Draper began to supply blue boxes to clients--generally unsighted youngsters-- in the Bay Area and beyond. He was also fascinated by the little whistle, and early the next year, when he took a month's vacation in England, he took one with him. When a friend rang him from the States, Draper blew the little toy into the phone, sending the 2600-cycle "on-hook" (hanging-up) signal to the caller's local office in America. The "on-hook" tone signified that the call had been terminated, and the U.S. office--where billing was originated--stopped racking up toll charges. But because the British phone system didn't respond to the 2600-cycle whistle, the connection was maintained, and Draper could con- tinue the conversation for free. He only used the whistle once in England, but the incident became part of phreaker legend and gave Draper his alias.
While in Britain, Draper received a stream of transatlantic calls from his blind friends. One of them, who lived in New York, had discovered that Bell engineers had a special code to dial England to check the new international direct-dial system, which was just coming on-line. The access code was 182, followed by a number in Britain. All of the calls placed in this way were free. The discovery spread rapidly among the phreaker community; everyone wanted to try direct-dialing to England, but since no one knew anyone there, Draper was the recipient of most of the calls.
This was, of course, long before the days when people would routinely make international calls. Even in America, where the phone culture was at its most developed, no one would casually pick up a telephone and call a friend halfway across the world. An international call, particularly a transatlantic call, was an event, and if families had relatives abroad, they would probably phone them only once a year, usually at Christmas. The call could easily take half a day to get through, the whole family would take turns talking, and everyone would shout--in those days, perhaps in awe of the great distance their voices were being carried, international callers always shouted. It would take another two decades before transatlantic calls became as commonplace as ringing across the country.
Naturally the British GPO (General Post Office), who ran the U.K. telephone system in those days, became somewhat suspicious of a vacationer who routinely received five or six calls a day from the United States. They began monitoring Draper's line; then investigators were sent to interview him. They wanted to know why he had been receiving so many calls from across the Atlantic. He replied that he was on holiday and that he supposed he was popular, but the investigators were unimpressed. Draper immediately contacted his friends in America and said, "No more."
At about this time, Draper had become the king of phreakers. He had rigged up a VW van with a switchboard and a high-tech MF-er and roamed the highways in California looking for isolated telephone booths. He would often spend hours at these telephones, sending calls around the world, bouncing them off communications satellites, leapfrogging them from the West Coast to London to Moscow to Sydney and then back again.
The Captain also liked to stack up tandems, which are the instruments that send the whistling tone from one switching office to another. What the Captain would do is shoot from one tandem right across the country to another, then back again to a third tandem, stacking them up as he went back and forth, once reportedly shooting across America twenty times. Then he might bounce the call over to a more exotic place, such as a phone box in London's Victoria Station, or to the American embassy in Moscow. He didn't have anything to say to the startled commuter who happened to pick up the phone at Victoria, or to the receptionist at the embassy in Moscow--that wasn't the point. Sometimes he simply asked about the weather.
The unit he carried in the back of the van was computer operated, and Draper was proud of the fact that it was more powerful and faster than the phone company's own equipment. It could, he claimed, "do extraordinary things," and the vagueness of the statement only added to the mystique.
