No secretary was without one of these dialer pens.
Posted on 11/18/2013 4:43:26 AM PST by Vigilanteman
Long before smartphones and text messages made the world instantly available with a split-second tap, reaching out to touch someone could take a full 10 seconds.
That was just to dial a number, ticked out one deliberate digit at a time, on a mechanical wheel owned by the phone company.
Monday marks 50 years since the United States began saying goodbye to the classic rotary phone, replaced by touch-tone services that slashed dialing time and foreshadowed a digital revolution that keeps reshuffling everyday communication.
The push-buttons became an especially big deal in Western Pennsylvania, where Carnegie and Greensburg were first in the country to see complete rollouts of the optional upgrade in November 1963.
Bell Telephone Co. customers could pay $1.50 a month for the pleasure and convenience of touch-tone, according to newspaper reports at the time.
“All of the many things we can do by phone — without interacting with a human — got an awful lot easier with the touch-tone,” said Jon Peha, a professor in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “The introduction allowed you to interact with automated systems on the other end in an easy way.”
Although the pound and star keys would not appear until 1968, the first 10-button sets largely resembled the keypads used on billions of mobile and other phones worldwide. The Tribune-Review described the touch-tone approach as “space-age telephony” of “missile-like speed and musical tones” when Greensburg phone users tested the technology in early 1961.
(Excerpt) Read more at triblive.com ...
I stand corrected. And that’s a good thing because polio is easier to spell.
Yes, they do. I have a rotary phone still in use in my house and one in my garage. I also have push-button phones in each building. I also have DSL internet access on those same lines.
If I am not mistaken, the earliest phones will still work on today's systems. The reason is that no change-out of technology could take place simultaneously everywhere. Device have to be backward compatible. The old "land-line" system will last until it is finally scrapped someday in the far distant future.
Miraculously, new technology continues to function in the old system.
When I was a kid in a small Alaskan village, we had the old crank type wall phones too, but no operator. Every house had their own ring kind of like morse code, Three shorts and a long or two longs two short etc.
Also, wern't there a lot of ways to beat the phone co. in Abbey Hoffmans "Steel this book". A friend of mine used one of those tricks using the payphone at school and got to a hotel in Manhatten.
“Prank phone calls were big in the 1970s. That was before people at home had caller ID so you could have all kinds of fun without getting caught. “
A rite of passage back then.
Do you have Sir Walter Raleigh in the can?
Is your refrigerator running?
What are you specials? Can you repeat that?..again...again...
“Did you ever use the automated collect call system to leave a message for your parents? for example your parents got a call that went like this: “you have a collect call from (pickmeupatthemall). will you accept the charges?” and then your parents would hang up and then go pick you up at the mall. “
Never did that one but we did have a code worked out for when us kids were leaving home and traveling we’d call home collect using a historical name play like Abel Lincoln or Georgio Washington to let the parents know we’d arrived safe.
the advances from those days is pretty amazing
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No secretary was without one of these dialer pens.
Mom used to put a dime in my sneaker. When it was time to get picked up (pool, bowling alley, whatever), I’d call from the pay phone, ring three times, and hang up.
It was possible to tap-dial calls that way out of some pay phones without the coin. I would not do that now (more honest now) but that seemed a cool trick at the time (mid seventies).
By the seventies touch tones were available most places in the USA. But in many locales all they did was to trigger pulse dialers on the telephone poles.
In many systems, the ringback tone heard at the calling phone was not synchronized with the ringer that sounded at the called phone. So “ring me 3 times” wasn’t always literally controllable.
I don’t know how Google manages to fund its Google Voice. Advertisers? Maybe they show ads that they think are associated with kinds of businesses that you called? But it’s free in the USA still. While Google does some bad things, so do normal phone companies... to me, trying to keep track of who is “worse” is a wash and not even a spiritually gainful pursuit. Now if someone was clearly “better” I’d choose them, but I don’t know who.
A guy at our church passed away years ago. I didn’t really know him, but helped out at his memorial service. He had either invented, or was on the team that developed the touch tone pad. He also developed a shipborne radar range finder in WWII that was named after him - Lorentz or something iirc.
One of the old guys mentioned that he was on a ship, and that radar saved thousands of lives. (The Japs would need to fire a round to judge the distance, while we were able to know the distance and hit them with our first round).
He had all sorts of other inventions at Bell. Always felt bad that I never know what some of the people around me are like until they pass away.
When TT had a monthly fee I showed everyone how to reverse the red and green wires in their jacks.
Voila,free Touchtone.
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“Never did that one but we did have a code worked out for when us kids were leaving home and traveling we’d call home collect using a historical name play like Abel Lincoln or Georgio Washington to let the parents know we’d arrived safe.
“
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We used person-to-person giving our own name and of course we weren’t home to take the call.. That was our “arrived safely” contact.
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Yes, people think that a certain episode of WKRP in which a paranoid Dr. Johnny Fever freaked out over the possible arrival of the phone cops was just fiction.
It wasn’t. There WERE phone cops back then. I know that for a fact.
Like most ancient people I was sick of living so long ago. So I gathered my family and we went in search of a better life. After a week of walking we found a Zippo, a cell phone and an Neanderthal express credit card. 2 days later we found a Walmart super store. Our lives have changed.
****
You must have walked really fast to get here in one week! Welcome!
I hope your children haven’t had problems adjusting to our lower education standards.
The list of Bell Labs inventions / finds is staggering.
Wish I could find the flowchart I once had that showed all the spinoff companies from the old Ma Bell - boggles the mind.
The kids do seem less intuitive. Yes we walked much faster when we stepped into that worm hole.
The dial tone is an “A” and can be uses to tune your guitar.
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