When we all started living the North American dream, and moving into larger and larger suburban houses, we of course needed a way to communicate within our palatial homes. Enter the in home intercom system. Now with just the simple touch of a button, your shouts of need could be easily transmitted throughout the house. Then at some point these systems fell out of favor. So much out of favor that one of these images came from a DIY article on removing said system from your house.
What has replaced it? Have we as a society just become louder? Do people just text message their kids/spouse/dog when they want their attention?
Certainly the fact that such a system is hard wired into the house doesn’t seem to be the issue. As evidenced by many readers here at AT, installing quality high speed internet connections throughout a home has become fairly common. But what ever happened to in-home intercom systems?
Images from vintagearizonarealestate.blogspot.com, notesongs.blogspot.com, ehow.com, and modernhomesportland.
One of my pet peeves is people yelling across the house at me. If you need something, come and speak to me like a civilized person. skitter, please report to the kitchen IMMEDIATELY would probably get an equally bad reaction.
Skitter, please report to the kitchen, for BACON!
If you can't tell the bacon is ready from the other end of the house without an intercom, either someone's frying it wrong or the smoke detector is broken.
We had the second one from the top. It was used more for listening to music than for room-to-room communication, at least until cheap boomboxes meant each of us kids could choose our own tunes. I bet my parents haven't powered it up for 20 years, except perhaps to demonstrate it to grandkids.
Today, with mobile phones so prevalent, I couldn't begin to guess how many times my wife has phoned me from another room rather than actually walking a couple dozen steps. Amazingly, whenever I "don't hear the phone", the related honey-do behind the call ceases to be a priority for her.
I use the 'shoe-boot-door' method of getting my sons attention. I stand at the bottom of the stairs and throw shoes and boots at their doors until they come out. When I'm lucky, I nail one of them (the boys) with a boot, but they've gotten pretty wary over the years.
My wife and I have a business where we kick down a lot of doors and walk through a lot of houses that are being repossessed by financial institutions. We have noticed there are a lot of houses with built-in intercoms, and they all look like they were installed in the 60s or 70s.
I have not seen one that is newer than that, and any house that has been remodeled does not have an intercom. I'm glad someone else is noticing these are gone and wonder why.
Just bought one to install in the house. It is a Nutone from the 60's. I'm psyched.
I used to live in the original planned community, Rossmoor, in the quaint village of Los Alamitos, CA – my house, a "Medallion Electric Home" featured just such an intercom system – though for my tenure at the home until we removed them, they never worked – but the controls were still in my room. A friend of mine's parents house still has their system installed, intact and in working order and appeared to be higher end system (huntington beach, CA) – this things are kinda neat, if impractical.