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and play the tape back into the mouthpiece. To Bell's exasperation, some people could even whistle up free phone calls.

Joe Engressia was the original whistling phreaker. Blind, he was said to have been born with perfect pitch. As a child he became fascinated by phones: he liked to dial non-working numbers around the country just to listen to the recording say ‘This number is out of order.’ When he was eight he was introduced to the theory of multifrequency tones – though he didn't realize it at the time. While he was listening to a non-working tape in Los Angeles he began whistling and the phone went dead. He tried it again and the same thing happened. Then he phoned his local office and reportedly said, ‘I'm Joe. I'm eight years old and I want to know why when I whistle this tune the line clicks off.’

The engineer told Joe about what was sometimes known as ‘talk-off’, a phenomenon that happened occasionally when one party to a conversation began whistling and accidentally hit a 2600-cycle tone. That could cause the trunk line to think that the caller had hung up and the line would go dead. Joe didn't understand the explanation then – though within a few years he probably knew more about it than the engineer.

Joe became famous in 1971 when Ron Rosenbaum catalogued his phreaking skills in the Esquire article. But he had first come to public attention two years previously when he was discovered whistling into a pay phone at the University of South Florida. Joe, by this time a twenty-year-old university student, had mastered the science of multifrequency tones and, with perfect pitch, could simply whistle the 2600-cycle note down the line and then whistle up the phone number he wanted. The local telephone company, determined to stamp out phreaking, had publicized the case and Joe's college had disciplined him. Later, realizing he was too well known to the authorities to continue phreaking in Florida, Joe had moved on to Memphis. That was where Rosenbaum found him.

In 1970 Joe was living in a small room in the Tennessee city, surrounded by the paraphernalia of phreaking. But even more than phreaking, Joe's real obsession was the phone system itself. His ambition, he told Rosenbaum, was to work for Ma Bell. He was in

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