An Oldie but goodie!! ????ÿ
My word, now that was a long time ago. There's generations that wouldn't have seen a dial phone, and maybe the current one hasn't seen a push button landline phone either, or a fax machine.
I can remember when I was a kid, we didn't even have a dial phone landline at home, and to call relatives we had use the neighbour's or a payphone, and the payphone meant calling the Operator if the call was to another town. That's what I tell younguns when they don't realise how tough things used to be, plus the fact that the UK emergency number is 999, so on a dial phone it's three quick flicks, but in NZ it's 111 which isn't quick at all, and for which NZ was criticized. Stock response is Crickets.
In between that and now, there's been many inventions that have come and quickly gone. I can remember around 1999 payphones in England having a QWERTY keyboard and small screen so that punters could send text messages to those who were mobile.
You've raised an interesting point that I have often talked about with people. I worked for many years behind the bar in an Irish pub in Germany, so the majority of my customers were fellow foreigners. This is a topic that came up from time to time.
In Germany, there are 2 different emergency services numbers. "110" is for the Police, and "112" is for the Fire brigade and the Ambulance service.
As you quite rightly say, in the UK it is "999", while in the USA it is "911". In Australia it is "000".
So, in the old days with the dial phones; if you were laying flat on your back and couldn't get up due to some sort of injury and the dial phone was on a table above you, then you would have to reach up and dial a number without being able to see what you were doing. So, the question asked in the pub was always "which number would you rather ring in that situation?"
For me, "000" (the last hole, cycled all the way and released 3 times) or "111" (the first hole, cycled all the way and released 3 times) seemed to be the only obvious choices.
And with "0" being at bottom-dead-centre, then I guess "000" has a slight advantage over "111".
Does anyone know where "911" comes from? Using 2 different numbers seems counter-intuitive (even on a modern touch/key pad).
The US telephone industry, led by the predominant Bell System, started using x11 numbers as shortcuts such as directory assistance well before the idea of a national number for emergency services took hold. Thus it was easiest to use one of those that hadn't been allocated.
There's generations that wouldn't have seen a dial phone, and maybe the current one hasn't seen a push button landline phone either, or a fax machine.
I can remember when I was a kid, ...
I can recall seeing people use the wooden box wall phones with a fixed mic, handheld receiver, and a hand crank to ring up the operator who would ask "number, please"
I wasn't old enough to make such calls myself. By the time I made calls, we had a fairly ordinary looking phone but missing the dial. Picking up the handset automatically connected you to the operator. A typical Bell System number was 123W2, which meant line 123 from the exchange, code W for ring wire of the pair and polarity, and 2 rings to signal which party on the line was to receive the call. W, J,?ÿ R, and M codes were chosen as most vocally distinct.
Then we got rotary dial.
But even in 1968, I knew a guy in college whose family's home was on one of the last non-Bell exchanges in the state to modernize.
A friend tried to call him one weekend and could not convince the city operator that he wanted to make a person-to-person call (no charge if that person wasn't available when the phone was answered) to Don [unusual last name] in [smalltown] and the number is 12F.
?ÿ
Angel's gonna shoot me, but, this is most definitely not what I thought it was supposed to be about.
@micheal-daubyn-2
It hadn't entered my head that '1' wasn't the first number on the dial, so as you say NZ's 111 was doubly awkward. I'm fairly sure that if one dials 911 in NZ, it will automatically go to 111 - a decade or two ago we had the flurry of USA cop reality shows and a lot of folk got 911 stuck in their minds as the NZ emergency number, which would be easy to do in a panic situation.
Hold the phone. I may have got that all wrong, all these years.
I was seven when we had a dial telephone in our house.?ÿ Prior to that it was the wood box on the wall with a crank as Bill described above.
Even with the dial phone, it was about 1985 or so before that phone was on a line by itself.?ÿ That is, there were several neighbors (6 to 9) who were technically on the same line.?ÿ That meant if you picked up the phone you might discover your line was already in use by one of those neighbors so you had to keep checking in to see when they were done before you could make your call.?ÿ That also meant someone calling you would get a busy signal despite you being available to take a call (neighbor using the line).
The number on her phone wasn't the one adopted at some point as the official non-existent number and thereafter used in all Bell system publications.?ÿ On the TV program Rockford files, Jim's phone had that number.?ÿ Good trivia question: what was that number?
555-1212
It seems to me dialing that number called time.
767-any four digits called time. POPCORN but the CORN wasn't controlling.
555-1212
Wrong.?ÿ The 555 part is right.
i forgot...555-1212 called directory assistance. You could get it in another City by dialing 1-area code-555-1212
With that huge demo dial, she looks like Vanna White's grandmother.
Multi-tone frequencies (MTF) were the death of old party lines. MTF was the DC technology that gave us the push-button-tone dialing instead of rotary dials. The equipment required one of the two phone wires into the house to be a dedicated common ground. The older dial equipment avoided a common ground within a residence because of AC voltage potential and the possibility of hearing 60 cycle (AC) hum on the equipment. The old ring-down party lines were possible due to swapping the DC anodes and cathodes to obtain the coded rings. I've seen as many as 8 parties on one single pair of conductors. Dedicating one of them for a permanent ground killed the party-line. Such is progress...
I don't think I agree with all of that. The key is balance, not grounding.?ÿ
They run the pair of twisted wires all the way from the central office to your phone with good balance and don't upset that by re-grounding anywhere along the way.?ÿ If it picks up hum both wires get the same amount and you listen to your call as the difference between the wires so it mostly cancels out the hum.
No worries! I am enjoying reading all of these posts!!! Gives me warm fuzzies and good memories of my mom. She started working for Pacific Telephone right out of high school! Retired from there 30+ years later, after just about everything was bought up by AT&T. I use to be able to call her by dialing "O" for the operator, and asking for her personally. ????
So, I have a fondness for phones. If it was not for her hard work and the phone company taking such good care of her and I, I would not have what I have today. I am very grateful and blessed. ??
