Rehearsal For a Requiem

CCXVI

A Bell System international switchboard, circa 1940

As Earhart and Noonan passed over the port of Gwadar, an enclave on the northern shore of the waterway leading to the Persian Gulf and belonging to the Sultanate of Muscat And Oman, they reentered the world they knew. A rumor that the Electra had been seen overflying the ancient Pirate Coast had broken at least some of the tension that had gripped an aviation-besotted world when Earhart and Noonan had seemingly vanished into the secret heart of Africa.

Their last known certain position had been Khartoum, but they had left before George Putnam had been able to place an international call to the authorities there.  This failure left George fuming.

To make a telephone call in 1937, particularly an international telephone call, and especially a call to Africa, was an exercise in creative frustration. In these days of instantaneous communication it might make sense to consider how quick and efficient our world really is. For example:

Local calls were handled by local operators who manually plugged wires into a switchboard.

To make a long distance call, a local operator had to connect to a separate long-distance switchboard, whose own operator would then connect to switchboards serving the intended city, and then to a local operator on the other end who would connect to the number desired.

The system was entirely manual, it was slow and subject to errors, the quality of the transmissions depended on the quality of the wires and the plugs and of the ultimate number of connections needed to complete the call (the more connections the more degradation of the signal), and it worked surprisingly well, given how crude it was.

International calling was another magnitude of complexity entirely, and involved radiotelephony. A local operator would have to connect to an international switchboard, which in turn connected to a transmission switchboard that then broadcast a radio signal to a receiver that would then in turn pass it on, and then on again. For example, to place a call to Khartoum, George Putnam would have to go through his local New York switchboard, then to a Canadian switchboard*, which would then connect him to an international switchboard that would direct him to a transmitter in order to send a signal via radio to London. London would then pass the signal on, perhaps to Gibraltar or Malta, and thence to Cairo, where it would then be transmitted over land lines to Khartoum.

The resulting call would be most likely be scratchy and faint, and it might echo annoyingly in the line as if the speaker was in a storm drain. There would often be frustrating delays between speaking and responding, and anything from bad weather in Buffalo to hostile tribesmen cutting the lines near Aswan could kill the call. 

Normally, it took hours to arrange such a call because there was little bandwidth available for international calls and everyone had to coordinate the connections across half a world of time zones. International calls were terrifyingly expensive --- in 1928 they cost a minimum of six dollars per minute and the price rose as the signal degraded, both having to do with distance and with the number of intermediate connections. A city the size of Khartoum had a local switchboard and could handle through calls from Cairo, but it was literally the end of the line.

The officials at Khartoum could assure Putnam that Amelia and Fred had looked well, that they had taken tea, and that they were headed for the Horn of Africa, but the men in Khartoum had no way to get word to Amelia in Massawa. As a matter of fact, the only thing the British officials who spoke to George knew was that Amelia’s ultimate destination in this phase of the Worldflight was Karachi, capital of the British Indian province of Sind; the side trip to Assab was a mystery to them.

Even if they’d known of the stop in Assab, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. The Italians used a different network and the two telephone systems had a dyspeptic compatibility at best. True standardization in communications technology would be a 21^st Century invention.

Complicating the communications lag was the fact that Amelia was sloppy with her regular broadcasts. She rarely gave an exact position; she rarely gave a local time. Her fifty-watt radio had a relatively short range except at night, and in order to be heard someone had to be listening, an unlikely event in the wastelands of the Arabian Peninsula.

All this added up to the fact that she and Noonan effectively disappeared from the earth after leaving Khartoum. The three hour flight to Massawa and the brief stop there, added to the approximately 15 hours spent flying to and staying in Assab, and the 13 hours spent transiting Arabia meant that they, as far as the world was concerned, had ceased to exist for about two full days. 

Interest turned to worry and then to morbid curiosity. Stories of the Empty Quarter and of the knife-wielding “wogs” who dwelt there began to appear under gratuitous tabloidlike headlines. Vulturine journalists camped on George’s front steps. George understood. As a publisher and as a former newspaperman himself, he appreciated that Amelia’s fate interested many, even if some of the reporters seemed ghoulish. During those days of mid-June George gave vent to no worries. Later, he was to say that he had absolute faith in Amelia’s flying abilities and that long silences during the transatlantic and transpacific flights (during which he’d been likewise besieged by the Press) had inured him to worry; he knew that Amelia would win through.  

*The Canadian and U.S. telephone systems were essentially unified, and the radiotelephone broadcast towers to Britain stood on Canadian soil, shortening the distance the signal had to travel. International calls were exotic, but even long distance calls were unusual. The first coast-to-coast long distance service was not inaugurated until 1927, and the first coaxial cables were not used until 1937. Telephone technology matured alongside aviation technology.  The first true mobile phones were invented to hasten battlefield communications during World War II. Direct-dial long distance was not introduced until 1951, around the beginning of the Space Age. The first true cell phone, the DynaTAC, more fondly remembered as "The Brick" made its first call in 1973; after refinements it hit the market in 1983. It cost $4,000.00, was a foot long, and provided 30 minutes of talk time --- at about six dollars a minute.