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just by knowing the secret. Bernay, steeped in the ethos of the Sixties, was motivated by altruism – as well as by the commonly held belief that the phone system had been magically created to be used by anyone who needed it. The seeds he planted grew and grew over the next years into a whole social phenomenon.

Legend has it that one of the early users of Bernay's system was a young man in Seattle. He told a blind friend about it, and this friend carried the idea to a winter camp for blind kids in Los Angeles. They dispersed back to their own home towns and told their friends: and one of these friends, who was also blind, moved with his parents to the East Coast and took the scheme to a summer camp for blind kids in Vermont . . .

Within a year unsighted youngsters on the East and West Coasts were linked together by the electronic strands of the Bell system. They had created a sort of community, an electronic clubhouse. The web they spun across the country had a single purpose: communication. The early phreakers simply wanted to talk to each other, without landing their parents with huge long-distance phone bills.

It wasn't long, though, before the means displaced the end, when some of the early phreakers found that the technology of the phone system could provide a lot more fun than just reaching out and calling someone. Loop-around-pairs were fine for just communicating; other schemes were needed to take control of the network.

In a few years phreakers would begin to look deeper. They found a labyrinth of electronic passages and hidden sections within the Bell network, and they started charting this unknown territory. Then they realized they were looking at the inside of an enormous electronic system, that Ma Bell was really just a giant computer linking terminals – or telephones – with switches and wires and loops all across the country. It was an actual place, though it only existed at the end of a phone receiver. It was a nearly limitless electronic universe accessible by dialling numbers on a phone. And what made this space open to phreakers was the spread of electronic gadgets that would completely overwhelm the Bell system.

According to Bell Telephone the first instance of theft of long-distance telephone service by an electronic device was discovered in 1961, after a local office manager in the company's Pacific Northwest

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