Presumably, Karlin's research also influenced the use of all-digit
zip-codes in America -- e.g. 12345-1234.
Which is amusing because similar research in England at about the same time
(at Oxford I seem to remember) came to the opposite conclusion -- that
mixed letter and digit codes are more memorable. For example, my zip-code
is BS31 3BQ. The "BS" stands for Bristol, and "BS31" is one segment of a
very large area around Bristol.
Keith
At 17:49 09/02/2013, Arthur wrote:
John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94
· by MARGALIT FOX
· Feb. 8, 2013 ny times
John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the
telephone easier to use.
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?
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,
<http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/denisnata/denisnata1011/denisnata101100079/8280436-big-black-calculator--keypad-background.jpg>as
on a
calculator<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-1>1
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 peoples 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
<http://img2.etsystatic.com/004/0/6620830/il_fullxfull.366687750_ermg.jpg>inside
the finger
holes<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-2>2, where
they had nestled companionably for years,
<http://www.rotarydialphones.com/red_phone.jpg>to the rim outside the
dial<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-3>3.
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 bachelors degree in philosophy, psychology and music, and a
masters 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 bombers 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. Karlins 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
<http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/black-rotary-phone.jpg>the
white dot<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-4>4
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&Ts 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. Karlins biggest challenge was almost certainly
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5t5na44D0Dw>the
advent of the push-button
phone<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-5>5,
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,
<http://www.google.com/patents?id=MmxUAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=2,394,926&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false>with
buttons arranged in two horizontal
rows<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-6>6: 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. Karlins group began to study what form the
phone of the future should take. Keypad configurations examined included
Mr. Mallinas, one with buttons in a circle, another with buttons in an
arc, and a rectangular pad.
The victorious design, based on the groups 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. Todays omnipresent 12-button keypad, with star
and pound keys flanking the zero, grew directly from this model.
Putting 1-2-3 on the pads top row instead of the bottom (the
configuration used, then as now, on adding machines and calculators) was
also born of Mr. Karlins group: they found it made for more accurate dialing.
Mr. Karlins 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 stepfathers death,
at his home in Little Silver, N.J.; six grandchildren; and three
great-grandchildren. A son from Mr. Karlins 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. Karlins experimental research, reported in the popular press, showed
that they could. As a result, PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield the stuff of
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_muFwwTSMs>song<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-7>7
and
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2b1UfHDso>story<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-8>8
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 culprits 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?
References
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-1>^<http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/denisnata/denisnata1011/denisnata101100079/8280436-big-black-calculator--keypad-background.jpg>as
on a calculator (us.123rf.com:80) (
<http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/denisnata/denisnata1011/denisnata101100079/8280436-big-black-calculator--keypad-background.jpg>http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/denisnata/denisnata1011/denisnata101100079/8280436-big-black-calculator--keypad-background.jpg
)
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-2>^<http://img2.etsystatic.com/004/0/6620830/il_fullxfull.366687750_ermg.jpg>inside
the finger holes (img2.etsystatic.com:80) (
<http://img2.etsystatic.com/004/0/6620830/il_fullxfull.366687750_ermg.jpg>http://img2.etsystatic.com/004/0/6620830/il_fullxfull.366687750_ermg.jpg
)
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-3>^<http://www.rotarydialphones.com/red_phone.jpg>to
the rim outside the dial
(<http://www.rotarydialphones.com:80>www.rotarydialphones.com:80) (
http://www.rotarydialphones.com/red_phone.jpg )
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-4>^<http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/black-rotary-phone.jpg>the
white dot (2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com:80) (
<http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/black-rotary-phone.jpg>http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/black-rotary-phone.jpg
)
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-5>^<http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5t5na44D0Dw>the
advent of the push-button phone
(<http://www.youtube.com:80>www.youtube.com:80) (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5t5na44D0Dw )
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-6>^<http://www.google.com/patents?id=MmxUAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=2,394,926&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false>with
buttons arranged in two horizontal rows (www.google.com:80) (
<http://www.google.com/patents?id=MmxUAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=2,394,926&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false>http://www.google.com/patents?id=MmxUAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=2,394,926&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
)
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-7>^<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_muFwwTSMs>song
(<http://www.youtube.com:443>www.youtube.com:443) (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_muFwwTSMs )
*
<http://www.readability.com/articles/amctpres#rdb-footnote-link-8>^<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2b1UfHDso>story
(www.youtube.com:443) (
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2b1UfHDso>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO2b1UfHDso
)
Original URL:
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