I watch a lot of old movies from the 50s and 60s. I never understand why it is, when those old rotary dial phones would not work, or someone hangs up, the person on the phone would keep hitting the buttons that normally hang up the phone (under the handset). Is this just a theatrical thing, or did people really do that, and if they did, why? It seems stupid because all it does is repeatedly hangup and get the dialtone. But maybe back then there was a reason.
Actually I know that those rotary phones actually made a series of clicks in the wires, so maybe there was a reason???
Tapping the cradle buttons does not hang up the phone. They must remain depressed for about two seconds. Rapidly depressing the buttons flashes the light on the operator's switchboard.
Actually, you can dial a number by tapping the hand-set buttons. The clicks are the same as the stepping switch inside the instrument. If you force the dial, you'll get the wrong number inasmuch as the clicks are time sensitive.
It got the operator's attention. Girl is sitting in front of a huge board - a light on, or a light off is her cue. If one starts flashing, it will get her attention quicker. [I think there was an audible sometimes, too-- I've had annoyed operators tell me to stop 'flashing the hook'.]
I don't remember the contacts failing on those old 500 phones, but that was also a way to make sure they were 'loose'.
You could dial a number with those clicks. Each click was a digit- pause a couple seconds between numbers.
And, not particularly germane to the actual question, but before rotary there were hand cranks to alert the operator who you then told who to connect you to -- an early memory in elementary school of being embarrassed that had to ask how to use a dial phone in school office to call mother that was sick and needed to be picked up early--I didn't know we had a _number_ that folks in town dialed, we had a "ring" and you told the operator... :)
(Was late 50s before the phone company ran lines out of town and connected us to dialup; prior to that we ran and maintained the lines w/ neighbors ourselves and connected at the edge of town...)
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Tehnically, all the responses so far are correct IF certain rules are followed; blindly tapping the button on a phone on residential lines though was not likely to get anything to happen. Most people did it out of frustration except say on a hotel "PBX" or more likely a key system, sometimes tapping it would get the operator, IF it was done properly. In the days before rotary dialling, there was always an operator standing by. In the days OF rotary dialing, the operator was no longer sitting at the console to see any flashing or otherwise on the line. The flashing had to math digit timing requirements or it simply did nothing. Phackers and phone people are/were about the only ones to know how to do this reliably and even they made mistakes once 7-digit dialling happened. I remember our first phone number was 99-R. Then came rotary and it was 4 digits for a few years. and then 7 digits. Then came dialable area codes and 10 or 11 digit dialling to get a different area. Prior to that you had to call the opearator for a long distance call. Oh, and information was free. When today's DTMF (dual-tone multifrequency) dialling came along, they kept the old rotary dial detection for many years and then slowly started dropping the detection of rotary signalling. Since it's just a software setting in today's CO (Central Office) software it's easy to switch it off or on because for a lot of years people still kept their old rotary phones. I got to learn a lot of this as manager for a compliance testing lab for worldwide telecom compliance.
In many cases, it was the buttons getting jammed in the holes in the cradle. In filthy environments, grit (or something sticky) would sometimes get down in there, and those early plastics would sometimes gall, or the pivot point inside would be totally gummed up. I've repaired more than one old phone for people, back in the day, by field-stripping it, and washing all the plastic parts in sink or dishwasher, and using electronic cleaner on the internal moving parts. Some of my trashpicked/salvaged/garage sale phones were so filthy I brought them home in a plastic bag, but unless they were actually rusty inside, I could usually bring them back to life. Unlike modern throw-away phones, those old WE 500/2500s were designed for a several-decade service life. There are ones older than I am still in daily service.
It was the early 70's when I was part of the telephone company that brought Summit, NY to the dial age. [and there were plenty of folks who didn't appreciate it]
It had been a 2 person operation before that. Joe owned and operated it-- his wife ran the switchboard. There were 20-some party lines that were run on old barbed wire fences in places. [try that with your modern telephones!]
Joe had a barn full of those old oak crank phones. A few of his customers already had the 'receiver' phones & they would flash for the operator to pick up. Joe bought them used so some even had dials & folks could actually dial '0' with results.
I remember the old party lines where you'd pick up the phone and someone else was using it and you had to hang up and wait til it was free. Also in those days, we only had one radio for the whole house. Went to the movies once a week to see shows and newsreels. How did we ever survive? I'm sitting here in den with 2 computers, a cable TV, telephone land line, cell phone, radio and three atomic clocks and they're just mine - wife has her own setup in other rooms ;)
I've heard stories like that from the E TN/SE VA area, too... :)
There wasn't ever anything much like that out here on the High Plains; it was either a local co-op or just informal groupings of neighbors like ours depending on just how far from civilization the area was. We were relatively close to town so wasn't terribly difficult to string the
30-40 miles of line for a bunch of farmers. Farther away from towns where it actually req'd them to have their own switchboards and so on was much more difficult (and revenue-requiring) project so there were several local telco's started or formal co-op's but none I'm aware of that were just one- or two-man shows as the service areas are comparatively much larger as the population density is so much lower than back east (even central/eastern KS/OK/NE, etc., are a whole different world than W KS/OK-TX panhandles/E CO).
I remember that. Also, when I moved to a small town in 1988, they still had an old mechanical exchange with a translator device for tone dialing. I would call a local number:
7-0212
(yes, we dialed 5 digits for local calls. That was until the new ESS exchange was put in in the early 1990s)
and it would take a long time to connect, while you could hear:
I was visiting some relativesvthat were on a party line when direct distance dialing was made available. The operator still got involved when you called long distance. You had to give YOUR number.
Old phones were certainly built to last - I had a couple when I lived in England, one from the 1960s and one from the 1940s (a GPO 706 and 164) that were still working.
One day I'll ship them over to the US and see if I can get them working with the US system (I'm not sure to what extent US exchanges still emulate the old strowger-type exchanges - and then there'd probably be some screwing around with some of the internal components to do, but I think "in theory" it might be possible to get them to work)
Well, it works when there is a manual switchboard and a switchboard operator. It flashes the light on her board, which attracts more attention than a glowing light.
I think it's a stage direction left over from the days of switchboard operators. New York City had dial phones in the 30's iirc, and certainly the 40's, based on movies I've seen**, but my home in a small city in Western Pa. didn't have dial phones until 1955 or 56.
I went to school one day and when I got home, the phone in my parents bedroom had been changed to one with a dial, and the one in the kitchen had had its flat top removed and replaced with one with a dial facing forward, standing on top.
After that, we dialed, but before then we would pick up the handset and wait until the operator came on. She would say "Number, plea-uz" and after we gave her a number, it might have made a ringing sound until someone answered. I can't remember. But if the line was busy, the operator came back and said, "The line is busssssy". Her pronunciation of busy is where they got the busy signal, imnsho.
When my mother first moved to this town of 50,000 in 1945, she would tell the operator, OLiver 4-3111, please, or OLiver 4-2347. After a couple days, the operator said, "You don't have to say Oliver 4****, ma'am. They're all Oliver 4." There may have been other Olivers, but everything more than about 20*** miles away was long distance. To call long distance, you said "Long Distance, please" and she connected you to the long distance operator. ***Actually, I don't really know. We didn't know any farmers, and everyone we knew was within 5 miles, or greater than 50, or greater than 20 and in the next state.
****Hmmm. The four digits after Oliver 4 are enough for 10,000 numbers, but there were 50,000 people and businesses. Families were bigger then, but I think this means not everyone had a phone.
**They might have anacrhonisms backwards in the movies, but not fowards. They didn't put dial phones in movies before they were actually in use.
When we left that small city in Pa. we moved to the north suburbs of Indianapolis. When my mother called for a telephone, she was advised to get a party line and that there would be no one else on it (but it was cheaper). And that was the case for the next 7 years. When another party showed up, she signed up for a private line.
My father was a dentist. We had a table radio in the kitchen and a floor radio in the living room. I remember the day about 1954 that they deliverd the tv and took the radio up to the attic. Before then my brother and I, or maybe just my brother, would go to a neighbor just to see what tv was like.
Not about phones but electricity. From '57 to '64 or most of that, lots of tv commercials for REMC. Sung: "Who turned on the lights in the country, for a better life to be? Yes REMC brought the lights for a better life to be." Rural Electfication something.
I have one in the basement. It still has the shoulder rest that my mother liked. Much easier to have both hands free. But the rubber about 10 or 20 years ago turned into a very viscous liquid. Much of it moved 1/4 inch, exposing very white parts that were in the middle of the sheet of rubber, and a little dripped off the edge. But this all stopped, maybe because it's in the basement now where it never gets over 70.
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