Science, Technology & Medicine
Rotary phones, Party lines...
Alphabetic prefixes (GEneral 7-2746)...
...and your phone was Property of the Bell Telephone System.
Also see "all-digit dialing" in the "Life Before" gallery.
Listen to the Pre-TouchTone dial tone
Listen to the telephone really ring
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There are 17 comments for this item.
When new films take place in the '50s and earlier, they naturally use rotary phones, but they often get the dial tone wrong, and I always notice.
When the "victim" got to the Q, they got the joke...
A popular joke from about 40-50 years ago was that there was a joke line that you could call toll free. You would dial the word REQUEST and notice there was no Q on the dial. Big joke. Ha ha.
In California the emergency line for the California Highway Patrol is ZEnith 1-2000 (Zenith twelve thousand). It's been that ever since I can remember. Zenith numbers were forerunners of 1-800 numbers. You would connect to them through your operator. But ZEnith 12000 is STILL the CHP emergency number. And the only way to get it is through a landline operator.
TUXedo-1212 was dialed simply 1212 from San Bernardino and 888-1212 from outlying areas. TUrner 2-1212 was dialed 21212 from San Bernardino and 882-1212 from outlying areas. The TUXedo-1212 number became TUrner 8-1212 and was dialed either 81212 or 888-1212. Knowing this it's easy to see when we were first able to call long distance without an operator it was so complicated.
our friends had TE(emple)6 and PO(rtage)2...if you diale PO2-0111you got "the time getter" ; "the time is ... 8 : 17 ... or BL(air)3-9933 you got a great siren noise
Also on YouTube: "Kids React to Rotary Phones".
For several years, there were great new innovations, like Call Forwarding, last-number callback, Caller ID, and even Call Waiting (which I happen to despise). But what have they done lately to keep up -- let alone innovate? Let you see Caller ID on your TV screen?
Think about text messages, for example, which you can neither send nor receive via landline. Most phones don't have alpha display screens, so if the landline telcos wanted to add texting, they'd probably go the Caller ID route: sell you a new phone or a separate display (perhaps with a QWERTY keyboard) and charge for the added service. Or maybe they'd have a robotic voice that would read the text message to you on a phone without the display. (Nice, but sending a text meassage on a displayless phone would mean doing "777" for an "R", blind... And would the phone need to ring every time a text message arrived? That could get annoying in a conversation! And what would become of the text message if you weren't home to receive it?) No, I'm afraid we've got a dinosaur here.
I still remember the recording for a party line call: "You have dialled a party on your line. Please hang up and allow sufficient time for the called party to answer, then pick up your receiver." You had to hang up, estimate when the other had answered, then pick up your phone and hope they'd answered!
The local volunteer fire department had a paging system using the phones. They could group dial all the firemen, and the phones would ring with a specific ring. No reason to answer, just report to the station. If you were too late to catch the fire truck, the location of the fire was listed on a chalk board and you drove your own vehicle to the site. We also had a fire siren on the water tower behind the fire station. Lived two blocks away.
Concerning "Information," I've been told that they switched to calling it "Directory assistance" because so many people were calling with questions like, "How do you spell 'Saskatchewan?" I think that it was also their way of implying that you should have looked in your directory and not bothered them.
BTW, have you ever heard the Nichols & May operator routine?
A school principal told me a few years ago that one of the pupils came to the office because he needed to use the phone. He showed the kid to a desk with a telephone and returned to his business. When he realized the kid was staring at the phone, the principal asked if there was a problem; he thought the kid might have forgot the number. It wasn't until the kid said he had never seen a telephone like that before that the principal realized that he had no idea how to use a rotary dial.
Our home telephone had a dial but the Collingswood, NJ exchange was not automated until the early 1960's. My first lesson in how to use the phone consisted of waiting for the operator to say "number, please" then telling her the number, or ordering "long distance", "information" "Western Union" or the police or fire departments.
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