📸

bine the effects of the organ and the recorder. It was wanted by some blind kids. Draper was an electronics engineer. Could he help?

After the meeting Draper went home, thought about the problem, then wired up a primitive multifrequency transmitter – a blue box. The device was about the size of a telephone. Ironically it wouldn’t work in San José (the exchange had yet to be modified), so Draper had to drive back to San Francisco to demonstrate it to the blind kids. To his surprise it worked perfectly. ‘Stay low,’ Draper told the youngsters. ‘This thing’s illegal.’

But the blind kids were already into phreaking in a big way, and it was from them that Draper learned about the potential of the Cap’n Crunch plastic whistle. The kids had also found that to make the whistle hit the 2600-cycle tone every time, all it needed was a touch of glue on the outlet hole.

Draper began to supply blue boxes to clients – generally unsighted youngsters – in the Bay Area and beyond. Of course he charged for his services. He was also fascinated by the little whistle, and early the next year, when he took a months’ vacation in England, he took one with him. When a friend rang him from the States, Draper blew the little toy into the phone, sending the 2600-cycle call-completion signal to the caller’s local office in America. The tone signified that the call had been terminated, and the US office – where billing was originated – stopped racking up toll charges. But because the British phone system didn’t respond to the 2600-cycle whistle, the connection was maintained – and Draper could continue the conversation for free. He only used the whistle once in England, but the incident became part of phreaker legend and gave Draper his alias.

While in Britain, Draper received a stream of trans-Atlantic calls from his blind friends. One of them, who lived in New York, had discovered that Bell engineers had a special code to dial England to check the new international direct-dial system, which was just coming on line. The access code was 182, followed by a number in Britain. The calls were free. The discovery spread rapidly amongst the phreaker community. Everyone wanted to try direct-dialling to England, but as no one knew anyone there Draper was the recipient of all the calls.

This was, of course, long before the days when people would

📸