Home intercoms: Shoddy Goods 104
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Like it or not, it’s Jason Toon back with yet another Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture. I’ve always lived in old houses, and I’ve always loved the odd archaic features left over from earlier eras, like phone nooks, coal chutes, TV antenna cranks, and most of all, home intercoms.
“Dear, come to the kitchen, quickly. Some creep is taking pictures of me.”
Parents of teenagers, you get it. Especially if you’re as lazy as I am. You need to communicate some essential information or ask a crucial question of an adolescent located inconveniently in another room. You call out at a volume you know can be heard from that distance. Silence. They’re holed up with headphones or something. Again.
So, to avoid a laborious trek down the hallway, you (meaning I) pick up your (my) phone and text them. Or call, if it’s really serious. To send a message twenty feet, you bounce it off a cellular tower a mile away. Am I the only one who feels a pang of guilt over the WALL-E-like sloth and decadence of this digital convenience?
20th-century technology once offered another solution to this predicament: the home intercom system. It wasn’t quite as ridiculous - but still a little too ridiculous to really change The Way We Lived.
“Standard equipment in the home of tomorrow”
“A ‘Sound Investment’ for Every Home! A Blessing for a Busy Mother,” says a 1958 brochure for NuTone built-in home intercom systems. “She speaks softly… and yet is heard in every corner of the house.”
For companies like NuTone, hopes were high that the age of intra-home radio had come. The postwar building boom saw more than 1 million new homes built in 1946, climbing to 1.95 million in 1950 and staying well above a million annually thereafter.
Those homes were filling up with modern conveniences, too. In 1941, only 45% of US homes had an electric refrigerator; by 1957, that figure had doubled to 90%. Before the war, only 55% of American homes had complete plumbing (hot and cold running water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet). By 1960, that number would be up to 83%. Telephones, too, spread rapidly after the war: from 45% of homes in 1945 to 75% by 1957.
They don’t make logos like that anymore
Homes were starting to get bigger. The size of the average new home built in 1950 was 983 square feet, while in 1960, it was 1,289 square feet - in other words, the average home grew by 31% through the decade.
The millions of families stretching out in these spacious, modern new homes would need to talk to each other, right? What better way than the friendly old radio? And what better time to build a home intercom system than right along with the rest of the new house?
As a 1953 newspaper story put it, “Many experts say that such systems will be standard equipment in the so-called ‘home of tomorrow’.”
Home Communo-phone Systems
“We feel any new house that costs from $18,000 and up is a potential market,” said L.H. Bogen of the Bogen electronic company in 1953, when that price was about the median for new homes. “The cost of the average installation is not expensive - about $300 (about $3750 today), but the small house owner just wouldn’t have as much need for it.” He said his company had sold 6,000 “home communo-phone systems” over the previous two years.
Another manufacturer that same year said “Mother may not be a broadcaster, but she knows her needs as a homemaker. So the intercom units are designed to fit her needs for simple operation.”
Their design model was radio. These units, set flush into a wall at about head height, had a familiar configuration: mostly speaker, with a set of dials and a switch or two. A bigger base unit, generally shown in the kitchen, connected to smaller “remotes” throughout the house.
While the functionality varied, home intercoms generally allowed two-way communication, or whole-house announcements, or eavesdropping on a particular room, like a baby monitor. Most included AM/FM radio that could be piped throughout the system, so Mother the non-broadcaster could listen from room to room.
The novelty of hearing a familiar voice coming from the “radio”, and the feeling of being in a science fiction future, sparked a wave of excitement over home intercoms. Newspapers ran stories like this one from Arizona, about three neighbors who connected their homes with an intercom system set up by one of their teenage sons. They could chat while each were doing their chores, and mingle in each other’s homes freely while keeping an ear out for the kids.
This ends in either lifelong friendship or a vicious feud
It was practical, it was futuristic, it was kind of fun. So why did home intercoms never really catch on?
“Hated that thing so much”
Statistics are hard to come by, but wired home intercoms never made the leap that TVs and telephones did, from luxury to essential. Anecdotally, they’re remembered mainly as either something only rich people had, or as a little-used, troublesome white elephant. “What a waste of money that was, we never used it,” said one Facebook user.
“We used it as a baby monitor,” said Redditor Xyzzydude. “That required a bunch of switch flipping at the central station to figure out. They weren’t exactly flexible or user friendly… That was the only practical use we got out [of] it in over 40 years.”
“Our intercom system caught fire when I was a teenager,” another Redditor, FireWaterSquaw, said. “My brother and I hated that thing so much. Our parents would abuse it to wake us up for school.”
NuTone mellows out in the leisure suit era
It’s a classic case of “features vs. benefits”. Yeah, home intercoms could do something. But that something just didn’t improve people’s lives enough to be worth the expense and effort of using it. Once the novelty wore off, an expensive, hard-wired, finicky unitasker was a tough sell.
Dedicated home intercom systems lingered for a few decades, gradually made redundant by other devices that were either more multifunctional or simpler. First came portable “wireless” intercoms that plugged into any outlet and carried sound on the home’s electrical wiring. Then, in the 1970s, some phone systems allowed you to dial to other extensions in the same house. The mid-’80s saw the first cordless phones with simple page and intercom functions between handsets, while simple wireless baby monitors made it easy to keep an ear on your kids.
Smart phones and smart speakers would seem to have finished the home intercom off for good. But they also affirm its basic use case, like every time I call my daughter two rooms away. With concern growing about data security, and a mood drift toward simpler “dumb” technology, the time may have come for the dedicated home intercom to make a comeback.
New systems like the Hosmart Ultraspeak and the Wuloo S600 might just be the first of a new generation of unconnected, cloud-free, wireless home intercoms. And you probably don’t need to worry about them catching on fire.
A dutiful wife always matches her pearls to her apron
My childhood home (built in 1973) totally had these intercom systems in every bedroom, though I can’t remember ever using them. Possibly for the crappy radio they had before I got my own. How about you, ever had these in your house or seen them in any others? Have anything quirky installed in your place that future residents will wonder about and/or gripe about having to uninstall? (I’m guessing my ‘smart’ thermostats will not be appreciated in the future.) Let’s hear about 'em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
Tune into these previous Shoddy Goods stories wherever fine infotainment is narrowcasted:
- Porta-Fi: when GE tried to wire your house for sound
- The radio ad blocker that never got manufactured
- The first baby monitor was a work of art, literally
And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!
- 16 comments, 6 replies
- Comment
I grew up in a 1958 house. No intercoms like those, but my father put in the plug-in type. And wired speakers to the kitchen and rec room. I’ve spent the last 40+ years in one of those small early 1950’s houses. No intercoms here - probably because it is too small to need them.
We have this with Alexa’s “drop in” feature!
@fgmart Me too. They can be used as “baby monitors” too.
I think I have some Realistic(?) Radio Shack intercoms in a box … somewhere.
@cfg83 @fgmart
We had those RadioShack intercoms all over the house in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Only way to keep track with the 5 kids on 3 different floors. Just getting them up and dressed for school and down to the dinner table was a primary use. Now my pal Alexa does the same job.
Nope we just shouted up and down the staircase. We did have a laundry chute to the basement though.
In 2000, I bought a home built in 1991, complete with intercom system. Master console in the kitchen, sub-units in seven rooms, of which about three worked. There was a port in the living room to tie in the A/V system- that didn’t work either. We never really used the system at all, and the wiring is the width of sewing thread.
When I was 10 (1964), we visited wealthy friends in Ohio. The next morning, the dad proudly announced, over their modern intercom, that “pancakes are being served in the kitchen!” I thought it was so cool.
Not so much, any more…
@MrNews well, surprise pancakes in any year are still a bonus!
You gave me a new appreciation for the existing ones in my house, where I have lived more than 23 years
I don’t think it had ever registered that the main unit was a full-on radio “sound system.” I think it was late to the party, as the house was built in 1977-78. The main unit is in what I refer to as the sunroom, but it’s in the center of the house. There is also a small unit in the kitchen, one on the patio, one in the living room, and one in each of the two non-main bedrooms. Too bad you can’t upload pics here 
@fondaporn If you use the full editor on desktop or in landscape mode in a mobile browser, you can.
@narfcake Oooohhh, fancy trick! Thanks!! Here is the mother unit I’d never previously looked at like I did today. I’m fairly sure I will have done something wrong by the time I post this, so I reserve the right to delete the errant post
And no that orange is not a holdover from the '70s. I actually chose it!
(Also, the color is kind of muddy in this picture.)
I’m in a house built in 1988 that has the whole-home intercom/am/fm/cassette. There are speakers in each of the three bedrooms and the loft. Last I checked they all still worked.
It was cool to reminisce when I bought the house 5 years ago. Then we painted over them to match the walls.
I worked at a place that had a wired intercom system.
My boss was a tinker (It was a computer store after all) and tried to patch a radio in.
I seem to remember that he got it to work.
Impressive since the intercom didn’t work by the time we moved in.
Friends of mine have a house built in the late 80’s / Early 90’s and it has an intercom system, a fancy one with AM/FM Cassette.
I suspect they use Mr. Toon’s cellular intercom system in stead.
We have cell phones. We text each other within the house fairly frequently.
When I was in my teens, we visited some friends who had moved into a large, lovely new home in an upscale suburban neighborhood. All of the appointments were top tier. Their Mom showed us the very sleek looking (for 1970’s) intercom, which she had wanted so that people wouldn’t be yelling in the (rather large) home. Gadget-loving me thought it was so cool. Until it dawned on me how annoying it would be to have my Mom being able to pipe into my room to announce dinner, call me down to chores, wondering what I was up to, etc, etc.
Probably one of the first times I noted that not all technical advances were good.
In the 80’s, we had a couple of intercoms you plugged into the wall and it used the 110v wires to transmit the signal. Worked great until we found out our neighbor had one and they all could hear everyone.
Never had an intercom system, but we did have a central vacuum cleaning system. Essentially a port in every room of the house where you could plug a vacuum cleaner wand and hose into. The containment system was in the basement. I used to tease my little brother and say that that was where the ghosts were stored, a la Ghost Busters.
We have a wired home phone with wireless handsets on all three floors. They include an intercom feature to talk between handsets, which comes in handy sometimes.
(We have cell phones but we live in a rural area in a house with a metal roof - the cell signal inside the house can be spotty.)
The system in my house when i bought it had remotes in each of the bedrooms and the main unit in the downstairs hallway. There’s still one i haven’t gotten around to removing/patching. No radio, but Aiphone brand is still around, i think.
Now that the full article is posted:
I wanted to monitor the washing machine for progress. While I could have bought a connected camera, I opted for a more “local” solution: a wireless baby monitor.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B11PY5HC
(Used from Resale for much less instead, of course.)
@narfcake to borrow from 1990’s Nintendo:
Lateral usage of withering technology!
(Making something new - in this case the Gameboy - from older, cheaper parts.)
Yes. A caveman, a dark ages king, they would gladly like living the rest of their extended lives in decadence. Until they discover debauchery.
Personally, I find there’s a fine line between convenience and overconsumption. Those tissues didn’t come from a unicorn, electric current isn’t made by magic jelly beans, and water has to be stored somewhere by someone else. Not to think of how food is made, packaged, and shipped.
But if you go and try to understand every moving gear in the world, you go a little crazy hippie.
I’ve experimented with electric water heaters for my shower and find i miss basking in the gallons that could be stored in my old giant gas heated drum. I’ve been using an extra electric kettle to supplement my shower regimen, which has changed to use much less water: a hot rinse, stop, lather, repeat, finishing with an extra rinse using the lukewarm kettle water. A little inconvenient, but it’s less water used. And the lack of a huge gas bill is satisfying.
I grew up across from a house with an outdoor intercom (probably indoor too, but it was across the town line/a stream and I have no idea who lived there). When they used it everybody could hear it within probably a two block radius and I thought it was the most inconsiderate, self-absorbed thing which is also kind of funny. They sold to people who let their dogs out to bark at me pretty much every time I went outside, and then eventually mounted a security light above their back door which shone directly into my bedroom all night. The house was built on land which originally included a street and bridge that joined the neighborhoods, so I understand now that the house is just cursed to be lived in by terrible people and I should not blame the intercom, but I still do.