Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USA
John E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use.
John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94
By MARGALIT FOX
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, as on a calculator — 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, where they had nestled companionably for years, to the rim outside the dial.
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
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, 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: 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 and story
— 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?”
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&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB&_r=0
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