So even a real Touchtone phone doesn't have to be connected right anymore? The central offices have a way to make it right even if it is wrong?
Is that true everywhere? or at least in Baltimore?
Western Electric Telephones, such as the famous model 500 were built to last 40 years (and indeed some have gone more than that).
The reason was that prior to the Bell breakup... Most homes and businesses rented their phones and could not own them. To reduce service calls, they were built like tanks, with heavy metal stampings, true metal bells, a potted network, heavy-duty dialers, and no wimpy modular connectors on the cables. The wires had solid crimp connectors attached to screws and a solid metal strain-relief. To move a phone to a different room was a major project. You probably should call the phone man.
I remember back in the early sixties, establishing new phone service was a relatively pleasant, if time consuming experience.
One went to the local AT&T branch office (in my case, it was Illinois Bell). Often these were office areas attached to the local town telephone exchange. A nice lady (they were always women back then) would invite you to her desk, serve you coffee, and then ask you questions about establishing your service.
Then you got to pick your phone from the Western Electric models on display. Most often this would be the model 500 available mostly in black, but sometimes other colors were available. Later, you could get a princess or a trimline wall phone if you wanted. If you wanted a lighted dial, then the installer would use the yellow and black wires for a lighting circuit and wire these to a plug in transformer somewhere in your house (The birth of the very first wall warts!) I heard that sometimes, these would catch on fire.
At some point touch-tone became available, but Illinois Bell stuck you with an extra 70 cents per month to be this modern. My father always argued that dial telephones were good enough for him.
Most numbers had alpha prefixes like PA9-2222 (Park 9) or AL1-1234 (Alpine 1). You might know your area code, but you never needed to dial it.
Directory Assistance was live and free, available 24 hours a day, and you could use it as much as you wanted. (I think we should have a law today that says that this is as it should be...)
Phone trouble? Dial #0 for operator or 611 for repairs and within seconds you were speaking to a live person who could solve your problem, again, 24 hours a day. No voice mail hell back then.
Beachcomber
Hi mm, I never have a problem with folk "horning in", as long as they are accurate and/or clarifying/correcting something! Good job, IMO; thanks. Pop
...
... That's a very important part of the picture. If you've accidentally caused a short somewhere, and you do not disconnect the house, then that short will still be there when you test at the demarc. By disconnecting the house, you remove the short and your dialtone may well return after a short pause. Note that a short sets off an "alarm" in the central office, which in turn disables dialtone to your phone line, followed a few minutes later by removal of the battery voltage. That way a storm problem or car accident doesn't knock out the whole central office due to many shorts. If you did have a short: when you disconnect the house to test at the demarc, it may be several seconds before the telco automatically restores battery voltage and dialtone to your phone line. It -will- come back though; it will not stay gone. So, give it a minute or so to return if it's not there at the demarc.
If however, you have an open circuit (something not connected that needs to be), you would never know the difference at the demarc, but ... you -would- have dialtone, meaning the telco is delivering dialtone to you and the problem is someplace in the house.
I've seen several good links to phone wiring here; assume you've at least looked at some of them.
Usually, in my case at least, the tech will grab the house wiring and do a quick test on it, without asking, at which time you are free to say something like "Thank you for the free test; that was nice of you". . Most techs are good working guys just like us, so ... .
Pop
The "fix" is actually inside the phones that you buy. The DC voltage is passed through a full wave rectifier so that no matter which polarity is connected, it passes thru the bridge to the internal cktry in the correct polarity. It's a very old phone these days that cares about the polarity, but even some of the old but more recent phones still have problems with ringing detection if the polarity is reversed and won't ring properly. Ring voltage detection, although basic, is probably the most complex part of a simple telephone.
Ring voltage, BTW, is enough to give you a fairly good jolt, so beware when you're handling telephone wiring.
Pop
That's another problem about these days: You have all these phones wandering around like vagrants, tramps, and hussies.
Some don't even have an address. They'll go home with anyone.
I'm not going to set up any illicit rendezvous.
Women have an affinity for establishing phone service. The desk job part, that is.
I knew they were there for sumpin'.
When my mother first married my father and moved to western Pa. she would pick up the phone and say, Oliver 4-2343, please; or Oliver
4-3873, please, and after a few days the operator said, "You don't have to say Oliver 4, Ma'am. They're all Oliver 4."In my first year of college, I had a BUtterfield-8 phone number. Remember that one?
No, no. It was Information, and people would call for all sorts of information, although all I ever did was once call some city to find out what time it was there.
BTW, I think they meant that they *might* come, and if they did, they
*would* call before they came -- for one thing, they would want me to be home if they were coming -- but they didn't say that, so I was afraid to continue. Maybe there was even a place to leave a message, but I'm not at all sure there was.Something doesn't work with my in-house wires. So I'm using the NIC and I've got a wire from it running up the front of the house and in the bedroom window to my phone and computer. Then I'm using the house wiring to go down to the kitchen and basement**.
Anyhow, when I have the wire from the phone machine on the second floor connected to the preinstalled house wire that goes to the kitchen, I pick up WBAL AM radio and it's really annoying. For some reason, I think if I ever get the original entry point to the house working again, this problem will go away.
**but I had to disconnect my own bedroom because there is probably a short in the wiring. I ran the wiring myself, because the previous owner put a layer of sheetrock over the jack and I don't know where it is. Except my bed is on a different wall anyhow.
That depends on what constitutes a "real" Touchtone phone. The oldest ones have to be wired right. The newer (all now at least 10-15-years old) Touchtone phones didn't care.
To me, a "real" Touchtone phone is at least 15-years old, was made by Western Electric, and was of the old Desk or Wall or Princess configuration. Those phones are "polarity" sensitive as are the first generation, round-button Trimline phones that use a dial light transformer to illuminate the buttons.
With the pair connected one way, the Touchtone keypad will work - depressing a button/key will "break the dialtone".
With the pair reversed, the phone will ring, you can talk on it, but you can NOT dial a call. The keypad doesn't work. It stays SILENT when any key is pressed. It doesn't "break the dialtone".
Even the later model Trimline phones had a "polarity guard" making red/green orientation unimportant.
Said another way: If you have a Touchtone phone that has a non-working keypad (NONE of the keys make a noise at all), check and note the keypad function when the offending phone is plugged-into other jacks.
Yes, as long as it is an ANCIENT, Western Electric phone.
Probably.
To this day, I encounter these from time to time. Many are still plugged-in but haven't been needed for YEARS.
HA! I never thought of that but you're right: When those "dial light" transformers began service, they were the ONLY "wall wart" in a house - for many, many years.
I got in on the tail end of this debacle.
The new "lighted dial" Princess then Trimline phones required a separate A.C. transformer for their dial light power. I'm not sure how many years after the wall warts first appeared, but some years later, The Bell System contracted with a company named "Ault" to manufacture these little "warts". I don't know how much time elapsed but, due to more than a few meltdowns and fires, The Bell System launched a *HUGE*, massive, nationwide "Ault Transformer Inspection" program.
Did you know that, for the first couple of years, there was no * or # on the Touchtone keypad? They were 10-button phones. The * and # were added early on but did *NOTHING* for YEARS - until Call Forwarding and Speed Dialing became available as Central Offices were upgraded to electronic switches.
I had one of those.
By the time I was using it much, I missed those two buttons, so I found key pads at hamfests or rummage sales before then and put in the
12 button pad. The first one didn't work at all, but the second different one worked well. I used a hot knife from a soldering iron to cut 2 more squares in the face plate. Hardly noticeable that the holes were new.
That's what I thought, but something in the previous post made me think there had been an improvement at the Central Station.
I have a touch tone phone going back to 1962 or earlier. I think that was the one that was originally 10-button.
I was also at a farm show in 1957 where the phone company, I guess it was, had a booth, and they demonstrated a touch tone phone. This one also had plastic cards, maybe 2x4 inch, that were pre-semi-perforated. You wrote the name of the person at the top of the card, and then completed punching out 3mm holes to make his phone number. Each line was one number, but there weren't ten holes per line, only about 5 so maybe it was binary or something.
Then one held the card vertically and pushed the card, twice as thick as a credit card, into the slot in the top of the phone where it stayed. Then one pushed a button and the card came out, touch-toning the number as it came. It was cool.
OK. I agree with your definitions.
Wait a second. Those are what you said above wouldn't work.
...and you attempted to verify my claim that something can be done to correct the problem from the Central Office and I said "yes".
If a customer called in and said that, suddenly, they could no longer dial-out on a Touchtone phone, the Central Office Technician would swap-out the regular heatcoil (protection device) with a "reversing heatcoil". If the customer's Touchtone began to work again, all was fixed. If that didn't do it, a dispatch to the premises was made.
Cable maintenance and repair were common causes of a here-to-fore good, working line suddenly "breaking" a customer's Touchtone. During the course of an 1800-pair "section throw", one or more working pairs could be accidentally reversed.
These days, the polarity sensitive keypad issue is all but gone. Thank heaven.
I want a phone-set with buttons for the other four tone-pairs. :-(
Then you buy a surplus TA/312-PT in good condition and add a TA-955 tone adapter to it. The phones are available on Ebay and the adapters are available from surplus dealers.
Actually, the specifications for TT are a 4x5 grid, and the military was somewhat involved in the R&D process. Back then, the dividing line between Ma Bell and the Feds was rather fuzzy in spots. ATT long lines, and the military phone system, were rather intertwined. Satellites and VOIP, along with other companies actually owning outside plant and long lines/fiber, have made things more distinct. I've seen the 2500 phones with the extra buttons- they supposedly did magical things on the old AUTOVON network, including seizing trunks when needed. In my collection, I used to have a
2500 w/o the * and # buttons- not sure what happened to it. All the copper parts were there for the two missing buttons- they just didn't put buttons above them. Different top cover with the square holes, and 2 less buttons.aem sends...
There was actually a recall on the ones made by a certain manufacture. I never found one but they did make effort to get the word out. My notice came in the phone bill.
-- Herb snipped-for-privacy@herbstein.com
Yeah! AUTOVON. Mostly, when I was near an AUTOVON phone I was told NOT to f**k with the right row of buttons. Not sure what they all did, but you could basically the planet (as far as our military is concerned). I'd suppose louse up my career too at the time. I'm thinking very early 1970's.
-- Herb snipped-for-privacy@herbstein.com
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