Before the machine
Before there were answering machines, there were people. Doctors, lawyers, tradesmen and small businesses often hired telephone answering services, in which an operator at a switchboard answered calls for several clients and wrote down messages. The service was staffed and paid by the month. Households with no one at home simply missed their calls.
The idea of a machine that did the same job needed three things: a way to detect a ringing line and answer it, a way to play a recorded greeting, and a way to record the caller’s words. The invention of the answering machine was a gradual combination of those functions rather than a single moment.
Early attempts
The first piece, magnetic recording of sound (later improved into magnetic tape), came in the late 1890s with Valdemar Poulsen’s telegraphone, which recorded onto steel wire, a method later called wire recording. Poulsen himself mentioned the possibility of recording telephone messages. In the early twentieth century, other inventors proposed and patented devices that would answer a telephone automatically, using cylinders, discs or wires to record. Few of these became products, in part because the amplification and recording quality were poor.
In the 1930s, researchers at Bell Laboratories built an experimental machine that recorded messages on steel tape. Accounts say the company did not market it, with worries about customer privacy and the doubtful commercial case mentioned among the reasons. In Europe and elsewhere, several inventors produced prototypes or small production runs in the 1930s and after. Because the claims about “the first” machine vary by source and depend on what counts as an answering machine, it is safer to describe the period as one of repeated experiment.
Rules and equipment
For decades, it was not simple for a customer to attach any device to a telephone line. In many countries the telephone company owned the equipment and controlled what could be connected. In the United States, a 1968 regulatory decision involving the Carterfone, a device that connected a radio telephone to the network, led to rules allowing customers to attach approved equipment. The decision is often considered an important step for the consumer electronics that followed, including modems and answering machines.
Reaching the home
During the 1950s and 1960s, commercial machines existed for business and professional users. They were large and expensive, often sold or leased through special agents. They were a luxury. Smaller portable recorders were appearing at the time, which pointed toward cheaper machines.
In the 1970s, cheaper electronics and the cassette tape allowed smaller machines for homes. By the 1980s, the answering machine was a common household appliance in many countries. A typical machine sat beside the telephone, with a light or counter that showed messages waiting. When the phone rang a set number of times, the machine picked up, played the greeting, sounded a tone and recorded the caller.
The beep and the greeting
The tone, or beep, became a social signal: speak now. Greetings varied from a brief “Please leave a message” to elaborate jokes, music and comic voices. People wrote scripts, and some spent time choosing an appropriate tone for a business or a home.
The machine’s design raised new questions. How long should a message be? Many machines cut off at a set length. How to retrieve messages from away from home? Remote access with a code was added. How to deal with a nuisance caller who left no message? Some people simply stopped replying.
Changing the meaning of a missed call
Before the machine, a missed call was just that. After it, a missed call could be a message. This changed how people used the telephone in several ways.
- Screening. Households could listen as a caller left a message, and pick up if they wanted to speak. The machine gave people more control over interruptions. Caller identification later made this easier.
- Telephone tag. Two people could trade messages for days without speaking, each calling when the other was out. The phrase “telephone tag” became common.
- Business. Small firms could remain reachable outside office hours, and were less dependent on answering services.
- Etiquette. People learned to leave clear messages with a name, number and reason for calling. Some were nervous about speaking to a machine, and the first messages could be awkward.
Some were uneasy about machines and privacy. Whether messages were secure, who could listen, and how long they should be kept were all questions that people discussed.
Decline of the standalone box
The standalone machine had a long run, but was displaced when voicemail services offered by telephone companies stored messages in the network, rather than on a tape in the home. Mobile phones accelerated that change. Today, with voice assistants and phone-based mailboxes, the machines are mainly a historical object or used where a landline remains in service.
Legacy
The answering machine altered ideas about availability. The telephone had once demanded attention at the moment it rang; now it could wait. That small shift prefigured later technologies such as email, text messages and voice messages in apps, where communication is asynchronous by default.