Hotline

Hotline (pronounced hot-lahyn)

(1) In Canadian use, talkback radio; of or relating to a radio program that receives telephone calls from listeners while on-air.

(2) A direct telecommunications link, either as a telephone line, teletype circuit or other connection, enabling immediate communication between heads of state and intended for use in times of crisis.

(3) A telephone service enabling people confidentially to speak with someone about a personal problem or crisis.

(4) A telephone line providing customers or clients with direct access to a company or professional service.

1950-1955: Hot was from the Middle English hot & hat, from the Old English hāt (hot, fervent, fervid, fierce), from the Proto-Germanic haitaz (hot), from the primitive Indo-European kay- (hot; to heat).  It was cognate with the Scots hate & hait (hot), the North Frisian hiet (hot), the Saterland Frisian heet (hot), the West Frisian hjit (hot), the Dutch heet (hot), the Low German het (hot), the German & Low German heet (hot), the German heiß (hot), the Danish hed (hot), the Swedish het (hot) and the Icelandic heitur (hot).  Line was from the Middle English line & lyne, from the Old English līne (line, cable, rope, hawser, series, row, rule, direction), from the Proto-West Germanic līnā, from the Proto-Germanic līnǭ (line, rope, flaxen cord, thread), from the Proto-Germanic līną (flax, linen), from the primitive Indo-European līno- (flax).  The Middle English forms evolved under the influence of the Middle French ligne (line), from the Latin linea and the oldest sense of the word is "rope, cord, thread"; from this the senses "path" and "continuous mark" were derived.  That was also the source of the use in telecommunications, telephone traffic originally routed along physical lines, usually a pair of copper wires; the use of “cable” “telegraph” & “wire” to describe the messages sent across these means of transmission had a similar gestation.  The spelling variously is hotline, hot-line and hot line and inconsistencies in use are common.  Hot line is a noun & verb and hotlined & hotlining are verbs; the noun plural is hotlines. 

The Moscow–Washington hotline

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964; US president 1929-1933) with the first telephone installed in the Oval Office, the White House, 29 March 1929.

The Moscow–Washington hotline (technically the Washington–Moscow Direct Communications Link) was established in 1963 after the experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) suggested to US diplomats that had the channels of communication been able more quickly to deliver messages, it may have been possible to resolve matters before they reached to point of criticality.  The solution was felt to be a means of immediate, secure communication between the Kremlin and the White House so the leaders of the USSR and USA instantly could speak in times of crisis, the imagery being two telephones connected by a long line between Moscow and Washington DC.  Unfortunately, although the classic image is of red analogue telephones (without a dial mechanism) sitting on the two desks, telephones actually weren’t part of the system.  There has been a telephone on the president’s desk in the White House since 1929 but never a red one and although there have been many red-colored phones in both civilian and military service in the US, there was never one connected to the Moscow–Washington hotline. 

The classic hotline was between two callers but there's no reason why they can't be multi-node: Four-way call, Mean Girls (2004).

The reasons telephones weren’t thought suitable was that in moments of crisis in international relations, it’s vital there be no misunderstandings and a conversation between two people speaking different languages through translators, separated by thousands of miles over a phone line of sometimes variable quality, would be inherently error-prone.  Additionally, a certainty of historic record in important in diplomatic discourse so a device which committed everything to paper, in text, was required.  What was adopted was the technology which was at the time the most appropriate, something robust, reliable and suitable for technicians at both ends; in 1963, that was the teleprinter (also known as teletypewriter, teletype or TTY), an electromechanical device which had for decades been used in inter-continental communications, much of its popularity due to the ability to bolt it to a variety of communications channels.  Over the years, the technology has changed to take advantage of advances including an era (which began during the administration of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004; US president 1981-1989)) in which the hotline was facsimile (fax) based, something which sounds now archaic but which was at the time both fast and secure.  Satellite links have for years been used and there is now a secure fibre-optic link although recent events have illustrated the inherent vulnerability of undersea cables.

Four-node hotline, Mean Girls (2004).   

Hotline Teleprinter, the Pentagon, Langley, Virginia, circa 1966.

Before the term hotline came into use in the 1950s, there had actually been a “hotline” which really did use telephones: In 1943, the first use of a scrambler (an early, analogue form of voice-encryption) was the system installed between the White House Downing Street to render secure conversations between Franklin Roosevelt (FDR, 1882–1945, US president 1933-1945) and Winston Churchill (1875-1965; UK prime-minister 1940-1945 & 1951-1955) and both the UK military and civil service had for years used hotlines (literally dedicated phone-lines) between departments.  The idea has spread and other countries have either installed hotlines or at least flirted with the idea although, the implementation has been patchy; some installed and never commissioned or switched off during periods of heightened tensions.  The usual suspects have been involved, China–USSR (and later Russia), China-India, China–United States, China-Japan, North Korea-South Korea and India–Pakistan.

The photograph of George W Bush (George XLIII, b 1946; US president 2001-2009) was a fake although it circulated widely, complete with a doctored photo-frame in the background, containing a picture of then UK prime-minister Tony Blair (b 1953; UK prime-minister 1997-2007). 

A fake Hotline, the so-called "Red Phone".

One linguistic quirk in the name of the Moscow–Washington hotline is misleading in that while the Russian end does terminate in Moscow, the US end is technically not in Washington DC but under military control in a secure facility in the Pentagon, located in Langley, Virginia where, twenty-four hours a day, a technician and translator attend the office.  Despite reality, in many fictional depictions of US-Soviet relations in the Cold War and beyond, literal, bright-red analogue telephones sometimes appeared, long after any such devices had been replaced, an example of the way in which verisimilitude in fiction is constructed sometimes by conforming to a popular perception of reality rather than reality itself.  

Ms Justine Haupt with custom rotary-dial cell phone in turquoise.

That popular perception continues to exert an influence on design.  Ms Justine Haupt (b 1987), an astronomy instrumentation engineer at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory went a step further (backwards, or perhaps sideways, some might suggest) and built a rotary-dial cell phone from scratch because of her aversion to what she describes as “smartphone culture and texting”, something to which many will relate.  In what proved a three year project, Ms Haupt used a rotary-dial mechanism from a Trimline telephone (introduced in 1965 and produced by Western Electric, the manufacturing unit of the Bell System), mounted on a case 4 x 3 x 1 inches (100 x 75 x 25 mm) in size with a noticeably protuberant aerial; it used an AT&T prepaid sim card and has a battery-life of some 24-30 hours.  Conforming to the designer’s choices of functionality, it includes two speed-dial buttons, an e-paper display and permits neither texting nor internet access.  

Designer colors: Available in black, white, turquoise, beige and the wonderful Atomic Hotline Red.  The "atomic" in the name is an allusion the hotline's origin in the aftermath of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis which was all about nuclear weapons.   

Although she intended the device as a one-off for her own use, Ms Haupt was surprised at the interest generated and in 2022 began selling a kit (US$170) with which others could build their own, all parts included except the rotary-dial mechanism which would need to be sourced from junk shops and such.  Unlike the larger mechanism on the traditional desk or wall-mounted telephone, the holes in the Trimline’s smaller rotary-dial used the whole circle so the ten-hole layout is symmetrical and thus the same as used on the wheelcovers of Ford Australia's XE Fairmont’s (something doubtlessly wholly coincidental).  Unfortunately, Ms Haupt encountered many difficulties (bringing to market a device which connects to public telephony networks involves processes of greater complexity than selling mittens and such) but the project remains afoot.