When A Hacker Found A Whistle In A Cereal Box, He Developed A Genius Way To Get Free Phone Calls
No doubt you can remember when breakfast cereals came with toys inside their boxes? For many kids, these tiny plastic treats were the perfect way to start the day. But in this instance, one these items inadvertently managed to alter the course of history. This incredible tale takes us back to the 1960s, back when The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix ruled the airwaves, Americans were sending people to the Moon, and Cap’n Crunch was peddling cereal boxes with toy whistles inside. This latter detail might not sound too important, except that one of these whistles ended up with a guy named John Draper. Even though he was a little, well, strange, Draper was also pretty clever. In fact, he figured out a very special use for this toy whistle – and in doing so, he kick-started a movement that changed the world.
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.”
