC was writing rules without knowing very much at all about the companies they would apply to. The negative FCC acknowledged that there remained a clear gray area between "communications" and "data processing" (with, once again, electronic mail as the clearest example) but still wrote the rules around "pure communications" and "pure data processing" as two separate domains. The existence of a "hybrid" category was acknowledged but little discussed. One of the key problems related to the actual technical implementation of computer networks: telephone networks all used circuit-switching of analog signals and so there was, at the very least, a logical fiction that all information passed through unmodified. Computer networks, on the other hand, were adopting more sophisticated architectures that often involved rewriting, modifying, or converting messages along the way. Indeed, the lack of standardization of computer communications prior to their domination by the Internet meant that some amount of protocol conversion was practically required for widely-available services. And yet, this type of manipulation of messages appeared to be data processing, not communications. In practice, almost everything turned out to be "hybrid." This is why the Computer inquiry is now widely known as Computer I: it was almost completely replaced by the second Computer inquiry, or Computer II, in in 1976. Computer II kept the same basic principles as Computer I except that it completely redefined the two categories in terms of functionality, rather than technology. The Computer II categories are "basic services" and "enhanced services." Enhanced services were those that involved manipulation or storage of data, but the FCC made that determination from the perspective of a user rather than an engineer. If the purpose of a service, or the activity in the FCC's words, was manipulation, storage, or retrieval of data, it was an enhanced service. If not, it was a basic service, even if the technical implementation involved some degree of manipulation, storage, and retrieval. This had the effect of making the telephone network a basic service, and computer networks an enhanced service 3. The separation rule remained the same: one company could offer both basic and enhanced services, but only under terms of strict separation. To the FCC, Computer II seemed a relatively elegant solution to one of their major problems. Under the definitions adopted, basic services were limited to the actual communications network. Just about everything else would be an enhanced service, firewalled away from any benefit from the regulated monopoly. Simultaneously with Computer II, the advent of retail telephone sales (remember, despite appearances, this is actually an article about telephone leasing) triggered several lawsuits and petitions to the FCC. The general theory was the telephone companies used their monopoly status to do everything possible to steer customers towards leasing phones, even requiring at least one leased phone in some cases. The FCC recognized that this issue was not totally unrelated to the Computer inquiries: Computer II in particular had led to consideration of very similar problems around modems and the ability of basic service providers to restrict enhanced services over their network (during this period, for example, you could either lease a modem from the telephone company or buy one from IBM—they were functionally identical, but it was not always clear which option was more legally appropriate). More than one court ruled that, to settle the antitrust problem, the telephone monopoly needed to get out of the leasing business. The FCC agreed in principle and, even better, in practice: it was a simple and obvious step to sweep "provision of terminal equipment" under the same rug as "enhanced services." Telephones, like enhanced services, were a competitive industry with lower barriers to entry. Therefore, like enhanced services, the FCC ruled that a regulated telephone company could only lease terminal equipment through a strictly separated subsidiary. Finally, the two threads of computer-related antitrust action and telephone leasing converge, in the curious form of the short-lived American Bell. Immediately following the conclusion of Computer II in 1980, AT&T disclosed to the FCC that it intended to take advantage of the new rules by forming a strictly separated subsidiary just as the FCC had contemplated (this was no surprise, as AT&T had been extensively involved in the inquiries). The mechanics were tricky, as AT&T had to come up with the capital to start a completely new subsidiary, with its own offices, support functions, equipment, etc., all without the appearance of subsidizing it with funds from their regulated business. Negotiations between the FCC and AT&T over these details delayed the incorporation of the subsidiary until 1982, when it emerged under the brand name American Bell. American Bell had two different divisions, in a way that seems quite incongruous without the lengthy regulatory context I have just unloaded on you: Advanced Information Systems, a computer and information services company widely expected to rival the likes of IBM, and Consumer Products, which manufactured and sold telephones. As a result of the strict separation rules, American Bell would have to replace the telephone leasing functions of the Bell Operating Companies (which were, in 1982, still part of AT&T). The storefronts the BOCs had opened to handle phones, the PhoneCenters, were quickly rebranded from the BOC logos to American Bell. AT&T also launched an expansion campaign that saw, for example, a PhoneCenter as a department in every Sears. They even sold phones wholesale to retailers, where erstwhile Western Electric products sat alongside those from ITT, AE, and the new bevy of imported Asian products 4. Most consumers, when they signed up for telephone service, would just go to a PhoneCenter or any other store and buy a phone. In fact, starting in 1982, leasing might not even be an option: the FCC had agreed to soften the blow to AT&T's balance sheet by allowing the BOCs to continue to sell or lease the telephones they already had in inventory. It was clear that this was a temporary accommodation only, though, as the FCC ordered that the BOCs could not purchase any additional inventory of customer premises equipment, and ordered state regulators to begin the process of removing telephone leases from the tariffs. Telephone company representatives told newspapers across the country that, starting in 1982, they would still "provide" a phone if they had one—but they might not, and customers couldn't be picky about the color. Some predicted their inventory would run out during 1983, and then customers would truly be on their own. Of course, customers didn't take this as hard as the phone companies did: retail phones were quite popular, and leasing numbers had been in decline since the late 1970s. We should finally talk about prices. From New York Telephone in 1983, as an example, you could lease a 500-style rotary dial phone for $3.03 a month. Purchasing the same phone at a PhoneCenter cost $45—so if you expected to have the phone for two years, you were better off buying. And we must keep in mind that Western Electric phones, while not totally immune to cost engineering, were still built to very high standards and came with a price tag to match. A more inexpensive phone, say one imported from Asia, was available at Radio Shack for $15. AT&T representatives discouraged the use of these cheap and ostensibly lower-quality phones, but struggled to say anything negative about a phone from, say, ITT, given that they were built to the same standards and sometimes to the exact same designs. The phone was no longer part of the telephone system. It was merely a consumer device, subject to the same forces as every other. But what of the many leased telephones already in service? The FCC referred to these as "embedded" phones, and had a very hard time deciding what to do about them. Because local telephone companies were prohibited from the leasing business, and the phones had always been handled under the auspices of Western Electric anyway, all of the leased phones They could simply require the telephone companies to stop leasing and take them back, but that would leave the telephone companies with a huge financial loss as they wrote off millions of phones they were no longer allowed to sell. They could require the telephone companies to offer customers a buy-out offer, but that created most of the same problems as having the companies lease them in the first place. Who would set the price? presumably the regulator, but how? Would they come with a warranty? For the time being, the FCC settled on a temporary solution: the embedded leased telephones would be left as-is. AT&T stridently objected. They were being told three things in the same breath: that they needed to come up with the money to fund a new independent subsidiary to sell telephones, that they had to keep servicing the existing fleet of leased phones, and that in no way could money from the latter be used for the former. AT&T suggested that the FCC should instead let them offer a buy-out on all leased phones, and then use the revenue to bankroll American Bell Consumer Products. The FCC brought back the question of how to set the price, especially given that some of these leased phones were very old. Would they need to be appraised? This stalemate lasted long enough for the ground to once again shake under the feet of the telephone industry. In 1974, as Computer II was just about to begin, the Department of Justice had decided to take action for the same reasons as the FCC. The monopoly questions around the telephone market, mitigated but not totally addressed by the consent decree in the 1949 case, had become clearer and more urgent. Here is where the story of telephone deregulation falls apart, and where I introduce the character we all know best: United States v. AT&T, the second one, a Sherman act antitrust case that ran in parallel to, but almost completely independent from, Computer II. Judge Harold Greene would have to answer the same questions as the FCC, and he did not answer them the same way. The breakup of the Bell System is a fairly well known topic, so I will keep my explanation brief. The main outcome of the later United States v. AT&T, set in a 1982 settlement called the Modified Final Judgment (MFJ), was a requirement that AT&T divest itself of the local operating companies. This was a very different outcome from Computer II, but the reasoning along the way was similar: the two inquiries were just looking at different aspects of the problem. Computer II was motivated mostly by the up-and-coming world of computerized information services, so the FCC focused on AT&T's use of the telephone network to bolster its information services business. The MFJ, on the other hand, was mostly motivated by the rise of competitive long-distance carriers like Sprint and MCI. That problem caused the court to draw a different distinction: local telephone service was deemed a natural monopoly, because of the massive outside plant required. On the other hand, the development of microwave and fiber optic technology had radically reduced the cost of long-distance connections. Through products like Execunet, AT&T's competitors were already proving the viability of competitive long-distance services that interconnected with the Bell System at the local exchange. While the story of United States v. AT&T is a complex one, it goes roughly like this: the court initially favored a solution that seems more similar to that of Computer II, by ordering AT&T to separate itself from its vertically integrated but non-regulated components. That would mean separating AT&T's local and long-distance telephone operations from Western Electric and likely Bell Laboratories, probably by spin-out into a completely independent company. Ironically, this was the ultimate (and perhaps foreseeable) outcome, but nonetheless AT&T fervently opposed the loss of the division that would lead it into the computer future. Instead, AT&T got a very different outcome: if local service was the real problem, the antitrust problem could be addressed by breaking out local service instead. AT&T seems to have preferred this route, but it was no less traumatic. The MFJ set a timeline of two years to implement the judgment: On January 1, 1984, the Bell Operating Companies became independent of their former corporate parent. AT&T was prohibited from local telephone service, but in exchange, was permitted to continue its long-distance business with few compromises—besides the big one, that it would now face competition. For the parallel story of leased telephones, this was a huge wrench in the gears. Leased telephones had always fallen under the purview of Western Electric (which operated the service centers, for example), and local telephone companies were now prohibited from leasing phones anyway, so embedded leased telephones had been moved under the American Bell Consumer Products brand. But American Bell would now be not just a separate subsidiary from the telephone company, but a separate subsidiary of another company that the telephone company just paid for long distance service. Closely following state regulator decisions about separating phone lease billing, they became even more separate: starting in 1984, consumers with leased telephones would receive two completely separate bills, one from the bell operating company and one from American Bell. But there was another problem: The "Bell System" as it was known was the AT&T monopoly, and the court made sure to take it from AT&T with the rest of the monopolized service. Among the terms of the 1982 MFJ was a prohibition on AT&T using the Bell trademark and name (except in limited circumstances), a rule that the still-new American Bell directly violated. Beginning in 1984, American Bell was rebranded once again to AT&T Technologies, with AT&T Information Systems as one subsidiary and AT&T Consumer Products as another. The signs of over a thousand PhoneCenters were swapped out yet again 5. Ironically, the local operating companies, prohibited from leasing telephones since 1982, actually regained that ability post-divestiture. Since they were completely separate companies from AT&T in 1984, they were free to form their own "strictly separated" subsidiaries to offer unregulated services. You will notice the overlapping timelines: the Computer II-era prohibition on leasing took effect in 1982, the same year that the MFJ was signed. When the BOCs were telling newspapers that they didn't know how long their phones would last, they already knew that they would be permitted to resume leasing operations in 1984, they just weren't sure if they would. This did little for consumer confidence in leasing telephones. In practice, as a business decision, most of the BOCs never leased telephones again. The market was already going downhill, and they would have to try to sign up customers against the competition of both cheap retail phones and existing lease arrangements with AT&T Consumer Products. Along the way, state regulators had slowly come up to speed with the FCC's rulings on leasing. The details here are very hard to tell, in part because they seem to have been different across both jurisdictions (different state regulators took different approaches) and markets (different Bell operating companies lobbied their regulators for different approaches). Further confusing things, some states seem to have adopted an approach to embedded leased telephones before 1984, and others after. These decisions were made in very different contexts and led to different outcomes. It shook out along these lines: starting in 1982, the FCC required AT&T to keep supporting leased phones for at least 18 months. AT&T offered to continue leasing services indefinitely, which was ultimately permitted. Still, the FCC was making (halting) efforts to implement Computer II, and pushed states to disposition the embedded leased phones. Most states did so by requiring, or perhaps more accurately allowing (since it had been their preference to begin with) AT&T to offer buy-outs to existing lease customers. Most of these buy-outs had to settle by 1984 as divestiture radically complicated the servicing of leased phones—sending a technician to repair or even retrieve one now required a complicated cost-sharing arrangement between the local operating company (which employed the technicians) and AT&T, all closely scrutinized by the FCC. Quite a few customers took the buy-out offers, but many did not, and by around 1985 the buy-out programs had faded away. For those customers who had leased telephones, and did not respond to mailings about the buy-out option, they simply remained lease customers of AT&T Consumer Products which issued a separate quarterly bill. And this is where the long twilight of the leased telephone begins. I put a lot of time into writing this, and I hope that you enjoy reading it. If you can spare a few dollars, consider supporting me on ko-fi. You'll receive an occasional extra, subscribers-only post, and defray the costs of providing artisanal, hand-built world wide web directly from Albuquerque, New Mexico. The 1982 Computer II restrictions and the 1984 United States v. AT&T restrictions came in rapid succession and, it was quickly observed, seemed to contradict each other in goals. You could be either a local telephone company or a long-distance telephone company but not both... or you could be a regulated company or an unregulated company but not both. The original goal of separating monopoly telephone service from "enhanced services" had effectively happened twice, by requiring AT&T to form a separate subsidiary for unregulated services and then two years later requiring them to divest most of the regulate services that had prompted the separate subsidiary to begin with. AT&T was mad, of course, but even the FCC came to agree that their attempts to promote free market competition had probably actually undermined it by taking away AT&T's ability to meaningfully compete. In 1986, a series of comparatively minor FCC decisions rolled back some of Computer II's implications, including the strict separation rule for AT&T. Free of the regulatory requirement for the business complexity (which had led to frustrations like the famous exclusion of AT&T Technologies employees from the Bell Laboratories library), AT&T reabsorbed its separate subsidiary. AT&T Consumer Products was once again just another division of the faltering giant. AT&T's computer ambitions were ill-fated. Despite the introduction of the 3B line of UNIX-powered minicomputers, and even a line of PCs, AT&T never achieved meaningful success as a computer company. AT&T entered a broad financial decline after the breakup, and the faltering computer business wasn't helping. Still, AT&T Technologies—the division made up mostly of the former Western Electric and Bell Laboratories business units—had potential, or at least they liked to think so. In 1996, AT&T Technologies once again spun out, this time into a completely independent company called Lucent Technologies. Lucent became the home of the manufacturing and research operations, but because of the circuitous history of AT&T Consumer Products, the embedded leased telephones came along for the ride. There were, as best I can find, approximately one million telephones still under lease when Lucent became the lessor. As an accommodation for billing and to reduce consumer confusion, AT&T granted Lucent a license to continue to use the name "AT&T Consumer Products" for leasing. Lucent didn't do all that much better than AT&T had, and it was more or less stripped for parts over the following decade, leading to a 2006 acquisition by French communications technology Alcatel—creating Alcatel-Lucent, later part of Nokia. The leased phones took a different path, though. The consumer telephone business was not profitable for Lucent, and the PhoneCenters closed in 1995. In 1996, the division took on the name Lucent Consumer Products and shifted its focus to wholesale, although it continued to use AT&T branding in connection to leasing. In 2000, it all had to go. Lucent eliminated almost the entirety of its manufacturing capability, mostly as Avaya which produced networking products and business telephone systems. The consumer products division mostly went to the well-established Hong Kong manufacturer VTech, which continued Lucent's consumer products under the name Advanced American Telephones. But there was an exception: the lease contracts. In the year 2000, there were still several hundred thousand. That is where the story becomes especially difficult to follow. Lucent sold the phone leasing business to what Wikipedia calls "Consumer Phone Services," although I am now quite confident this company was properly called North Street Consumer Phone Services LLC. I do not know the meaning of "North Street," and I have found conflicting information on whether the company was based in New York, Miami, or somewhere in New Jersey. It probably moved around a bit. North Street seems to have incorporated in 1999, suggesting it may have been formed for this purpose. Further confusing things, as late as 2004 the leasing program was still "managed by" Lucent. I am unclear on what "managed" meant, but newspaper articles about phone leases in the era often feature statements from Lucent spokespeople despite the sale. At the least, Lucent was allowing North Street Consumer Phone Services to continue to use the AT&T name under license. Around 2006, perhaps in connection to Lucent's sale to Alcatel, the "managed by" relationship apparently ended. In 2008, North Street Consumer Phone Services was replaced by QLT Consumer Lease Services. I know very little about this company, I am not even sure if it is a descendant of North Street Consumer Phone Services or a result of another sale of the lease contracts. There can't be very many lease contracts left. Considering that most marketing for phone leases ended in 1982, anyone still leasing a phone today has most likely been making payments for the last 45 years. Are leased telephones a scam? Perhaps, even probably. By the mid-1990s, the FCC and Federal Trade Commission realized that an inadvertent effect of the 1980s regulatory chaos was that consumers who had dutifully paid their phone bills but not otherwise paid much attention were likely still making lease payments. That probably described most telephone customers who had started service before '82, but by the mid-'90s leased telephones were already becoming a distant memory for most Americans. How many people had a leased phone that they had forgotten about? How many people had a leased phone that they had replaced with one they bought, but never returned? In theory the separate billing rules mitigated the problem, but it was clear that not everyone read their bills closely. The fact that the Bell Operating Companies and American Bell Consumer Products had switched to billing on separate days was intended to reduce confusion by making sure the bills arrived completely separately, but especially after phone leases switched to quarterly billing (due to their small amounts) it probably made it more likely that people would think both were the phone bill and simply not notice that they were getting two different sets. In 1996, the FCC and FTC issued a press release warning consumers to check their phone bills for forgotten lease payments. An accusation was made that Lucent Consumer Products was functionally exploiting the elderly, since older people were more likely to have had the same telephone service for decades and probably less likely to critically consider a $15 quarterly lease bill. When you did the math, it was easy to find customers who had had the same leased phone for the last 20 years and paid over one thousand dollars for it. As time passed, more and more of those customers didn't even have the phone any more, but they still got the bills, and they still paid. When asked, many thought the prominently AT&T-branded lease bill was for long-distance calling (it didn't help that Lucent seems to have used some very non-specific language on the bill like "equipment fee"). In 2002, lawsuits in several states were combined into a national class action case that alleged that AT&T and its various successors had scammed vulnerable Americans out of many millions of dollars by simply continuing to bill them. While no one involved admitted fault, they did settle by creating a fund of up to $300 million to reimburse customers who filed claims that they were paying a lease for a phone they did not use. The reimbursement program ultimately paid out less than $10 million due to lack of claims, which consumer advocates quickly criticized on the grounds that people who did not realize they were paying a lease bill probably weren't following developments closely enough to find out about a class action settlement they needed to apply to. Interestingly, even the composition of the settlement fund was complex. The billing at issue had happened under multiple companies, and many of the rounds of divestiture and acquisitions had come with contractual allocations of liability. AT&T (the original parent company) and Lucent (the spinoff) ended up bearing most of it, but amusingly, National Cash Register was hit for a few million dollars because of liability assignments during the brief period that it was part of AT&T Technologies (the spinoff of Lucent included NCR, and assigned part of AT&T Technologies' liability to NCR that conveyed with the company when Lucent spun it out again). NCR basically caught a stray for a business they were never involved in. And yet this is still going—in 2004, 2005, 2008, it's easy to find newspaper articles, cable news segments, and AARP columns recounting mostly elderly people who had paid thousands of dollars in lease fees for telephones they no longer had. AT&T, Lucent, and QLT have never had much to say in their defense. In the late '90s, Lucent pointed out that phone lessees got all kinds of fringe benefits, not only the ability to exchange their phone for a different color but a "lease rewards" discount program. QLT offers the same discount program today, the same type of pharmacy discount and coupon card that you can get dozens of other ways. It's very hard to find much information on QLT, although they're clearly still alive and issuing a charming thrice-yearly newsletter called Lease News & Views, presumably as a bill insert. Well, I say still alive, but the Spring 2026 issue is late and it seems like Summer 2026 ought to come out any day now. I have a lot of basic questions about QLT. For one, what does QLT mean? Well, I figured that one out: it doesn't mean anything, it's just supposed to sound like "quality" when said out loud. I can't find this clearly stated anywhere, but my assumption is that either AT&T revoked the license agreement to the AT&T brand or QLT independently decided that it was better to stop using it—either way, in response to the press coverage and lawsuits that attributed consumer confusion to the phone company branding on bills. I also wonder how many customers they have. In 2012, QLT responded to a CBS article on yet another elderly person paying for a leased phone for 30 years by noting that they have over 300,000 customers. How many of them are still paying, 14 years further on? QLT has "11-50 employees" per LinkedIn, several of which have been with the operation since divestiture. In response to a 2019 article on elderly people still paying phone leases, QLT "Our customer research data shows that approximately three quarters of our surveyed leasing customers also have at least one purchased phone in their home." To me, this seems to undermine QLT by suggesting that many of their customers are making lease payments for no reason, but they spin it by positing that these customers demand the reliability of a leased phone as a backup option. What I can tell you is this: If you want a Western Electric 500, or really a Cortelco 2500, they're only $5.95 a month from QLT in touch-tone. Or $45 to buy outright. Contrary to the impressions of many, selective ringing was common on party lines, especially in more urban areas. These systems allowed the central office to ring only a single telephone on the line, instead of all of them, making party lines a lot more convenient to the user. It was also technically quite complex: a common scheme involved sending different A/C ringing frequencies to carefully-tuned solenoids that would only travel far enough to strike the bells when made resonant.↩ Of course, this "feature" is much undermined if you remember that telephone companies of the era usually charged more for touch-tone service. This is one of many ways that the story of leased telephones is nuanced and full of conflict.↩ At least for most things you would consider a "computer network." It's sort of difficult to draw a clear line here even today, so we can sympathize with the FCC's difficulty in the 1970s.↩ A consequence of this shift was the separation of the telephone manufacturing business from Western Electric, one of many cuts that put America's greatest manufacturer into terminal decline. As with so many other parts of this story, though, the telephones themselves lived on. Many of the original Western Electric designs are still manufactured today by Cortelco, actually a descendant of Kellog via ITT, which had purchased manufacturing licenses for WE's designs going back to the 1950s.↩ I am not confident that I am describing the corporate structure entirely correctly, because in practice AT&T went through several rounds of reorganization. AT&T Technologies is sometimes described as a subsidiary of AT&T Information Systems, for example, the opposite of how I put it. I suspect that more than one version was correct over time.↩

Through decades of consolidation, reorganization, and divestiture, AT&T left a famously complicated corporate history. One of the greatest enterprises in American history, arguably the greatest enterprise, AT&T has often rivaled the federal government in the size of its budget and workforce. One of the reasons, as we well know today, was monopolization and its close relative vertical integration. AT&T was the telephone system, or at least aspired to be, and for decades the meaning of "Universal Service" was that the service was designed, built, and operated by AT&T—universally. While AT&T's tangled origins are fertile ground for the historian, they also obscure many of the early stories of telephone history. Much of the work of the early independent telephone industry has been lost in the voluminous achievements of AT&T. Even very basic facts become obscure. For example, who invented the telephone? Well, we all know the answer: Alexander Graham Bell. We have mostly forgotten that, at the time, this was a hotly contested question. One of the most prominent alternate claimants to the title was a man named Elisha Gray, today immortalized as the "Gray" in electrical distributor "Graybar," but better known in his time as an inventor of telegraph and telephone equipment. Gray contracted prototyping of some of his inventions to an upstart manufacturer and de facto Western Union spinoff, founded by Enos M. Barton (the "bar" in Graybar) and George Shawk. Impressed by Barton's operation, and at odds with Shawk on its future direction, Gray put together the money to buy out Shawk and became half-owner of the company that would reincorporate, in 1872, as Western Electric (WE). It is ironic, of course, that a man who might fairly be called one of the top enemies of Bell helped to found the company that would become one of the most important parts of the Bell System. It's not a coincidence: Gray's involvement in WE included plans to manufacture his own telephone design, for which he had filed a provisional patent. Like many of the late 20th century's telephone inventors, Gray's greatest challenge in commercializing his invention was not technical but legal. His provisional patent on a telephone transmitter, substantially similar to the one invented by Bell and possibly older, led Western Union to take take part ownership in WE to advance their own plan to compete with AT&T as a telephone company. That set off a protracted legal battle, whose end result included the termination of Gray's patent claim and Western Union's abandonment of telephony. AT&T was not the kind of company to leave things to chance, though, and least of all when it came to competition. In 1881, AT&T acquired WE. From that point on, WE was no longer a competitor, it was a core part of the Bell System: the manufacturing and supply arm of AT&T. A few decades later, WE had become the primary maker, and often sole supplier, of every piece of equipment used in the Bell telephone network. Everything from telephones to cables to central office switches were made at WE's various works. What few components WE didn't make, it sourced, through an expansive purchasing arm that negotiated orders on the behalf of the entire AT&T family. In 1925, WE had become so dedicated to the Bell System that its remaining non-telephone business, mostly local distributorships, was spun out into a separate company (Graybar). From that point forward, the Bell System was not only WE's sole shareholder but its sole customer as well. As part of the 1925 reorganization, WE's research and development arm became a new organization, jointly owned by WE and its patron AT&T: Bell Laboratories. This new organization consolidated AT&T's expanding basic science efforts with WE's manufacturing expertise, setting the stage for decades of equipment that was conceived, designed, manufactured, and used within the AT&T empire. Bell operating companies got everything they needed, from tools to the telephones themselves, via requisition to their local WE supply warehouse. Such were the needs of the growing telephone system that WE started manufacturing telephone cable in 1925, quickly became the world's largest manufacturer of wire and cable, and likely held that title continuously until the turn-down of much of its manufacturing capacity in the late 1970s. AT&T was the nation's largest private employer for much of this period, and WE accounted for about 1/6th of that workforce. Until the Carterfone decision and, for the most part, until the divestiture of AT&T in 1984, telephones were born at Western Electric. All of the phones leased by Bell Operating Companies, ranging from the classic WE 500 to explosion-proof phones for coal mine applications, were made at WE facilities like the Indianapolis Works. There were nearly 10,000 employees there, making 35,000 phones a day—and Indianapolis was not remarkable. It was just one plant of many. AT&T built its empire through innovation, but also through domination. The acquisition of WE was one of its biggest steps towards complete integration, a goal that WE would pursue through the middle of the 20th century. For example, when the Morton Salt empire indirectly led to the Teletype Corporation and the development of commercial teletypewriter networks, they bought it. Teletype was a WE company from 1930 to its end. Telephones were not only born at WE; they went there to die. During the 1920s, telephones were expensive instruments that required regular maintenance. Besides the commercial advantage, which would become more significant in later years, this aspect of telephones encouraged a full service lease model. Customers leased their phones from their telephone company in part because (prior to Carterfone) they had to, in part because the arrangement made the telephone company responsible for the phone's care. At the same time, Bell Operating Companies carefully controlled their expenses by reusing equipment as much as possible. So, when a customer signed up for telephone service, they were issued a phone. When they canceled service, or had trouble with the phone, or quite simply wanted a phone that was a different color (or an upgrade to a Trimline or a Princess), the telephone company took the phone back. It would join hundreds of other phones on a trip to the nearest WE Service Center. The same truck would likely make the return journey loaded with phones ready for customers: the service center refurbished them. Millions of telephones come back to Bell System service centers each year, many with their housings, handsets, and other molded plastic components bruised and battered. Some can be put back in shape by buffing, solvent polishing, or painting. Others wind up in piles. (Q1) The scale of WE's phone refurbishing program was remarkable. Huge workshops of WE employees inspected, cleaned, repaired, and tested each phone. Refurbished units visited a test desk for a thorough electrical checkout before they received the service center's stamp or label that they had been remanufactured for use. In the Mountain States and west, WE service centers were found in Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. By the 1960s, Portland and Salt Lake City had joined. Of course, despite the best efforts of all of WE's horses and all of WE's men, not all telephones can be put back together again. Much of the equipment returned to WE could not be satisfactorily refurbished. Besides, it wasn't just phones that telephone companies returned to WE, it was everything. Upgrading a crossbar exchange to an ESS? The ESS came from Western Electric, and the crossbar exchange went back to them. WE supplied telephone poles to the operating companies, and at the end of their life it took them back. Western Electric has manufactured millions of telephones, millions of miles of wire and cable, tens of thousands of manual and dial switching units, and the thousand-and-one other kinds of apparatus that go into the plant of the Bell System. It has purchased from thousands of other manufacturers the great variety of supplies that are used by the Bell System. (Q2) The majority of that output—at least what wasn't still in service during WE's decline—went back to WE for disposal, as well. That included the wire: from simple drop wires to heavy multipair cables, old wiring was routinely cut into sections and shipped back to WE—specifically, to the WE Salvage Works on Staten Island. In 1883, as the component elements of a telephone industry were swirling around New York and accreting by gravity into the shape of the Bell System, Benjamin Lowenstein arrived from Germany. Settling in New York City, he took up a business that he must have learned back in Europe: metal refining. Within a year of his arrival, the B. Lowenstein & Bro. company was smelting scrap metal from a shop in Manhattan (the brother, Moses Lowenstein, was a constant second fiddle in Benjamin's ventures until he sold his share and retired to go his own way in 1900). Lowenstein had a way of maneuvering his metals businesses into the path of technological progress. His first such success was lead, or rather an alloy of lead with tin and antimony. This specialized alloy was eutectic, meaning that it melted and solidified at a single, well-defined temperature, and a low one at that. These were exactly the requirements for feeding the newly-invented Merganthaler hot-metal typesetting machines, later known as Linotype—much as the metal came to be known as Linotype alloy. By 1890, B. Lowenstein & Bro. was the major supplier of feedstock for hot-metal typesetting in the US. Linotype metal brought in a lot of money, enough that Lowenstein looked to expand. New York City was already dense enough that it was hard to find a site for a large industrial operation. Instead, Lowenstein found land in the southern end of Staten Island, near the town of Tottenville. There, he founded the Tottenville Copper Company, Tottenville Copper grew quickly, well positioned for the new demand for copper brought about by the electrical revolution. During the 1900s, Lowenstein rebranded B. Lowenstein & Bro. as the Nassau Smelting and Refining Company and moved to consolidate it with Tottenville Copper. In 1914, as the US entered the First World War, Nassau Smelting and Refining was noted as one of four companies responsible for 90% of the country's copper exports. It's said that war is good for business, and it certainly was for Lowenstein. The war brought a pressing need for copper, and the Tottenville plant was pressed into military service. This part of the company's history is, unfortunately, well-documented due to a scandal all too familiar to our present times: on March 27th, 1918, police officers seconded to Naval Intelligence raided the Tottenville copper plant and arrested sixteen laborers—Germans and Austrians, many of them crew members of German merchant ships who had become trapped in the United States by wartime turmoil. In finding productive employment, a way to support themselves, they had made the critical mistake of taking jobs that supported the war effort. The intelligence officers spent most of the day at the plant in Tottenville, which employs about 500 workers. Practically all of them were questioned, but most of them were found to be either native Americans or naturalized citizens. The sixteen who were unable to show either that they had registered or had obtained zone permits were placed under arrest at the plant. (Q3) Because of its role in supplying copper components of artillery shells, the Tottenville smelter was considered a munitions plant, and was thus off limits to any enemy aliens who did not possess a specific movement permit issued under police supervision. A few of the sixteen arrested had not registered as enemy aliens, but most had registered and had the wrong work permit. The newspapers do not suggest that these sixteen had committed any offense other than a lapse in paperwork, but they were nonetheless "turned over to Federal Authorities for internment." The authorities were also, reportedly, investigating an allegation that a manager at the plant had made "seditious remarks." These included criticism of the Liberty Bonds used to fund the war effort, and a suggestion that American forces in France would not prevail. Fortunately for the plant manager, he was able to produce paperwork proving his citizenship, and officers deemed the evidence of his "seditious" opinions to be insufficient for charges. If the war brought good fortune to Lowenstein, peace took it away. The end of steady military contracts complicated the finances of Nassau Smelting and Refining, requiring a retooling of the plant towards other products in the difficult context of the post-war recession. A major fire at the plant, in 1923, racked up a huge repair bill and cut into production. There were personal problems, too: in the mid-1920s, Lowenstein divorced, starting a bitter multi-year legal battle over custody of his children—a question ultimately resolved in his favor, but not without the involvement of the appellate courts and an axe-wielding deputy sheriff. The financial condition of his company continued to decline as the country slid into the Great Depression. Lowenstein must have been looking for an exit. By this time, Nassau Smelting and Refining was consolidated into a 45-acre property on Staten Island straddling Mill Creek, just south of State Route 440 and between Arthur Kill Road and Page Avenue. There were two primary operations: the "red metals" complex which processed copper, and the "white metals" complex for lead and tin. Both ran primarily on reclaimed scrap, refining it into ingots ready for reuse. Conveniently, these were two categories of metals in great demand to the Bell System: copper, for wiring, and lead and tin, extensively used to coat cables and splices and as key ingredients in solder. The post-war period brought not only general economic decline, but also an increase in metals prices, stressing AT&T's supply chain. Western Electric turned its mind towards consolidation. Given the Nassau plant's proximity to WE's headquarters in New York City and plants throughout the region, WE must have already done quite a bit of business with Lowenstein's company. In 1931, they bought it. Likely because Nassau Smelting and Refining was already a well-established business, WE left it to operate as an independent subsidiary, alongside the Teletype Corporation (which was acquired at nearly the same time) and, later, the Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque—the three independent subsidiaries of Western Electric through the 1980s. By the 1940s, Nassau Smelting and Refining was processing thousands of tons of scrap each year. Most of this was disused telephone equipment and cable that had been broken down at other WE plants and then delivered to Staten Island for smelting. WE reported that about 3/5 of the nonferrous metal content of this scrap was returned to WE as high quality metal stock for manufacturing use. In the mid-1950s, Nassau Smelting and Refining provided about 16% of the Bell System's copper supply and 20% of its lead. During the Second World War, when copper became exceptionally scarce, the Nassau works provided a critical in-house metal recycling capability that not only supplied the military as a contractor but also allowed AT&T a reliable source of metal for its wartime telephone projects. During several such periods of disruption in the metal market, Nassau Smelting and Refining provided most of AT&T's supply. For AT&T, vertically integrating metal smelting thus had two key advantages: cost savings from owning its own supplier, and a degree of protection from the whims of the market. "Nassau Smelting and Refining Company is a further extension of Western Electric's constant effort to do its Bell System job better and more economically" (Q2). A 1946 newspaper article, announcing an open house at the plant with tours open to the public, gives a sense of the scale of the operation. Each day, an average of five railroad cars of scrap arrived at the plant. Stripping machines separated lead sheathing from telephone cables "like a child would peel a banana" before the remains were fed into the furnaces—enough oil to heat a house for a year kept each furnace at 2,000 degrees for one day. Lead was transferred from furnaces to kettles, 30 tons at a time, and poured into ingot molds. Much of the lead then went to the plant's on-site solder mill. Each of the presses there formed enough rosin-core solder to reach "from Tottenville to St. George [at the far end of Staten Island] and back," each day. During the mid-century, WE expanded the Nassau company's remit beyond just nonferrous metals. Nassau Smelting and Refining became WE's general broker of scrap and secondary materials, brokering cinders from telephone company power plants as a soil amendment, and iridium recovered from telephone relay contact points as a precious metal. As a subsidiary, rather than a mere component of Western Electric, Nassau was somewhat more independent of AT&T than the rest of WE. The metal operation wasn't restricted to the telephone industry, and both purchased scrap on the open market and sold metals to any buyer. Nassau was one of two bidders, for example, on an enormous post-war Naval copper supply contract. Metal refining is not a clean operation. In 1947, Nassau faced charges of "smoke annoyance" and "noxious conditions" that might have led to a criminal prosecution, were the case not forestalled the company's agreement to install a $350,000 bag house to filter furnace emissions. By this time, Nassau was called one of the nation's largest "above-ground mines." Metal recycling, while economical nearly from the beginning of metallurgy, received a surge of interest in a post-war nation that keenly remembered the shortages of the previous decade. Unlike our modern association between recycling and environmental protection, in the 1940s it was styled mostly as a new form of extractive industry: "The Nassau Smelting and Refining Company... mines the vast Bell network for valuable metals.... in 1948,.. Nassau reclaimed more copper than was produced in six of the nation's 14 major-producing states. And of 22 major lead-producing states, only four produced more than was reclaimed by Nassau." The president of Nassau at the time, William Scheuch, described "American homes, factories, and cities" as the "mines upon which modern industry depends." He noted as well that, by that time, rubber, plastics, rope, and "scores of other materials" had fallen under Nassau's responsibility. "So thrifty are Nassau's experts that even floor sweepings are cooked by incandescent heat to reclaim the last drop of metal content" (Q4). Later that year, Nassau hosted a delegation of European metallurgists discussing techniques for recycling aluminum, then a major focus of Nassau's research department. //beg// In 1956, the Staten Island Advance ran a puff piece on Nassau's production (162 million pounds of scrap converted into 138 million pounds of saleable metal in 1955) immediately next to the headline "Smog Growing Problem." In 1958, the same newspaper carried an editorial by Nassau's new president, Arthur Fegel, under the headline "Nassau Battles Air Pollution." In some ways, the piece is a celebration of the company's 75th anniversary, but the headline betrays an underlying political struggle. "Just as good families are good neighbors,.. an industrial concern like Nassau devotes much attention to being a good citizen in its own neighborhood" (Q5). This was the preface to an announcement, at the end of the article, that Nassau was about to build a new furnace that would burn the insulation off of wire. The exhaust, he promised, would be "clean as a whistle." In the early 1960s, Nassau underwent a wave of expansion, including new office and warehouse facilities on the north side of the property. The plant had become one of the major employers of Staten Island, with a payroll including "12 fathers and their 14 sons." The Staten Island Railroad operated a train station for the plant's employees, called Nassau, and expanded it in the early 1970s. The plant was one of their largest freight customers as well, with an industrial siding just off of the station. In 1971, the Deputy Commissioner of the New York Department of Air Resources paid a visit, or rather a "sniff," in part to confirm that Nassau had complied with an order to stop burning lead away in furnaces. "In terms of other smelters in New York City, it is fairly clean; but that doesn't mean it is in compliance with all the standards" (Q6). The 1970s were, for the Bell System, the beginning of the end. An upstart subsidiary of the Southern Pacific Railroad waged an intense legal battle against AT&T's monopoly, won the right to compete on long-distance service, and renamed itself to Sprint before merging with principal AT&T competitor GTE. Corning demonstrated a new communications technology based on light trapped in glass fibers; by 1980 the manufacturing technique for these new cables had become refined enough that they presented a lower-cost option compared to AT&T's coaxial and microwave network (Bell Laboratory's alternate plan for the future of communications, long-distance microwave waveguide, was stillborn). At the same time, the American environmental movement hit its stride. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency; each of these steps imposed new requirements on an aging metal plant that had long been considered a major polluter. Wastewater from metal separation processes, a slurry of heavy metals and petrochemicals and God only knows what else, was redirected from Mill Creek to the site's first water treatment plant in 1973. That plant separated the contaminants into a dried sludge, which for years was simply piled up under the approach ramp of the Page Avenue bridge. Later, this sludge was processed to extract precious metals, but that modest revenue didn't make up for the capital investment. It wasn't a good time to be an expensive part of Western Electric: facing declining revenues, labor unrest, and the weakening state of its sole benefactor AT&T, WE entered the late 1970s as a company in decline. WE started backing away from its integrated salvage operation: sometime in the late 1970s, the remaining metal recycling operations at Nassau were contracted to a company called C&D Recycling, which assumed management of part of the Nassau plant. Copper smelting operations at Nassau ended in 1981, beginning a multi-year decommissioning and demolition process for the Red Metals complex. The main copper processing building was razed by 1985, but in the mean time, the entire Bell System had met a worse fate: divestiture. Antitrust lawsuits against AT&T, brewing throughout the 1970s, leading to a 1982 settlement agreement that required the dismantling of the Bell System over the following years. On the first day of 1984, the Bell Operating Companies became independent corporations, over 2/3rds of AT&T gone overnight. Western Electric went along with them: one of the key findings of the antitrust case was that AT&T had built and maintained a monopoly through vertical integration so extensive that it deprived their competition of equipment and supplies. AT&T was able to partially mitigate the unwinding of their vertical integration: by agreeing to completely divest the operating companies, it won terms on which Western Electric could remain an AT&T company, under a new name. AT&T had agreed to end use of the trademarks most associated with their nationwide monopoly, including not just "Bell System" itself but the Western Electric name and logo. WE was reorganized, with some divisions meeting other fates, but most of the company became AT&T Technologies. As part of the settlement, AT&T had gotten relief on various restrictions imposed on them by previous antitrust cases, including a key prohibition on Western Electric marketing general-purpose computers. While there was some initial optimism that that small victory would allow the new AT&T Technologies to take on the likes of IBM, it didn't work out that way. A series of poor decisions, several fundamental missteps, and no doubt some plain bad luck had Western Electric, and its close partner Bell Laboratories, on the downhill. Post-divestiture, Nassau Smelting and Refining took on a new identity: AT&T Nassau Metals. As part of the settlement agreement, Bell Operating Companies could no longer be required to purchase equipment and supplies from WE. The Bell telephone market was suddenly open to competitive manufacturers such as the Canadian company Northern Electric (later Nortel), itself a fragment of Western Electric that had broken away when a 1950s antitrust case led to a settlement agreement that WE would divest its foreign operations. On top of the Carterfone decision and divestiture making consumer telephones a competitive market, WE found its business seriously undermined. The 1980s saw closure of many of WE's largest plants, Nassau not excepted. The White Metals complex at Nassau continued longer, shutting down in 1991 with demolition starting in 1996. The last manufacturing operations at AT&T Nassau Metals, by then limited only to electroplating, ended in 2001. Nassau had actually outlived its parent, WE, which was renamed to Lucent Technologies and made independent in 1996. By that time, AT&T Nassau Metals had been renamed to simply the Nassau Metals Corporation, and existed primarily to manage the closure and remediation of the Tottenville site. All of the original, 1930s-era manufacturing buildings were found south of Mill Creek and had been demolished by 2000. The newer 1960s era buildings, an office building and a warehouse north of Mill Creek, were leased to a developer who found various commercial tenants. Most of the site remained abandoned in its post-demolition state for the next twenty years, though: a formidable environmental recovery was required before reuse. The Nassau Metals site was investigated by the EPA for inclusion on the National Priorities List as a superfund site during the 1990s, but was ultimately not nominated. The main reason was simple: the Potentially Responsible Party was the Nassau Metals Corporation, a subsidiary of AT&T, a company that was still very much alive. With some cajoling by environmental authorities, AT&T agreed to avoid the federal CERCLA process by entering the New York Department of Environmental Conservation's Voluntary Cleanup Program (VCP). Many environmental authorities offer something like the VCP: one of the reasons that contaminated industrial sites, often called brownfields, tend to stay that way is the uncertainty and liability involved in environmental contamination. Real estate developers are understandably hesitant to commit to a property that may require an enormously expensive remediation in the future. The VCP provides an alternative: when a company participates in the VCP, they develop a comprehensive plan for site remediation—at their expense—that is mutually agreed with and supervised by the Department of Environmental Conservation. In exchange for the land owner completing the approved remediation plan, the Department of Environmental Conservation makes a binding agreement not to impose further requirements in the future. In other words, it's a legal arrangement to settle on what level of cleanup is "good enough," so that future owners of the property are protected from expensive surprises. For remediation purposes, the Nassau site was divided into three Operable Units. The largest, OU1, includes the primary industrial area where both the Red Metals and White Metals facilities had been located. From a 1991 Site Investigation Report to the 2011 Final Engineering Report, remediation contractors identified extensive contamination of the soil throughout the site, and downstream on Mill Creek, with lead and other heavy metals. It was found, for example, that a substantial portion of OU1 was built on artificial infill of a former wetland. The fill material, in line with standard practice in the 1930s, is best described as "assorted trash." Everything from construction debris to domestic garbage to old telephones had been piled up and compacted, and then factory buildings put on top of it all. Every time there was a storm, Mill Creek surged against its south bank and washed some of it away, downstream, into Arthur Kill. Particulate contamination from these materials could be identified out into the ocean. During the 2000s, contractors dredged Mill Creek and parts of Arthur Kill, temporarily dammed Mill Creek to facilitate further excavation, stabilized the banks of Mill Creek by geotechnical methods, developed new wetland areas on other parts of Arthur Kill at a 3:1 ratio to the area permanently disturbed by the site, replanted vegetation, and cleaned out storm sewers that had been contaminated by runoff from Nassau. These were all secondary efforts, though, in comparison to the largest remediation activity. The majority of the site, on both sides of Mill Creek, were covered with an engineered barrier of soil, stone, geosynthetic clay liner, and asphalt, intended to ensure that the contaminated soil will remain on site. It is simply too large of a volume to practically be removed, and even if it was, the degree of the contamination is so severe that it would be difficult to find a facility licensed to dispose of it. We tend to think of nuclear waste in the most severe terms, a contaminant that we can never be rid of, pretending that this is somehow an unusual outcome. The reality is much worse: permanent on-site entombment is one of the most common fates of industrial contamination, and there are tens of thousands of sites across the United States in which it is forbidden to dig. Nassau is one of those. Nassau Metals no longer owns the land, it has all been sold to private developers. On the north side, where the office building and warehouse remain (now a restaurant and a complex of fitness facilities respectively), the parking lot and foundation slabs of two new fast food restaurants make up the permanent barrier. Whenever any paving or concrete work is required, a qualified environmental engineer must be on-site to supervise the work and ensure that the integrity of the barrier is maintained. On the south side of the property, which was unpaved, the clay barrier must remain in place under the new construction or a new barrier must be approved by the Department of Environmental Conservation. No digging can be done without arranging for disposal of the disturbed soil at a licensed facility. Covenants on the property require that these institutional controls be observed in perpetuity: the owner of the property shall prohibit the Property from ever being used for purposes other than for Commercial or Industrial use without the express written waiver of such prohibition from the Department Because of the particular standards to which the site was remediated, it is considered suitable only for limited occupation within the context of the institutional controls. Healthcare facilities, elder care homes, child care facilities, agriculture or gardening of any kind (even at hobby scale), and residential construction are all perpetually prohibited. The groundwater cannot be used without construction of a treatment facility approved by the state. The barrier system containing the contaminated soil must be inspected and recertified by engineers on a regular basis. This, then, is the story of Western Electric—it calls for many things and many activities, blended together, to create the miracle of telephonic communications. It takes people and equipment, inventiveness and technical skill. It takes experience, and, above all, the fundamental desire to be of service to the public and the nation. (Q2) For some 75 years, AT&T was the telephone company, and Western Electric made the telephones. It destroyed them, as well: every phone inspected, tested, and if found wanting, condemned to the furnaces of Nassau. Telephone wires stretched across the nation by 1915; and by 1984 that very same wire had likely been cut, stripped, melted, and refined on Staten Island; quite possibly, it had even been returned to Western Electric, just a few molecules in each of the 35,000 telephones rolling off the line of the Indianapolis Works. Likely also, a few molecules of the soil permanently interred under Premiere Pickleball of Staten Island, a few molecules on the banks of Mill Creek, a few molecules of the ocean. Metal is highly recyclable; it's sometimes estimated that the majority of the copper ever mined is still in use today. Much of that metal passed through Nassau at some point, there might be a bit of a Western Electric 500 in your smartphone today. There certainly is under the YoYo Chicken: a tombstone for the telephone era.

The submarine is a surprisingly ancient technology—at least in its early, primitive forms. The idea is quite simple, that a well-enough-sealed boat ought to be able to submerge and resurface. It's the practicalities that make the whole thing difficult. It is generally considered that the US Civil War was the first use of submarines in combat; these were primitive machines with very limited operating endurance and navigational capabilities. These submarines were more like torpedoes: you pointed them in the right direction and hoped they went straight. The First World War benefited from tremendous advances in submarine technology. A number of experimental designs during the 19th century had built practical experience, especially in Germany, and the Germans apt use of the first modern "U-boats" had a significant military impact. British and US designs made similar advances, and submarine warfare was born. The chief advantage of the submarine is its ability to submerge and maneuver while hidden. WW1 submarines were diesel-electric or gasoline, so their submerged endurance was limited by the power supply stored onboard. Still, these submarines could operate underwater longer than any before, long enough to establish the submarine sneak attack as a key part of naval warfare. It was also long enough to expose one of the trickiest challenges of underwater defense: communications. Water, especially seawater, is dense and conductive. This is very bad for radio wave propagation: by the first world war it had already been discovered that seawater effectively blocked radio communications. HF radio, the main form of communications at sea (and, in the WW1 era, in general) might only penetrate seawater for a few meters in real-world That meant that submarines had to surface in order to communicate, another de facto limitation on their endurance while submerged. The Navy had been evaluating electronic communication aboard ships since 1887, when they demonstrated a simple and "radio-adjacent" technology using conduction of waves through the seawater itself. This scheme never worked very well, but was saved by the development of modern wireless transmitters late in that century. Marconi himself demonstrated radio to the Navy in 1899, and in 1903 the Navy bought its first radio sets. Tactical reports from conflicts elsewhere on the globe, like the Russo-Japanese war, reinforced the idea that radio would serve a key role in naval combat. When C-class submarines Stingray and Tarpon, and D-class Narwhal, launched in 1909, they were immediately given duties including the evaluation of radio equipment. In a classic tale of early technology, the evaluations went poorly. Tarpon ran into mechanical trouble that prevented its planned trial voyage, so the radio set was never installed. Stingray received a cutting-edge quenched spark gap transmitter and receiver set, but the transmitter turned out to be DOA. Still, Stingray was able to demonstrate its receivers, copying a message from the nearby Boston Navy Yard while surfaced. Narwhal's mission was more ambitious: underwater communication. A test was made on the same direct conduction technology, using brass plates suspended below the ships, demonstrated in 1887. It similarly failed to perform. A repetition of those experiments, done the next year and with improved equipment aboard Narwhal's sister ship Grayling, produced better results. The system provided reliable communications with the "antenna" plates submerged as much as two feet below the water... and no deeper. Frustrated Navy engineers concluded that it was possible to get radio signals through seawater, but not practical. Through the First World War and following decades, engineers focused on ways to get the antenna to the surface without having to bring up the entire submarine. Around 1915, the Navy adopted a floating antenna buoy that a submarine could "winch up" towards the surface on a cable. Putting anything at the surface was less than ideal, but the anti-submarine technology of the era the small antenna buoy was still very difficult to detect at long range. Submarines just had to make sure it was retracted back to the submarine's deck before attempting anything where stealth was key. These floating buoys were not reliable during WW1, but they could work, and the technology has continued to develop to this day. Still, there were other ideas about underwater communications. The most important development came from two engineers of the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), or at least, that's what a court ruled after a patent dispute between two sets of supposed inventors. John Willoughby was employed by the NBS, which would later be known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to investigate new types of radio receivers. In the summer of 1917, he was arranging various types of coil antennas at a receiver test site on the Chesapeake Bay when he accidentally dropped one of the antennas into the water. Strangely enough, the radio receiver connected to the antenna continued to provide good reception even as it sank into the bay. NBS management was not especially enthusiastic about this accident, but Willoughby was. He knew that the Navy was investigating means of communication with submarines, and that seawater seemed to block radio waves, all of which suggested that he might have stumbled on an important discovery. Lacking NBS support for further research, he took the idea to gifted radio inventor and NBS colleague Percival Lowell 1. In a fine tradition of innovation, the two took to Willoughby's basement for a series of experiments that illuminated the underlying phenomenon: Willoughby had been experimenting with unusually low radio frequencies, below 30kHz where wavelengths become too long for most antenna designs and coils become the best receivers. These lower frequencies were significantly less affected by water than higher, more conventional frequencies, and Willoughby and Lowell built a successful prototype for what they called "long-wave" radio between two coils. The NBS remained surprisingly uninterested, but Willoughby had a contact in the Navy who felt quite differently. In 1918, Willoughby and Percival joined LtCmd H. P. LeClair, then running the Navy's experimental radio program, at submarine base New London (so named after New London, Connecticut, across the Thames River (Connecticut) from the base). They made a hurried and rough installation of their equipment on submarine D-1 and a surface support vessel. Not everything went perfectly, but they proved the idea: Willoughby, Lowell, and LeClair listened attentively to their radio sets as the D-1 submerged and continued to come in loud and clear. Within a matter of a few years, the Navy accepted long-wave radio as a standard technology for submarine communications. The various jury-rigged installations at New London showed that coil antennas could easily be integrated into a submarine's rigging, and even better, the Navy had found that long-wave radio propagated over the surface as well as under it. Long-wave communications would serve the entire Navy, and a transmitter site was already underway. Long-range communications had become a top concern throughout the military in the early 20th century, and a series of meetings between US military branches and between the US and UK lead to a scheme of "High Power" radio stations. The first of these, NAA, went up near Arlington, Virginia in 1913. Over the following years, similar stations were built in the US and Europe, facilitating the first direct communications between the two and the first transatlantic voice communication in 1915. The construction and operation of these stations also lead to considerable advances in radio technology generally, especially powerful transmitters. NAA was one of the early stations to be equipped with Poulson arc transmitters, almost two times more efficient than earlier designs and well-suited to long-wave operation. Around the same time as the Willoughby/Lowell experiments, Navy engineer LtCdr Albert Taylor found similar results with long-wire antennas shallowly under the water. These experiments offered another design for concealed submarine antennas (which could be stored onboard in reels and let out with floats that kept them just under the surface), and also demonstrated that long-wire antennas could be buried for transmit use. Five years later, in 1918, construction was underway on NSS—a new high power station in Annapolis, Maryland. Unlike those before, NSS was specifically designed for long-wave signals. Two 500 kW Poulson arc transmitters driving an antenna 400' square and suspended between four 500' tall towers 2. The long-wave capability at Annapolis was not originally intended for submarine communications, but it quickly fell into that niche. During the 1920s, NSS became a key station for submarine command and control of submarines. NSS itself remained in service until 1996, and it was joined by VLF transmitters at Cutler, Maine; Jim Creek, Washington; Lualualei, Hawaii; LaMoure, North Dakota; and Aguada, Puerto Rico; besides sites in Europe operated with allied militaries. Each of these stations is its own interesting story. The 1,205' VLF antenna tower at Aguada remains the tallest structure in the Caribbean. LaMoure was originally built in the 1960s for a long-wave navigation system called Omega, and was repurposed for submarine C2. Jim Creek went into service in 1952 as the most powerful radio transmitter in the world, using a fascinating antenna that draped from one ridge to another across a mountain valley. Let's focus, though, on Cutler. VLF Transmitter Cutler is the spiritual descendant of the Navy's original High Power program, symbolized in its inheritance of the callsign NAA. Cutler was part of a Cold War expansion of the VLF system, going into service in 1961. Many other VLF sites received upgrades around the same period, but Cutler was a completely new design. Cutler's two antennas, for redundancy, are each supported by 13 towers. The center tower is about 1,000' tall, and the other 12 make up two concentric rings of about 900' height. The complete antenna is over 6,000' across, or nearly 2 km. Between the tower tops stretches a web of tight horizontal wires, each 1" copper, that form an enormous capacitor. The capacitor's other plate is the ground, electrically reinforced by many miles of buried groundplane wires. The radiating elements are vertical wires, hanging down from the upper horizontal mesh. In Maine's harsh winters, the wires accumulate ice until their weight threatens the towers. Each antenna is alternately switched into a deicing mode in which it is turned into a 3 MW heating element... just for long enough that the ice melts off. Outer towers are supplemented by short, stout structures that allow the 220 ton tension weights to move up and down on tracks. "Helix houses" at the feedlines of the two antennas sheltered enormous inductors; walls lined with copper served as insulation and to ground the occasional arcs that made the helix houses and transmitter rooms unsafe to enter during operation. The two antennas were driven by a transmitter complex designed and built by Continental Electronics. The 11 MW on-site power plant supplied the AN/FRT-31 transmitter, custom to this installation, consisting of four parallel units of eight ML-6697 transmitter tubes. The transmitter's control room rivaled that of many power plants, as did its output: the military required at least 1 MW, Continental rated the transmitter for just over 2 MW, and it still operates today at powers as high as 1.8 MW. There are several reasons that the "most powerful radio station in the world" is now difficult to pin down, but NAA Cutler is certainly in the running. That is the end of the VLF story, in that it hasn't ended. The original 1910s and 1920s VLF sites are mostly decommissioned, but only because they have been replaced by more modern equipment, sometimes on the same site. Cutler, Jim Creek, Lualualei, and Aguada are all still in service. LaMoure may be in some kind of mothballs state but is definitely capable of operating, it has recently seen some use for propagation experiments. VLF is still a key technology in the Navy's C2 and nuclear reprisal plans. So, we can say that VLF has achieved one of the great feats of technical history: it has outlived its replacement. First, though, we should spend some more time on the theory. In modern parlance, "VLF" describes the band from 3-30 kHz. Most Naval VLF stations operate at around 24 kHz, but some stations support lower frequencies as well and other stations have operated as high as 40 kHz (still considered VLF by the Navy for practical purposes). These wavelengths pass through seawater well because of a basic trait of radio waves that was becoming experimentally apparent in the 1920s and received a thorough theoretical underpinning later. Radio waves attenuate as they pass through materials in proportion to the number of wavelengths in the material. In other words, as a rule of thumb, a radio wave with a 12 m wavelength (~24 MHz) will experience about 1,000 times the attenuation of a signal with a 12,000 m wavelength (~24 kHz). This is true of water or air or any other material, but the attenuation rate in saltwater is so high that the effect is extremely apparent in the sea. This brings us to our first property of VLF: because of the long wavelength of VLF signals, they pass through water with relatively little attenuation. Still, there is a limit. The details of submarine communications are mostly classified, but from open materials it is realistic for a submarine to receive a VLF transmission up to about 100' below the surface. This depth is already far better than what's achievable with HF, and far superior to deploying a floating buoy. Still, intuition dictates that even lower frequencies could be even better, and the Navy did not go without noticing that possibility. Second, we should revisit the antennas. One of the key insights of early experimenters like Willoughby and Lowell is that coil antennas create an asymmetry in radio communications. Antennas become more efficient as they reach the wavelength of the signal, or multiples thereof. That means that lower frequencies, and longer wavelengths, require larger antennas—thus the 6,000' wide cobwebs at Cutler and more than one regional height record set by VLF antenna towers. On the other hand, coil antennas, or more specifically magnetic loop antennas, can be very small compared to the wavelength they receive. Unfortunately, the physics trick that makes magnetic loop antennas work so well (magnetic coupling) is basically one-way. Magnetic loop antennas are relatively inefficient but usable for reception; they're completely useless for transmitting. VLF is effectively a one-way technology, and some of the traffic carried by the Navy's VLF network consists simply of orders for submarines to surface or deploy a buoy for more advanced communications. Finally, we should observe that the capacity of a radio channel to carry information is proportional to its bandwidth, and that the use of lower frequencies and longer wavelengths makes the usable bandwidth of given radio equipment much smaller (we can intuitively understand this by noting that larger antennas are, simply due to scaling, more precisely tuned to their intended wavelength than smaller antennas). VLF transmitters are only capable of very narrow transmissions, functionally limiting them to continuous wave (Morse code) operation or simple digital schemes at very low speeds. We probably all realize, as did the Navy, that pushing to yet lower frequencies and longer wavelengths would produce better penetration of the seawater, at the cost of basically every other property becoming worse: larger antennas, less efficient transmitters and receivers, narrower bandwidths. The possibility of going even further—from Very Low Frequency to Extremely* Low Frequency—was just a solution in wait of a problem. The military had a lot of those, and the Cold War was one huge problem. The idea of a nuclear-powered submarine is almost as old as the nuclear program, and a collaboration between the Navy, the Atomic Energy Commission, and famed admiral Hyman Rickover lead to the 1951 launch of nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus. The next decade gave the Electric Boat Company new meaning, as nuclear propulsion displaced diesel in the US submarine fleet and fundamentally changed the strategy of submarine warfare. Nuclear submarines, unlike those using diesel-electric or gasoline propulsion, can be set up to remain submerged almost indefinitely. The reactor does not require air, and provides plentiful power for life support equipment that mitigates the fresh air requirement for everything else. This created a generational change: by some definitions, all pre-nuclear submarines were merely submersibles, ships designed to submerge only temporarily. The nuclear submarine was a new kind of creature, one that not only visited the depths but could live there. Add in the development of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), which enabled a submarine to direct nuclear weapons at targets on shore with shorter travel time than any other means of delivery. Every submarine became a portable missile silo, one that could not only hide but actively evade detection. Their ideal mission was to lurk, undetected, for extended periods of time. Of course, this new potential for submarines further stressed communications infrastructure. A nuclear submarine might spend weeks submerged in water that is ostensibly controlled by another nation, making stealth critical. Such a submarine doesn't want to remain close to the surface, which makes detection by all means easier, and also doesn't want to deploy floating buoys or antennas that are easily detected by modern radar. On the other hand, for it to have any value as a nuclear deterrent, the Navy needs some way to deliver a launch order without having to wait for the next duty rotation. The military spent the early Cold War developing a dozen different systems for survivable delivery of nuclear war orders, things like the High Frequency Global Communications System (HFGCS) and TACAMO that solidified the concept of short, simple, one-way Emergency Action Messages to direct nuclear forces. The Navy needed a way to deliver EAMs to submerged submarines, and that provided the impetus to investigate lower frequencies than ever before. The lowest generally recognized radio band, ITU band 1, is Extremely Low Frequency or ELF. There is some historic complexity around the definition of ELF, and the modern range of 3-30 Hz does not exactly match the way the Navy has used the term. In general, though, we can consider ELF to refer to the very bottom end of the usable radio spectrum. The extreme lower edge could be said to fall around 7 Hz, where the wavelength of a radio signal matches the circumference of the earth. This leads not only to complex interference problems due to constructive and destructive interactions, it also produces a very high noise floor as global lightning storms trigger perturbances that resonate on and on. Balancing the desire for the lowest possible frequency against the practical challenges of ELF, the Navy settled on the range of 72-80 Hz as the most promising window for submerged submarines. The history of Naval ELF development is not simple to research. First, the Navy conducted much of its ELF research in secrecy, a result of typical Cold War paranoia and an awareness that the Soviet Union was pursuing a similar idea. Second, much like GWEN, ELF became the locus of fervent public opposition grounded in general anti-war sentiment, demands for nuclear disarmament, and the safety of electromagnetic radiation. Many of the readily available sources on ELF history today come from "electrosensitive" advocates or newsletters, a still-strong movement founded on the mostly unscientific premise that EM fields pose a danger to human health. While mostly factually accurate, these sources require some caution since they tend to mix their historical narrative with observations about EM and RF safety that are now broadly considered pseudoscientific. Still, this frustration leads to two positive outcomes: first, it helps to place the development of ELF radio within a broader cultural context of uncertainty about both war and new technology, emphasizes the unknowns involved in the push to ELF, and makes the ELF stations an interesting focus of the anti-war movement. Second, it leads to a personal connection that likely contributed a great deal to my interest in military communications. There are rumors, even scant evidence, that the Navy initiated classified experiments with ELF in the late 1950s. There is very little that I can say about this first part of ELF history, besides that the experiments must have had promising results. In 1968, the Navy adopted a full-scale ELF communications plan called Project Sanguine. The original Sanguine proposal was truly an artifact of the Cold War, remarkable in its scale and doomed to obsolescence before construction even began. The Sanguine ELF station would actually be over one hundred independent transmitting stations, operating in synchronization as a form of hardening. The loss of a subset of those stations, say due to nuclear attack, would only reduce power rather than disabling the entire facility. Of course, to maximize survivability of the individual transmitters, they would all be installed in hardened underground bunkers, each with a set of 2" antenna cables extending 40 or more miles in four directions. The overall layout of stations and antennas created a grid with antenna elements spaced every 3-5 miles, covering a total of some 6,500 square miles. That's larger than Connecticut, but smaller than New Jersey. Perhaps more apropos, it is about 1/10 the area of Wisconsin, the state where the Navy planned to install the system 3. This underscores a fundamental problem with ELF: antenna sizes. At 80 Hz, the wavelength of a radio wave is 2,300 miles, or about one quarter of the diameter of the earth. Take, for example, a half-wave dipole antenna—a very common antenna design in most bands. For ELF, the antenna would need to stretch from Albuquerque to Portland. Clearly, then, any practical ELF antenna needs to be "electrically short" or, in the relative sense of RF engineering, a small antenna. Small antennas are inefficient, and the smaller they get the less efficient they are. Complicating things further, practical ELF propagation over the surface of the earth requires vertically polarized waves. That means a vertically polarized antenna, and there is simply no way to construct a tower that is hundreds of miles tall. Sanguine proposed, and most later ELF projects adopted, a style of antenna called a ground dipole. A ground dipole is basically two different electrodes, or grounding rods, driven into the ground a great distance apart and connected by feedlines. The power from the transmitter goes through the electrodes into the ground, where it flows as ground current from one end of the antenna to the other. The ground dipole thus forms a loop, with the feedlines as one side and the ground as the other. The actual RF emission results from the magnetic field between the feedlines above ground and the current flowing beneath, somewhat like the VLF antenna at Annapolis if half of it was buried beneath the ground. Ground dipoles, like a typical dipole antenna, are directional. They emit RF most strongly in the same axis as the antenna, with strong lobes extending away from the ends of the two feedlines. By installing a second antenna on a perpendicular axis and shifting the phase between the two, you can create a steerable antenna with its strongest lobes pointed in the direction of your choice. That's why the Sanguine proposal, and most ELF transmitters after, have used two ground dipoles in a crosswise layout. I put a lot of time into writing this, and I hope that you enjoy reading it. If you can spare a few dollars, consider supporting me on ko-fi. You'll receive an occasional extra, subscribers-only post, and defray the costs of providing artisanal, hand-built world wide web directly from Albuquerque, New Mexico. During the 1960s, the Navy performed a series of poorly documented experiments to establish the feasibility of Sanguine. These included a Wyoming power transmission line that was temporarily disconnected for use as an ad-hoc 40 mile antenna, and a power-line-like 110 mile antenna built by RCA in North Carolina and Virginia. The details of this RCA experiment, part of Project Pangloss, have become obscure. It appears that RCA was contracted to evaluate a number of different communications options for the Navy, including the use of other planets in the solar system as passive repeaters, but most of them didn't work out. The VLF transmitter for the project was located at Ararat, North Carolina, and the two two electrodes at Algoma, Virginia and Lake Lookout, North Carolina. A 1963 test successfully got a message from the test antenna to a submarine submerged 150' deep and 520 miles from the transmitter. Like most of the military's ambitious plans in the late 1960s, Project Sanguine didn't happen. The reasons are complex, or at least several. Sanguine was unpopular with the public: besides specific concerns around safety, the late '60s saw a rising anti-nuclear campaign and a general lack of interest in enormously expensive military undertakings. The fact that Sanguine needed a massive amount of land meant that it was pretty much impossible to site it somewhere that wouldn't generate local opposition, so like ICBM fields, Sanguine was kicked around like a football. Originally planned for Wisconsin, it later shifted to Texas, and Texas didn't like it that much either (although by that point the antenna field had been downsized to just 1,600 to 3,200 square miles). And, of course, the technology was struggling to keep up with the threat landscape. The hardened design of Sanguine relied mostly on the idea that the Soviet Union couldn't possibly nuke most of the transmitters distributed over 6,500 square miles, a reassurance that the development of multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs) seriously undermined. As public opposition formed, a health and safety review commissioned by the Navy resulted in a noncommittal report that did little to reassure the public (and lawmakers) that the plan was safe. Last of all, but certainly not least, the budget projections for Sanguine were formidable, and Congress did not have the appetite for the spending. Sanguine made it far enough that, during 1968, the Navy and RCA built a scaled down transmitter and antenna in the Chequamegon National Forest of Wisconsin. This came to be known as the Wisconsin Test Facility, and it was used as a transmitter for a series of jamming tests in the late '60s and early '70s. During this period, the Navy also considered the use of a BPA transmission line from The Dalles, Oregon to Los Angeles as an ELF transmitter—the plan being to actually modulate messages onto the 60 Hz AC power carried by the line, which was incidentally radiated due to the line's largely straight 850 mile span. This plan was called PISCES, and it is unclear if it ever went anywhere, although an interesting rumor holds that it was operational for a short period and used as the "jammer" transmitter for jamming susceptibility testing of the Wisconsin transmitter. The results of these tests were mostly positive, but that wasn't enough to save an unpopular plan. Sanguine faded away, perhaps replaced by a scaled-down system called Super Hard ELF or SHELF. There is very little information on SHELF today. The idea seems to have been to install an ELF antenna in deep underground shafts (potentially over a mile below the surface) using hard-rock mining techniques. Work on SHELF apparently continued through the 1970s, but it probably never got beyond the feasibility stage. Instead, the Navy shifted its focus to Project Seafarer. Seafarer was clearly a direct descendant of Sanguine, but addressed many of its biggest problems through a stripped down design. Seafarer transmitters, for example, would be located in surface buildings instead of underground. Still, the same basic antenna design remained, a grid on 3.5 mile spacing requiring about 4,700 square miles. The Nevada Test Site was considered as a location, as was White Sands Missile Range and forestland in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Michigan was ultimately selected, a result of favorable ground conditions and the lack of frequent large explosions. Seafarer construction was expected to begin in 1977, but instead it ended. The governor of Michigan shot the idea down, Congress didn't like it all that much, and President Carter signed the order ending work on not only Seafarer but ELF in general. In 1977, after roughly two decades of R&D work across multiple experimental sites, the ELF Program was in mothballs. The Navy was not so easily dissuaded. Later in 1977, they proposed "Austere ELF," a plan to throw together an ELF transmit site more or less from spare parts. A transmitter at Sawyer AFB in Michigan's Upper Peninsula would feed 32, 45, and 53-mile-long antenna elements, and via a leased telephone line the AFB would also control the inactive Wisconsin Test Facility transmitter. Even this basic, partially spare parts plan fell afoul of the public and congress. It failed to address most of the original health and environmental concerns, and still cost too much. Serious resumption of the ELF program would have to wait for President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a fan of big, expensive, technically sophisticated solutions to Cold War programs, and ELF sure was one of those. Reagan approved "Project ELF," itself a scaled down version of Austere ELF. Project ELF used the existing Wisconsin Test Facility, supplemented by an identical 56-mile antenna in Michigan's Escanaba State Forest. Both would be operated by Sawyer AFB. The Wisconsin Test Facility from Project Sanguine, after 20 years, came to be known as Navy Radio Transmitter Clam Lake: the first operational ELF transmitter. The Michigan site, known as Navy Radio Transmitter Republic, quickly joined it. It's amusing that a temporary test facility ultimately became the final product, but the Navy had already invested a huge amount of effort in the Wisconsin transmitter. Everything from the strength of the EM field produced by the transmitter to its location in a National Forest had posed complications. Although Sanguine was intended as a hardened, underground system, burying antennas was a lot of work and the Wisconsin Test Facility had originally been temporary. Instead of buried cables, it used 1/2" aluminum wires strung above ground on utility poles for the two antennas. The voltages on the antenna wires required isolation from the surrounding environment, so as with power lines, trees were cleared to make a right of way for the antenna cables. The Forest Service, concerned about aesthetic impact on the forest's recreational areas, required that the antenna routes avoid some parts of the forest and take right-angle jogs near roads so that it was not possible to see a considerable distance down the antenna ROW when driving past (which would make the existence of the cleared ROW much more obvious). The transmitter site and antenna ROWs are still clearly visible today. At each of the four ends, about seven miles from the transmitter building, around 10,000 feet of buried copper wire make up the electrode. Trickier were the electrical problems. The ELF antennas could induce a significant potential in parallel electrical lines, and the use of ground return meant a lot of interference on telephone lines. When transmitting, which was ultimately the case 24/7, the 2.6 MW transmitter induced a current of about 300 A in the cables and ground. Understanding these impacts of ELF transmitters was actually one of the original purposes of the Wisconsin Test Facility, and the Navy had built model power and telephone lines parallel to the antenna elements. The ELF system was found to cause problems ranging from flickering light bulbs to phantom telephone ringing, and the Navy installed additional grounding and filtering on public utilities throughout the area at its own expense—even reimbursing the utilities for administrative costs related to customer complaints. Still, the interference problems were not fully solved during the test operations and no doubt contributed to the public's less than enthusiastic support. The former Wisconsin Test Facility, as Clam Lake, became operational in 1985. Its sister site, Republic in Michigan, went online in 1980. Republic was new construction, not an old experimental facility, but for cost and expediency reasons it was a virtually identical design to Clam Lake with above ground wires to buried electrode screens. Because of geographical constraints, the Republic antenna is not in a straightforward cross configuration. Instead, it's more of an "F" shape, electrically equivalent but with the feedlines placed differently. From 1989 on, the two sites operated in synchronization, with their total 2.6 MW operational transmitter power producing a radiated power of about eight watts. Yes, even at 14 miles in length, ELF ground dipoles are extremely inefficient. This remained a key problem with ELF. Early Navy ELF plans, like Project Sanguine, had assumed the use of extremely high transmit powers to produce a usable signal. ELF propagates very well, but at the paltry 8 W achieved by the Project ELF transmitters, practical reception still required extracting the transmitted signal from a noise floor that was just about as loud. That meant reducing the practical bandwidth of the system even further, and thus its speed. Project Sanguine would probably have been able to transmit EAMs directly to submarines; Project ELF was not. Even the compact format of EAMs was too long for a system with an effective symbol rate of about one letter per five minutes, or fifteen minutes to transmit the three-letter code groups used by the Navy. This reduced ELF capability was basically a very fancy pager network. The Navy has not disclosed the details of the scheme, but it's probably something like this: each submarine has a three-letter code group assigned to it. When its ELF receiver detects that specific code group, the submarine crew know that there is a message waiting for them, and they have to move at least close enough to the surface for VLF in order to find out what that message is. The Navy often referred to this as "bell ringing:" ELF messages were like the ringing of a telephone. As a means of supervision, so that submarines knew they were capable of receiving a message, "idle" code groups were transmitted 24/7. For how hard the Navy had fought to build it, Project ELF did not have a long life. The Navy's ELF submarine communications system was conceived around 1958, became operational over 30 years later in 1989, and shut down in 2004 after just 15 years of service. "The Nuclear Register," an anti-nuclear-weapons newsletter, put it like this: "A surprise Navy announcement signaled the end of 36 years of first local, then global, opposition to the Navy's giant transmitter system." ELF overcame formidable political odds. Besides Congress's lack of interest in the expense and federal policy concerns around health and the environment, a statewide ballot referendum in Michigan had attempted to prohibit construction and legislation prohibiting ELF transmitters was perennially introduced in the federal congress. Activist groups opposed to the transmitters staged regular demonstrations and, as Project ELF proceeded despite their objections, protests gave way to civil disobedience. Utility poles supporting the ELF cables were cut on numerous occasions, and the transmitter buildings vandalized. "The Nuclear Register" wrote: Nukewatch said the Navy's closure announcement, while welcome, raises more questions than it answers. The Navy said "improved technologies" and "changing requirements of today's Navy" made ELF obsolete. However, "very-low-frequency (ELF) [sic] alternatives to ELF have been around for 30 years and the 'changing requirements' refer to the end of the cold war that happened 14 years ago," LaForge said. Indeed, it is hard for me to see the undignified closure of the Navy's ELF program as anything other than an admission of failure. The basic technical concept of ELF appears sound, but the transmitters are large, disruptive, and costly to operate. It is not clear that the advantages of ELF, namely the greater depth at which it can be received, outweigh its downsides or compare well to VLF. VLF is still used by the US Navy today. ELF is not: the US has had no ELF capability since the 2004 closure of Clam Lake and Republic. China, India, and Russia are the only other nations to have constructed ELF transmitters. The Russian system, ZEVS, operates at 82 Hz from ground dipole antenna in place since at least the early 1990s. It is a candidate for the most powerful radio transmitter in the world, although the exact specifications have not been made public. India's INS Kattabomman gained an ELF transmitter in the 2010s, and while few details are known, China is believed to have constructed an enormous ELF transmitter in Huazhong during the 2010s. It is, of course, interesting that China and India have both built an ELF capability after the US abandoned the technology. One wonders what made an ELF capability so hard to sustain here, even after the Clam Lake and Republic sites were built. Well, there is an inertia to politics: the organized opposition to ELF, once energized, didn't go away. Area residents and politicians continued to organize for the closure of the Wisconsin and Michigan transmitters until their final days. Opponents of the ELF sites got plenty of help from both science and popular culture. Preliminary research linking ELF radiation to leukemia has not held up to modern scrutiny, but as with broader EM/RF cancer links this is an area of ongoing controversy. Extensive research by the Navy, mostly on the Clam Lake Site, hasn't found evidence of ecological disruption due to the ELF transmitter. Still, there is ongoing controversy, and one of the reasons for Project ELF's long and torturous construction process was a series of lawsuits and appeals under the National Environmental Policy Act, contesting the thoroughness of the environmental research. As usual, these possible connections to health and environmental impacts have given way to conspiracy theories. In the more shadowy corners of the internet, ELF is associated with everything from strange sensations to mind control. And that is where I first became involved. The X-Files episode "Drive" (S06E02) sees Fox Mulder cornered, practically carjacked, by a man who insists that if he does not drive West then his head will explode. The episode aired four years after the release of Speed and no doubt owes inspiration to that film (Mulder even makes a joke about it in the episode), but it attributes the bizarre scenario to a very different cause. The hapless victim, portrayed by Bryan Cranston, gained his head-exploding illness as a result of some sort of military experiment involving long antennas secretly buried beneath his house. Vince Gilligan wrote the episode, and while there were several influences, the final episode is a direct reference to Project ELF and the surrounding controversy. Years later, because of their collaboration on "Drive," Vince Gilligan cast Cranston as the lead in his show Breaking Bad. In the episode, Cranston doesn't make it to the West Coast. Mulder and Scully hatch a plan to puncture his inner ear and relieve the pressure building in his brain somewhere on the California coast, but Mulder just can't drive fast enough. Cranston's head explodes. Over the lifespan of the Project ELF facilities, police issued 636 trespass citations to demonstrators. Congressional representatives introduced legislation and amendments to end the ELF program multiple times. At least a half dozen ELF transmitter concepts were canceled, each one less ambitious than the ones before it. ELF is an interesting technology, but in a way, it's more interesting as a case study in military acquisition. Take a concept that is expensive, politically unpopular, and questionably superior to systems already in service—but if the military wants it, they tend to eventually get it. After thirty years, the military wears resistance down and gets something pushed through. Fifteen years later, the Navy shrugs, calls it obsolete, and shuts it down. What's left is a 14-mile-across "X" in the forests of Wisconsin, a legacy of controversy that still echoes, and a pretty good episode of The X-Files. Unrelated to astronomer Percival Lowell, although there are enough moments of intersection between the two that you wonder if they might have met.↩ Many of the fine details of the original NSS installation have become confused, probably because the Navy upgraded the equipment several times in its first decades and the specifications of different eras have become confused. Here are some notes: some sources give the transmitters as 350 kW, others as 500 kW. A Navy history explains that improvements to the antenna design allowed for raising the power after the site was originally designed, so 500 kW is indeed what was installed but we know where the 350 number came from. Some sources give the original towers as 500' tall and others (including Wikipedia) 600', I think the 500' number is more reliable as it agrees with the Navy history. I am not quite sure where the confusion comes from, though.↩ Some sources, such as Wikipedia, give a number of 22,500 square miles and 2/5 the area of Wisconsin. This was the very top end of a preliminary estimate that was revised down to 6,500 during planning. The 22,500 number still frequently appears, probably just because it's the more absurd figure, which is an example of the challenges of historical research when most information comes from activist groups opposed to the thing you're researching. Of course, we have to temper that criticism with the fact that some anti-Sanguine sources use the 6,500 figure, especially older ones. The shift towards the more attention-grabbing 22,500 might have happened later as Sanguine was discussed more by people without original knowledge of the program.↩