Apple Inc. co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak along with their friend John Draper, also known as Captain Crunch, used a device known as a blue box to prank the Vatican.
What Happened: Jobs, Wozniak, and Draper found a way to manipulate the phone system using a blue box, a device used for phone phreaking, and used to call various places around the world.
The blue box allowed users to make free long-distance calls by mimicking the tones used by telephone operators, essentially hacking the phone system.
One of their boldest pranks involved a call to the Vatican, where they impersonated the then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Recalling the prank, Wozniak, in an interview, said, “I said, ‘Well, I’m Henry Kissinger with Richard Nixon at the summit meeting in Moscow, and we’d like to speak to the Pope.'”
At the time, the head of the Catholic church was Pope Paul VI.
He later jokingly said, “I told the Pope ‘I’m just calling to make a confession,” however, Wozniak must have been joking about this part because in a separate interview Jobs said that they never got to speak with the Pope.
In a 1975 interview, Jobs recalled the time they pranked the Vatican saying, “They actually sent someone to wake up the Pope when finally we just burst out laughing and they realized that we weren’t Henry Kissinger and so we never got to talk to the pope.”
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Why It Matters: Their interest in the blue box was sparked by an Esquire article Wozniak read the day before starting classes at Berkeley in the fall of 1971.
The article described a network of anonymous technical people, known as phone phreaks, who were outsmarting phone companies.
Inspired, Wozniak called his friend Jobs, and the duo began their journey into the world of phone phreaking.
Wozniak and Jobs purchased analog tone generator kits and attempted to build their own blue box. However, they soon realized that the analog circuits were imprecise, noted The Atlantic, citing an excerpt from Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone.
Wozniak then decided to build a digital blue box using the chips used to build computers. By early 1972, Wozniak had his design worked out and successfully tested it with Jobs.
Wozniak and Jobs eventually met with Captain Crunch, who taught them more about blue boxing techniques.
According to a New Atlas article from October 2020, one of the original circuit boards hand-made by Wozniak for the first iteration of “Blue Box” in 1972 was auctioned.
The blue box was the first collaboration between Wozniak and Jobs, with the pair selling between 40 and 100 blue boxes at $170 each before almost being caught by the police and shutting the business down.
This venture, although short-lived and illegal, marked the beginning of their partnership, which eventually led to the founding of Apple Computer.
Image via Shutterstock
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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