One of my all time favorite scenes in any movie! How one telephone call could cause such an uproar!
shareI'm 46 and we had a "party line" at one point. When we moved away from family for 3 years the long distance phone calls were a big deal. Pretty spendy to make and we weren't allowed to talk very long. These days my son calls his Grandmother on his cell phone and talks to her for 3 hours at a time.
"We accept you, one of us! Gooble Gobble!"
"There will be 'H' to pay, if my family found out I was calling long distance!"
shareI would really love to know how much these famous long distance calls actually did cost!
shareThis site gives you a bit of an idea.
http://www.telcomhistory.org/vm/segment2.html
It states a long distance from Denver to Leadville cost $1 dollar for 5 minutes in 1900. Today's equivalent in dollars would be about $25 to $30. That is quite expensive.
Early service was done by subscription. So Warren probably had to tell the operator to use someone's subscription to make calls. It looked as if he was in a hotel, so he was using the hotel's subscription. After the call, he would pay the desk clerk. Although I couldn't say for sure.
Now, about his family finding out. It depends on how much allowance they send him and how wealthy they are in life.
Maybe 5 dollars (about $150) to last him a semester (5 months?), a lot less if they were thrifty or not wealthy. All of it spent on a long distance call would cause him H to pay. LOL
Telephones had not been around all that long and long-distance calls were even more recent. And, as the previous poster mentioned, they were quite expensive.
To us, telephones and cars and televisions and record (!) players are old hat. They most definitely were not in 1904. Which is why, when watching a movie that takes place in another time period, you really need to adjust your brain to that era to really understand and appreciate it. It amazes me how many people are incapable of doing that - to them, anything that took place more than a year ago is ancient history.
Same here. It's one of my favorite scenes.
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