https://blog.waleson.com/2024/10/bakelite-to-future-1950s-ro...
Definitely bookmarking your post
There's something so Brooklyn / Portland about wanting to relive this for the romance. It sucked.
This is useful for dialing from a phone with the dial intentionally disabled or removed.
Back in 1996, I was living in Almaden Valley (South San Jose) and we had underground utilities. We also lived on top of an underground stream. After a rainstorm, water got in and intermittently shorted out the phone line. It was clicking like crazy!
I was on my cool new Motorola StarTAC talking with Pacific Bell to report the problem. Then I heard a loud knock on the door: "San Jose Police. Open up!"
I asked the officers what the problem was and they said "We got a 911 call with no one on the line. We tried to call you back, but no one answered. So we had to come out and investigate."
I invited them in and said, "I think I know what happened." They followed me over to the landline speakerphone in the kitchen and listened to the clicking.
Then I explained, "You remember the old rotary dial phones? They worked by making and breaking the circuit, just like this clicking. Even if we all have touch-tone phones these days, the phone lines are still compatible with the rotary dial. So somewhere in the midst of all this clicking, there were nine fast clicks in a row, and then one click, and one more. And that dialed 911. Sorry about that!"
(I guess the international number 112 is a compromise. Still a low number of clicks, but I suppose the timing would be more difficult to get right?)
Going back a little further it was common not to have a dial at all, with the operator being signalled immediately, literally patching your call manually through a series of other locations.
I know about the switchhook trick from friend's father who actually used it to bypass this measure on a phone installed at his military unit during the mandatory military service.
I too have had little luck getting my hardware to activate the phone’s chimes but that at least led me to another fun quirk. The cabling for the phone has named wires that corresponded to the original switchboard connectors, which looked like enormous headphone jacks. They had two contacts: one at the tip of the plug and one for the collar that sits around the plug behind the tip, separated by insulation. The collar is ring shaped so this part of the circuit is called the ring connection.
Whoever dreamt that naming scheme up? It would be like calling the dial — where you set in the number you wanted to dial with you hand — the hand-set! Or calling a mute button the ear-peace!
You succeeded. I was transported back to better times.
I'll take that genuine Old Web energy over a Substack or Reddit post any day. Thanks for being yourself and not just another drone. <3
We found all kinds of tricks to protect our fingers. Today I would try to build a manual dialer based of an ESP32 or something :)
