We still have 2 Western Electric dial phones in continuous operation (one wall mounted in the 60s). For maintenance we need to have a Golgafrinchan in every so often to erase the fomites. We also have a ‘newer’ (70s) one of these with the dial in the base:
Not quite as sturdy as the WE units, for example I wouldn’t use it to club an intruder.
I had a friend whose parents had a party line up to the early 90s, I think. They were both college professors, so I’m sure they could afford their own line…
And what about those thick cords, eh?
Another funny thing about dial phones. You could tell if the person who added sound effects to movies were paying attention. For the benefit of those who didn’t experience dial phones, the dial made a short zzik sound as you pulled it down against the finger stop, followed by a longer whirrr as a spring returned the dial to its rest position. The higher the numeral dialed, the longer the return whir. Occasionally you’d see an actor dial what was obviously a “long” number but the sound editor put in a “short” whir. Come to think of it, I wonder if actors were instructed to dial mostly “short” numbers so they wouldn’t waste time waiting for the dial to return.
I think I found another tutorial for rotary dial phones, this one is from the 90’s.
My father (R.I.P.) was an electrical engineer for the phone system for 30 years. He told me a lot of phone trivia over the years, much of which other commenters here have already mentioned. He’d be proud of you all!
My take on the video is that it is quite impressive how well the conventions that were developed in the 1930s held up for decades. I mean, dial tone, busy signals and ringing indicators are still in place today (at least if you still have a land line), and even cell phone users recognize what they mean. To me, that’s an extremely successful implementation of non-verbal communication.
And of course there are other uses for a rotary dial phone.
Archive.org, has another nice one…
How to Use the Dial Phone : American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (AT&T) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
two anecdotes:
when i was young, 5-10 years old, we were on a party line. the first one was a 4 party line but after a couple of years we got on a two party line. the best part about the two party line was that the other party was my grandparents, just down the road. finally we had our own private line which seemed a decadent luxury.
from fall of 1985 until january of 1988 i had a rotary dial phone in my houre from which the numbers had been removed. it became a test of my spatial memory to use it. eventually i got so good at it that once, when i was trying to be the 9th caller to a radio show, the dj asked me if i had an automatic dialer because i was the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 9th (i won a “summer safety kit” consisting of two tickets to a local theater, a card for two free drinks at a local club, and a gift certificate for $25 to my choice of any one of five local restaurants) on one particular occasion. oh, the trigger for the call-in was anytime they played “safety dance” by men without hats. i still have a soft spot in my heart for that song.
I see your Raffaella Carrà and raise you one Walter Wanderley:
A friend grew up in rural Australia: “It was two hours out of town by telephone!”
At a friend’s university dorm, their phones had their dials removed - they were for incoming calls only. That’s when we learned that quickly “clicking” the hang-up cradle was the same as one dial click. You could dial out by rapidly tapping the cradle button, pausing between numbers.
“two” click-click
“two” click-click
“nine -fuck!” click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click
Apparently a cover; that song was written by Roberto Menescal and Ronaldo Bôscoli.
I brought in some old newspapers to a (USAn) 5th grade class for some social studies lessons. In the papers the day after JFK’s assassination there was an ad for a rotary phone. A girl in the front row asks “what is that?” One of the other kids knows, and we talk about how it worked, etc. After a few minutes of looking at it again she asks “how do you text with your friends?” I say “well, you can’t. If you want to communicate with your friends you either call, or write a letter.” Her eyes roll and in a perfectly dismissive voice she says “well . . . That’s stupid.”
But texting was possible in the 1960ies, they called it sending telegrams.
In his book “Ghosts in the Wire” Kevin Mitnick described how he would use this method to make phone calls from prison. He got so good at it that he could terminate an incoming call and flip it to an outgoing call, with the prison on the hook for the fees
In New Zealand our dials were numbered opposite to most places. 0 was in the same place but then it went clockwise 123456789. To dial digit X it sent (10 - X) pulses.
I love that song, and also this version.
