Summer 2015
Postcard / Dialing for Free with Captain Crunch
John Draper and the phreakers
![A postcard depicting a photograph of a Cap’n Crunch plastic toy whistle, and a bowl of the cereal next to a Cap’n Crunch box.](/issues/58/cabinet_058_postcard_1.jpg)
![The back of the postcard reads “Direct-dial long distance phone service, introduced in the United States by AT&T in the early 1950s, was made possible by a system of tones that allowed routing lines to automatically communicate with each other. Designed to be transmitted on the same line as the voice, one of these supervisory signals, a 2600-hertz tone, told the system to connect and disconnect distant phone calls. Over the next several decades, individuals discovered that they could in effect hijack long-distance service by emitting the correct high-pitched sounds into the phone. Among the most famous of these phone “phreakers,” as they came to be known, was John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, who found that he could use a toy whistle given away in boxes of the popular cereal to produce the tone required to make free long-distance calls.”](/issues/58/cabinet_058_postcard_2.jpg)
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