converting an old rotary phone to work now

[disneybuff99]

I just got an old rotary phone from an antique store - the original cord is attached - I want to hook it up and use it in my home - what do I do??

[David L. Martel]

Disney,

Check with your phone company to be sure that your local exchange can process rotary information or make a converter to take the rotary signals (pulses) and convert them to tone dialing. My local exchange still accepts pulse dialing but many businesses use voice mail systems that aren't compatible with pulse dialing.

Dave M.

[terry]

It may work just as is. Certainly likely to be able to answer an incoming call; o if it is in working condition at all.

Many telephone lines, at least those from regular 'line' telcos. Will still accept the pulses from the rotary dial.

We have such a dial equipped phone in our hallway and it works just fine, although we tend to use a cordless phone because of ease of use and ease of pushing buttons and redialling etc.

But when there is the occasional power outage with traditional telephone systems, often equipped with 24 hour battery back-up, nothing works better than a plain old fashioned rotary phone.

If you want to test it before hooking up connect a 9 volt battery to the two wires (often red and green) to see if you hear a click in the earpiece, also try blowing or talking into the microphone part and see if you hear something; it's called side-tone (i.e. you should be able to hear yourself slightly. (Side tone sometimes is called 'Spitch') if so the phone may work.

However depending on the original quality of the phone (Bell system standard/Western Elctric/ AE Co. Chicago, for example , whether it is in good condition and its model you may or may not get good quality voice transmission, both ways. Although judging by some of the cheap junk phones that have been sold and in some cases given away an older standard rotary phone that meets international standards may be better! I have pre-1950s phones that work just fine.

[Special Ed]

To test if it works, remove cover from wall jack, touch red and green wires from phone to same colors on jack. Listen for dial tone. If you get one, so far so good.

Next screw the red and green wires from the phone to the jack and test for outgoing and incoming phone calls. If it works, you can just leave it that way-- or attach an RJ11 plug to the phone so you can use it an any jack.

[Kurt Ullman]

Would you be able to use it for outgoing calls or just incoming?

[terry]

.

David makes good point ............. while you may able to dial local and long distance numbers, many/most voice-mail and automated answering and directory systems cannot respond to dial pulses once you have connected through the phone system to them. Many still say "Press X for such and such .... . Or stay on the line to be answered (Hopefully by a real live human being!!!!!).

BTW: Have seen one or two phone oddities from time to time. There was one European phone that had 12 rotary dial numbers on it. Also the standard speed of the dial pulses in North America and the UK used to be/is ten pulses per second. So it takes one second to dial zero! Old style rotary dial payphones outside sometimes used get pretty slow in cold weather and below about eight pulse per second the telephone equipment in the nice warm telephone building would misdial and one could get wrong numbers. And lose the money inserted! So sometimes one needed to push the dial back round to get enough speed.

Also the ratio of make/break of the dial pulses was slightly different in different countries. Recalling in the UK each pulse around 66% break, 34% make. In North America it was IIRC closer to 70% break etc.

So if this is some unusual manufacture of phone from say Chechloslovakia, or some made up abomination of a 'fake vintage' phone made in Taiwan or somewhere, expect anything in way of performance on a standard North American telephone connection! Which is, btw, why, at one time, Bell System and other companies discouraged the installation/ connection of 'other' phones to their lines; too many problems and trouble calls!

Oh. BTW don't think a rotary dial phone will work on any of the VOIP (internet connected) services such as Skype!!!!!!

[George]

I don't understand why a rotary phone would be better. Touch tone phones are also powered by the loop so if the loop happens to be on battery the touch tone phone will still work just as well as a rotary phone.

[Special Ed]

Both if it's working properly-- though as others have pointed out, there is no touch tone capability so you couldn't Press One For English..... Way back when, Radio Shack used to sell a pocket sized touch-tone generator-- or maybe hold the speaker of your cellie up to the mouthpiece of the old phone and enter them that way.

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Call the phone company. Phones with cords requires special expertise by trained technicians from the phone company. Only they know the proper wires to hook up to in the box. They can come out on Thursday between 2:00 and

4:00.

[mm]

I think the odds are more than 1/2 that it will work fine. Just conect one of the two wires from the phone to the red wire on the wall and the other to the green. Which is red and which is green don't matter with dial phones, but if they do have colors, you might want to attach red to red and green to green.

This is most easy if you have a box mounted on the surface somewhere, because they have covers that come off, but if all your phone jacks are below the surface of the wall, with only the hole sticking out, you can still take off the wall plate and make your connections there.

If your phone system no longer works with dial phones, you still won't harm the phone system. They're designed to handle even long short circuits, much longer than the split-second pulse-shorts that rotary phones make.

I haven't tested this for decades, but used to be, if the red and green were shorted to each other for a long time, 50 seconds in a row?, the line would go almost dead (no dial tone but maybe some background noise) and I had to wait for about 10 minutes before the dial tone came back. No big deal.

I have a dial phone in my basement, probably not as old or pretty as yours, and it works fine.

[Marilyn & Bob]

I believe that the old rotary phones were 3 wire, not two. It's been a long time, but I think it was red/green/yellow (or was it red/green/black) They connected to the matched red and green on the jack with the third color attached to the red (again, I think). The third wire was necessary to power the bell (yes, those phones had mechanical bells).

[J. Clarke]

Ring voltage comes in on the talk pair. If you're holding it when a ring comes through you can get quite a surprise.

Standard pairings are red-green for line 1 and yellow-black for line

1. Been that way as long as I can remember, in the US anyway.

[Steve Barker DLT]

Plug it in, it should work. The system is backward compatible in most areas.

s

[mm]

I don't know all phones from all years, and there may well be 3 wire phones, but there are certainly plenty of two wire dial phones**. The cord may have 4 wires but in that case only the red and green are for talking. . Princess phones used the other two wires for a light, but I don't think he has a princess.

My oldest phone would go in the living room if I had a jack there. It's probably older than I am, 61, but has only two wires.

Its bottom is like half a grapefruit face down, but black with a dial on the front, and a four pronged almost bakelite cradle above it that holds the handset maybe two inches higher than the grapefruit. The sillhouette of this phone is often used to indicate Ma Bell or telephones in general.

I bought it in 1967 at Olsen's Electronics, on Western Avenue in Chicago ,across the street from Allied Radio. They had a big 3 foot x3x3 box full of phones for 99 cents, plus a handset from another box for 15 cents. I bought three handsets but only one phone. I wish I'd bought more. They must have been at least 20 years old at that time.

Just two wires.

**I remember the day I came home from school and our non-dial phones were changed for dial phones. The desk phone in my parents' room was changed totally, but the wall phone, which was a little rectangular box with a hook for the handset, was still there. The repairman had taken off the flat 2x2" top and replaced it with a top that had a dial. I didn't take it apart, but I'm sure he spliced the dial into one of the wires inside. ...Unless he did change the phone and the rest lookesd so much alike that I missed it.

[gfretwell]

That was for selective ringing on a party line. Just hook the green and yellow to the green on the new jack. Red to red.

[Steve Kraus]

Plug? What's that?

[Jim Redelfs]

You are correct.

I agree.

Since there are still many, MANY rotary phones in service out there, I am unaware of any PUBLIC switch that does not respond to dial pulses.

Also, more and more services that, in the past, required Touchtone (press '1' for this, '2' for that), are converting to voice response so an old dial pulse phone is actually returning to nearly full functionality.

What goes around, comes around...

[gfretwell]

I still have two hooked up. One is an old pay phone I have outside by the pool (they are quite weather resistant). The other was the original phone in this 40 year old house and still has the telco printed phone number on the dial face. Sprint/Embarq still supports rotary dialing. Of the half dozen phones we have hooked up here only one is not W/E.

[Marilyn & Bob]

Yes that is exactly what I meant. You need to connect both the green and the yellow wires from the phone cord (thanks for the memory trigger) to the green wire on the jack or the bell will not ring.

[disneybuff99]

THANK YOU TO ALL - next question I have - I got the phone connected and it works, I've received and made calls - only thing is that the volume I Hear is low, the other person hears me fine, but the sound I hear is low, there appears to be maybe a volume dial on the bottom of the phone but that doesn't help - is there anything else I could do to increase the volume of the earpiece?