Science & Technology
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
There are 5 comments for this item.
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.
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?
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.
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