When A Hacker Found A Whistle In A Cereal Box, He Developed A Genius Way To Get Free Phone Calls

It’s pretty incredible to think that a mere children’s toy could have such a profound effect on the way we live our lives today. But the Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun whistle possessed a particular quality that made it incredibly useful for someone like Draper. Basically, the whistle gave off a very specific kind of sound when it was blown.

And Draper quickly recognized that this sound could be useful to him. Having once served as a tech worker in the American Air Force, Draper later came to be associated with a subversive group known as the “phone phreaks.” This movement, to put it simply, laid the groundwork for the hackers we know today.

Thanks to a Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun whistle, Draper managed to become a prominent figure within the phone phreaker community. In fact, his idea was so effective that his story even made it into the mainstream. In 1971 Esquire magazine printed an article about the movement that grew from Draper and his breakfast cereal toy.

And this is where things started to snowball. The Esquire story caught the attention of a young man named Steve Wozniak, who was studying at Berkeley at the time. It was an important moment for the student, as he later explained to Phil Lapsley for the latter’s book Exploding the Phone. Wozniak said, “You know how some articles just grab you from the first paragraph? Well, it was one of those articles.”

Excited by the things that he’d read, Wozniak recruited the help of his pal Steve Jobs. Together, they decided to locate Draper to find out what he could teach them. They were successful, and the pair left their meeting with Draper feeling inspired. They quickly started their earliest enterprise together, a move that got them started on the road to Apple Computers and ultimately the technological revolution that defines many of our lives today.

It’s fair to say, then, that the phone phreaks were an incredibly influential bunch of people. Their history can be traced back to the end of the 1950s, a time when several of them were still at college.

Though phone phreaking first emerged during the 1950s, it was really in the following two decades that it truly blossomed. The 1960s and 1970s broadly constitute its heyday, an era that kick-started our contemporary hacking culture. Nowadays, of course, hacking’s mainly associated with computers, rather than phones.

Phone phreaking can be traced back to 1957 and a kid named Joe Engressia, who had a very special skill. Engressia was blind and had absolute pitch, which meant he could easily identify any musical note he heard. With this ability, Engressia was naturally a very good whistler. And in 1957 he realized that if he whistled a specific note into a phone, he could hack the network and make international calls for free. This discovery’s seen as the start of phone phreaking.

Exploding the Phone author Phil Lapsley clearly admires early phone phreakers such as Engressia. Speaking to The Atlantic in 2013, he said, “These people kind of crystallize what I love about this subject... Which is simply the combination of innocence and curiosity. These were not people who were out to make free phone calls, you know, for the sake of making free phone calls. They were just like, ‘Wow, what happens if. What happens if I dial this number? What happens if I play this tone?’ They were simply curious.”

The burgeoning phone phreak community dedicated much of their lives to investigating telecommunication systems. Its members experimented with different methods of hacking into them. They did their research, reading up on how phone networks actually worked. Some even acted like spies, putting on voices and pretending to work for phone firms in order to infiltrate the network.

Among these early phone phreakers, of course, was the enigmatic John Draper, who’d later style himself as Captain Crunch. Though he eventually became a pivotal figure within a community of outsiders, his earlier life seemed to be more conventional. His father had been in the Air Force, so in 1964 Draper himself signed up to carry on the family tradition.

While serving in the Air Force, though, it became clear that Draper was an unorthodox guy. His interest in testing boundaries was soon evident, particularly in relation to telecommunications. He managed, for instance, to figure out a way to place phone calls without paying for them when he was based in Alaska. Later, when serving in Maine, he set up a bootleg radio station.

Draper finished up with the Air Force in the late 1960s, at which point he moved out to Silicon Valley. Here, he initially took on some jobs linked to the armed forces, but then he moved into the telecom sector. And it was around this time that he became affiliated with the phone phreaks.

Draper had constructed a transmitter for broadcasting bootleg radio signals, but he needed help to test it. So, he sent out a phone number on his frequency in the hope that people would call in to tell him that his broadcasts were successful. And this is what introduced him to the phone phreaking movement.

Now, Draper was exchanging ideas with like-minded phone phreak technicians, including Joe Engressia. And it was through these associates that Draper first learned of an instrument with special properties that could help with phone phreaking. This tool, of course, was the plastic whistle that came with Cap’n Crunch products.

iIt turned out that the Cap’n Crunch whistle was really useful for phone phreakers, because the note it emitted was perfect for hacking a phone line. And though several members of the group used the toy in this way, it was Draper whom it ultimately brought fame. That’s because he’s the one who took it a step further.

With the toy whistle’s noise as a model, Draper managed to create a gadget known as the blue box. In simple terms, this gizmo was capable of emitting different notes that could be used to hack a phone line. With that, the user could make free phone calls and get up to other shenanigans.

The wider phone phreaking community then got in on the act, with alternative instruments such as black and red boxes also being developed. These gadgets basically allowed the phone phreaks to explore phone networks and develop their telecom expertise. But they were also able to tap into people’s phone calls, which meant the FBI eventually took an interest in their activities.

It wasn’t actually against the law for the phone phreaks to hack into the phone system. Yet it was illegal when they then placed calls without paying for them. And naturally, the act of tapping into calls was also unlawful.

By the 1970s the phone phreaks were perceived in contrasting ways. On the one hand, members of the community could be seen in a good light as inquisitive and analytical. On the other hand, though, they were also considered to be outlaws who disrupted the phone system.

Either way, the group made waves. And they even broke into the mainstream thanks to that 1971 Esquire piece. It laid out the work of the phone phreaks, with specific reference to Draper. And thanks to the feature, “Captain Crunch” – as Draper was nicknamed – became something of a cult celebrity.

So the Esquire article was a pivotal moment in the history of phone phreaking. In fact, its publication may well have contributed to the course of technological innovation more broadly. After all, the feature was noticed by a young man named Steve Wozniak – and he felt energized and inspired by it.

The subjects and ideas discussed in the Esquire article really captured Wozniak’s imagination. As he explained to Phil Lapsley in Exploding the Phone, “I kept reading it over and over, and the more I read it, the more possible and real it sounded.” The cogs of history had started turning.

Wozniak needed to discuss the things that he’d learnt about phone phreaking – and he knew just who to call. He contacted his pal Steve Jobs, who it turned out was just as enraptured by the subject. The two young men needed to know more, so they decided to track down one of phone phreaking’s most prominent figures. And pretty soon, they’d managed to secure some face-time with John Draper.

Draper agreed to visit Wozniak’s college dorm for a conversation about phone phreaking. True to his word, he showed up – and with his outlandish personality on full display. As Jobs later told The New York Times, Draper was mustached and wore garish glasses. Depending on which reports you believe, Draper then announced his presence with either the phrase “It is I” or “I am he.”

Speaking to Lapsley for Exploding the Phone, Wozniak remembered the encounter with the outlandish Draper. He said, “Captain Crunch comes to our door, sloppy-looking, with his hair kind of hanging down on one side. And he smelled like he hadn’t taken a shower in two weeks, which turned out to be true. He was also missing a bunch of teeth.”

It isn’t surprising to learn that Wozniak was a little disconcerted by Draper and his obvious eccentricities. As he put it to Lapsley, “[Draper] turned out to be this really strange, funny guy, just bubbling over with energy... one of these very hyper people who keep changing topics and jumping around.”

Despite Draper’s oddness, Wozniak, Jobs and a number of their pals still happily hung out with the phone phreak. The group exchanged ideas, with Draper showing Wozniak the way to make international calls with a blue box. Then, after many hours, Draper said his goodbyes to the young men.

The impact of this meeting on Wozniak and Jobs was profound. Of the two, though, it was Jobs who was more stirred into action. As Wozniak remembered, “Steve Jobs suggested we could sell [blue boxes] for $170 or so. He came up with the price pretty early in there.” With that, the pair went into business together for the first time, selling blue boxes to college students.

Wozniak and Jobs developed an elaborate sales pitch for their blue boxes, as Lapsley laid out in Exploding the Phone. “They would knock on random dorm room doors and ask for an imaginary person with a made-up name,” he explained. “When the confused occupant would respond ‘Who?’ they would say, ‘You know, the guy who makes all the free phone calls.’ Depending on the occupant’s reaction they might add, ‘You know, he has the blue boxes.’ If the person they were talking to lit up and got excited, they knew they had a solid sales prospect who wasn’t likely to turn them in.”

But following a number of sales, Wozniak and Jobs soon allowed their blue box operation to fade away. After all, as Wozniak remembers it, the process of making the devices was very time-consuming and the returns weren’t that great. He estimates that they sold around 30 or 40 of the gadgets, though Jobs was under the impression that it was actually closer to 100.

Wozniak and Jobs had figured out a way to make some money from blue boxes, but Wozniak also used the devices to another end. To be precise, he made prank phone calls. The most ambitious, perhaps, was when he tried to get in touch with the Pope. And with his blue box, he successfully got through to the Vatican.

Wozniak then pretended to be Henry Kissinger and asked to speak with the Pope. His plan was thwarted, though, after people at the Vatican managed to speak with the real Kissinger and realized that Wozniak was an imposter.

Draper, on the other hand, was supposedly more successful when he made an ambitious prank call of his own. The phone phreak community had figured out how to make calls to the White House, so Draper and a pal managed to call up and ask to speak with President Nixon. They were then patched through to somebody – and this person, apparently, had a voice an awful lot like that of the then-president.

Draper’s accomplice spoke, telling the person on the other end of the line that a crisis was engulfing Los Angeles. The person – potentially Nixon, remember – then asked what sort of emergency was occurring, to which Draper’s friend replied, “We’re out of toilet paper, sir!” The president, if it really was him, wasn’t happy.

So, the phone phreaks definitely used their skills for childish mischief. But they also have a more serious legacy as the pioneers of a hacking culture that’s so prominent today. Of course, this association has both negative and positive associations. On the one hand hackers are representative of human curiosity, but their techniques can also be used for crime.

Perhaps the phone phreaks – and John Draper, specifically – are most note-worthy for inspiring Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. As Jobs himself once recalled in an interview, “I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple Computer had there not been blue-boxing.” Given the prominence of Apple today, that’s quite the statement.

But despite his cult status in hacking circles, Draper himself has become quite a controversial figure. He’s created software for some major companies, including Apple. But he’s also been imprisoned for committing fraud. Plus he’s faced accusations about his personal conduct towards other people. His legacy, then, has taken on a negative light.

But Draper really did leave a mark on technology in his younger days, as did the toy whistle that came with Cap’n Crunch cereal. Thanks to that gizmo, Draper managed to develop the blue box and therefore inspire Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. The world’s never been the same since.