[RVRC] Fw: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

[N2GJ_AMSAT]

It's interesting to recall that, at the NY World's Fair in Flushing
Meadows, AT&T's Pavilion had a "contest" type board where you could compete
against someone who was dialing a conventional number vs. using the Touch
Tone keypad.  A digital timer was used to keep score.  Does anyone else
remember that?

I remember there was also a "Picturephone" booth - as I recall, it was B&W
and fairly grainy....a similar "booth" was "installed" on the set of "2001:
A Space Odyssey."  73,

http://davidszondy.com/future/Living/picturephone.htm


GJ
Gerry Jurrens N2GJ
mailto:n2gj at amsat.org


On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Marvin Bronstein <marvbrons at verizon.net>wrote:

> **
>
>
> *Subject:* John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at
> 94
>
>
>
>   John E. Karlin, 1918-2013
>  John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94
> Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA
> John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the
> telephone easier to use.
> By MARGALIT FOX<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/margalit_fox/index.html> Published:
> February 8, 2013 172 Comments<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-who-led-the-way-to-all-digit-dialing-dies-at-94.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0#commentsContainer>
> A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was
> about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical
> question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long
> enough to dial them?
>   Enlarge This Image
>  Bell Telephone Laboratories
> Experimental model of a touch-tone phone from 1959.
>  Enlarge This Image
>  Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.
> John E. Karlin in 1965.
>
>  And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new
> questions arose: round buttons, or square? How big should they be? Most
> crucially, how should they be arrayed? In a circle? A rectangle? An arc?
>
> For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of
> social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs
> industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.
>
> By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he
> had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical
> engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on
> Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.
> But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet
> emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th
> century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the
> shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones. And that keypad, in turn, would
> inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.
>
> It is not so much that Mr. Karlin trained midcentury Americans how to use
> the telephone. It is, rather, that by studying the psychological
> capabilities and limitations of ordinary people, he trained the telephone,
> then a rapidly proliferating but still fairly novel technology, to assume
> optimal form for use by midcentury Americans.
>
> “He was the one who introduced the notion that behavioral sciences could
> answer some questions about telephone design,” Ed Israelski, an engineer
> who worked under Mr. Karlin at Bell Labs in the 1970s, said in a telephone
> interview on Wednesday.
>
> In 2013, the 50th anniversary of the introduction of the touch-tone phone,
> the answers to those questions remain palpable at the press of a button.
> The rectangular design of the keypad, the shape of its buttons and the
> position of the numbers — with “1-2-3” on the top row instead of the
> bottom, as on a calculator<http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/denisnata/denisnata1011/denisnata101100079/8280436-big-black-calculator--keypad-background.jpg>— all sprang from empirical research conducted or overseen by Mr. Karlin.
> The legacy of that research now extends far beyond the telephone: the
> keypad design Mr. Karlin shepherded into being has become the international
> standard on objects as diverse as A.T.M.’s, gas pumps, door locks, vending
> machines and medical equipment.
> Mr. Karlin, associated from 1945 until his retirement in 1977 with Bell
> Labs, headquartered in Murray Hill, N.J., was widely considered the father
> of human-factors engineering in American industry.
>
> A branch of industrial psychology that combines experimentation,
> engineering and product design, human-factors engineering is concerned with
> easing the awkward, often ill-considered marriage between man and machine.
> In seeking to design and improve technology based on what its users are
> mentally capable of, the discipline is the cognitive counterpart of
> ergonomics.
>
> “Human-factors studies are different from market research and other kinds
> of studies in that we observe people’s behavior and record it,
> systematically and without bias,” Mr. Israelski said. “The hallmark of
> human-factors studies is they involve the actual observation of people
> doing things.”
> Among the issues Mr. Karlin examined as the head of Bell Labs’ Human
> Factors Engineering department — the first department of its kind at an
> American company — were the optimal length for a phone cord (a study that
> involved gentle, successful sabotage) and the means by which rotary calls
> could be made efficiently after the numbers were moved from inside the
> finger holes<http://img2.etsystatic.com/004/0/6620830/il_fullxfull.366687750_ermg.jpg>,
> where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the
> dial <http://www.rotarydialphones.com/red_phone.jpg>.
> John Elias Karlin was born in Johannesburg on Feb. 28, 1918, and reared
> nearby in Germiston, where his parents owned a grocery store and tearoom.
> He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a
> master’s degree in psychology, both from the University of Cape Town.
> Throughout his studies he was a violinist in the Cape Town Symphony
> Orchestra and the Cape Town String Quartet.
>
> Moving to the United States, Mr. Karlin earned a Ph.D. from the University
> of Chicago in 1942. Afterward, he became a research associate at Harvard;
> he also studied electrical engineering there and at the Massachusetts
> Institute of Technology.
> At Harvard, Mr. Karlin did research for the United States military on
> problems in psychoacoustics that were vital to the war effort — studying
> the ways, for instance, in which a bomber’s engine noise might distract its
> crew from their duties.
> In 1945 he joined Bell Labs, then the jointly owned research and
> development arm of the American Telephone & Telegraph and Western Electric
> Companies. (It is now owned by Alcatel-Lucent.) The first research
> psychologist on the labs’ staff, Mr. Karlin spent his early years there
> working on problems in telephone acoustics.
>
> Before long, he later said, he realized that the dynamics of using a
> telephone involved far more than speaking and hearing. In 1947 he persuaded
> Bell Labs to create a unit, originally called the User Preference
> department and later Human Factors Engineering, to study these larger
> questions; Mr. Karlin became its head in 1951.
>
> An early experiment involved the telephone cord. In the postwar years, the
> copper used inside the cords remained scarce. Telephone company executives
> wondered whether the standard cord, then about three feet long, might be
> shortened. Mr. Karlin’s staff stole into colleagues’ offices every three
> days and covertly shortened their phone cords, an inch at time. No one
> noticed, they found, until the cords had lost an entire foot.
> From then on, phones came with shorter cords.
>
> Mr. Karlin also introduced the white dot<http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/black-rotary-phone.jpg>inside each finger hole that was a fixture of rotary phones in later years.
> After the phone was redesigned at midcentury, with the letters and numbers
> moved outside the finger holes, users, to AT&T’s bewilderment, could no
> longer dial as quickly.
> With blank space at the center of the holes, Mr. Karlin found, callers no
> longer had a target at which to aim their fingers. The dot restored the
> speed.
> Mr. Karlin’s biggest challenge was almost certainly the advent of the
> push-button phone<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5t5na44D0Dw>,
> officially introduced on Nov. 18, 1963, in two Pennsylvania communities,
> Carnegie and Greensburg.
>
> In 1946, a Bell Labs engineer, Rudolph F. Mallina, had patented an early
> model, with buttons arranged in two horizontal rows<http://www.google.com/patents?id=MmxUAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=2,394,926&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false>:
> 1 through 5 on top, 6 through 0 below. It was never marketed.
>
> By the late 1950s, when touch-tone dialing — much faster than rotary —
> seemed an inevitability, Mr. Karlin’s group began to study what form the
> phone of the future should take. Keypad configurations examined included
> Mr. Mallina’s, one with buttons in a circle, another with buttons in an
> arc, and a rectangular pad.
>
> The victorious design, based on the group’s studies of speed, accuracy and
> users’ own preferences, used keys half an inch square. The keypad itself
> was rectangular, comprising 10 keys: a 3-by-3 grid spanning 1 through 9,
> plus zero, centered below. Today’s omnipresent 12-button keypad, with star
> and pound keys flanking the zero, grew directly from this model.
>
> Putting “1-2-3” on the pad’s top row instead of the bottom (the
> configuration used, then as now, on adding machines and calculators) was
> also born of Mr. Karlin’s group: they found it made for more accurate
> dialing.
>
> Mr. Karlin’s first marriage, to Jane Daggett, ended in divorce. Survivors
> include his second wife, the former Susan Leigh, whom he married in 1963; a
> daughter from his first marriage, Bonnie Farber; three stepchildren,
> Christopher, Stuart and Susan Leigh, who confirmed her stepfather’s death,
> at his home in Little Silver, N.J.; six grandchildren; and three
> great-grandchildren. A son from Mr. Karlin’s first marriage, Christopher
> Karlin, died in 1968.
> Throughout his career, Mr. Karlin was happy to work out of the limelight,
> a stance doubtless reinforced by this cautionary tale of all-digit dialing:
> By the postwar period, telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable
> words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache
> of new phone numbers, but whether users could memorize the seven digits it
> entailed was an open question.
>
> Mr. Karlin’s experimental research, reported in the popular press, showed
> that they could. As a result, PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield — the stuff of
> song <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_muFwwTSMs> and story<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2b1UfHDso>— began to slip away. By the 1960s, those exchanges, along with DRexel,
> FLeetwood, SWinburne and scores of others just as evocative, had all but
> disappeared.
>
> This did not please traditionalists, and thanks to the papers they knew
> the culprit’s name.“One day I was at a cocktail party and I saw some people
> over in the corner,” Mr. Karlin recalled in a 2003 lecture. “They were
> obviously looking at me and talking about me. Finally a lady from this
> group came over and said, ‘Are you the John Karlin who is responsible for
> all-number dialing?’ ”
> Mr. Karlin drew himself up with quiet pride.
> “Yes, I am,” he replied.
> “How does it feel,” his inquisitor asked, “to be the most hated man in
> America?”
>    A version of this article appeared in print on February 9, 2013, on
> page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: His Studies of
> Behavior Eased Marriage of Man and Machine.
>
>
>