A 1940 educational short by Bell Telephone to show customers that were recieving new dial phones how to use the new device, and why they were getting these new sets. From Archive.org: archive.org/details/DialComesToT
All this so that in the distant future, your great-grandchildren can receive spam robo calls telling them that their car's warranty is about to expire.
@Thx1138sober Or that they're going to be arrested because their social security number has been associated with criminal activity, which of course they can avoid if they just pay money by way of buying Google gift cards.
I love how at that time they needed a 20 minutes film to explain people just how to dial a number on a rotary phone, but nowadays when you get an iPhone they don’t even ship it with a manual.
Not only that but telephone operators were very polite and helpful. True customer service. You could call them for many things. The time, the weather, etc. I remember my mom calling our neighbor's son in Europe in the Army during the 1970s and having an operator put the call through. In fact my mom was a telephone operator briefly.
@@rael5469 Why operators were woman. They tried males and boys first early on with telephones... But men get nasty and cross... So the phone company hired females!
My grandfather was a great man. A farmer born in 1886, knew Civil war veterans, WW1, WW2, and Korea vets. Saw the first airplanes and the moon landing, but not on TV - he had no time for it. I was fortunate enough to spend 3 summers with him, helping him farm. I learned a lot from an OLD man. How times have changed!!
Me too. It’s not the introduction of new stuff that bothers me as much as the taking away of old stuff that I’m still comfortable with. Backwards compatibility used to be important, but it seems not anymore.
My father worked for Bell System. I have his original splicing oak stool, tool sets, and anniversary gifts from the company all marked Bell System. Amazing stuff....
Wow my dad worked for AT&T here in NYC from 1960s till about 2009 and I remember the choices he got for his anniversary gifts Thry offered him it was a catalog.He showed it to all of us and wanted something we all could use we wound up getting this really nice big clock which I still have and works had to take it to be looked at only once.You gotta love those people who grew up during the Great Depression and WW2 they really saw the bad but made them like they say that best generation.
I started as a Long Distance Operator (Traffic Dept) with a supervisor just like that lady! Married the mother of our children from there! Installed residential and business phones. Spliced the cables on poles and in the ground. Did it all, up to 47 years later when I was provisioning internet equipment for the masses. Even turning up equipment in cellular offices for 5 G when I left. All with a high school diploma! They never skimped on the training!
In 1975 I lived in a very rural region of the US. My phone was two rings on a three person party line. Placing a call within town required four digits, direct. To call outside, you needed the operator, a live person. To make a cross country call, you’d first call the local operator to connect you to the state “Bell” system, who, in turn, would place the call for you.
I lived in the mountains of southern Oregon in 1975 and we had a party line then also. We never had to talk to an operator unless you had a question, but you definitely had to take turns using the phone.
Right ! I forgot about the three person phone line system. As a kid - mom would just so mad as the 3 person would spend all day just sitting on the open line. And she would bang the phone hard just to get back to my mom for belly g her to hand up and stop eavesdropping, or should would report her. ( well she did and got a new 3 way line. ) one week later. Put a different person on a third-party line start doing the same thing as the first woman. Shared three-way phone nine ! That would be really funny if used today !
@@billneo how about the “ BELL Company” Break up from their monopoly forced by the government. They were every where and almost ever state as the only phone company.
When Gramps finally got enough nerve up to engage that new telephone , and successfully call his friend , well , I couldn’t help but wipe away a few tears from my eyes . Simply beautiful.
@peterbelanger4094 I hear ya same with my pops and he worked for AT&T!!! And it was other stuff too like using apps he couldn’t understand the concept “so how many channels?” “No no it’s not like channels just choose what you want” it’s like he needed a clicker in his hand and needed to channel surf.Times change but he always said “f**k that times do t change!!!”
You have to appreciate the level of thoughtfulness that the writers put into this script. This formalized style is the best. It treats everyone like they're smart and not the type of dumbing down that we see today.
A telephone operator, dial phone, push phone, even the concept of a standalone land telephone is foreign to kids. All they know is a mobile where you can, among texting, WhatsApping, YouTubing, tiktokking, twittering, photo making etc, also call people. How old fashioned!
@@pastelskies8466 what on earth are you talking about ? Telephones started in the 1870s and 1880s and definitely used wires. The earliest radio (wireless) communications were sometimes called wireless telephony or wireless telegraph, but that was circa 1910.
I remember we had a "party-line"...That was a shared line due to the limited capacity of the phone system back then. We had to wait until our next door neighbor would get off her phone before we could use ours...We often thought she was listening in on our calls...Sometimes we'd even catch her because we could hear her breathing!.
When I was a kid in the early 1960's, you could dial your own phone number, hang up and few seconds later, it would ring. It really pissed of my sister, whenever we did that, because she'd run like the devil, to pick it up, thinking it was one of her friends calling.
We had an upstairs extension phone. If you dialed 1-1-9-1 on one of the phones, it would make the other ring....this worked clear into the 70's. And yeah, it would get my younger sister all ticked off when I'd do it to her. And what about phone exchanges? Instead of a 7-digit phone number, it was two letters (the first two of your exchange) and then 5 digits. One of the popular radio commercials was for a home improvement company and it went "People you know call Maybro, HAzel 1-9988." And when you were calling within your exchange, you only had to dial those last 5 numbers. (edit) I just remembered. One of the classic radio commercials in Pittsburgh during the mid-60's was for another home improvement company...."No money you'll be riskin' when you call Joe Ziskind, so dial this number and do it quick. HAzel-1-7866." And also, before there was 1-800-(whatever), there were toll-free calls that featured the ZEnith exchange.
So glad they improved the open line signal from the way it was in 1940 to my 70s childhood. The sound here is like a mechanical saw grinding its way through a lead pipe, good grief. Bell was almost a governmental agency, really. Probably should've been one. Those old rotary phones were operational until the early 80s.
Loved this! In 1972 when I was 9 we moved into a new home. The Southern Bell guy pulled up in his van and opened up the side door. Displayed inside were the phones, desktop or wall units in all available colors (white, black, yellow, red, pink, avocado, and sky blue). Being the nerdy kid I asked when the new push button phones were coming out. They’ll be out shortly, he said. I asked, what about the new extra buttons (# and *) what are they for. New features, he said. So dad ordered 3 sky blue phones, the one going in the kitchen matched the color of our GE appliances. About a year later a new kid moved into the neighborhood. We went over to his house and, gasp, he had the new push button phones. Dad, can we get the new push button phones. Nope, these work just fine he said. I still have one of the desktop units displayed on a shelf. The Rotary remained in my parents home up until at least the late 80’s.
Miss White nailed her presentation, considering she had to memorise a solid 8 minutes without skipping a beat. Even more amazing it's immortalised on RU-vid 81 years later!
she didn't "memorized" anything, she just knew how the system worked and proceeded to explain it. When I do a presentation over a subject that I know a lot about I also do not "memorize" anything, I just explain the concept, plan or idea I am presenting.
@Paul Morley A phone is any device that you can use to talk to people in real time, where you hear their voice on the other end. How it works and what else it can do, doesn't matter. Hell, you could even say my desk top computer is a phone too, because I can use it to make video or voice calls with Google Voice or apps like Zoom. It technically wouldn't be wrong.
I so enjoyed listening to the lady explain how to make a call. She was so pleasant, courteous and precise and her smile was so friendly and she seemed so kind and helpful. I could work around someone like this all my life and enjoy them everyday!
Strict dress codes for ladies back then. The old Bell System was a strict place to work. I was sent to company schools and learned how to do things the Bell System way.
I worked a cord board in Santa Barbara from '81 to '85. I still have a calculagraph I used. That was the time stamp apparatus to keep the times for the calls.
@@kbobdonahue1966 When you had to take gloves off outside to use them the finger could stick in the hole. The bad old days. As for the operators,I had a girlfriend who would dress and make up like the images of B17 and B29's art. Strangely,nostalgically erotic
I'm now 73 years old. When I was 3 years old I picked up the phone and told the operator that I wanted to talk to my Grandma. She connected me. We lived in a small town. If my Grandmother were still alive I could now do that with my iPhone.
@@bobgillis1137 BUT back THEN it would have cost extra, by the minute. Today there's really no such thing as "long distance", except for out-of-country.
Nowadays, we take for granted monthly updates on our cellular phones. During the time of this film, the convenience of the dial added to the phone must have been a big amazement in that time period. Interestingly, you see the grandfather worrying about the complication of the rotary dial until he tries it for the first time, and the granddaughter, excited for such new technology, peeking at her grandfather to check out his reaction! Beautiful piece of film, worth the whole 20 minutes of it!
70 years after this video, I taught my grandmother how to use the internet for the first time. She was just as nervous, but then just as impressed as Grandfather was about the new rotary dial. :-)
@@MrManfly this girl youtuber made a rotary phone on youtube and its actually a cell phone. Its really cool, look her up shes like some young inventor, super tiny channel go check it out
In 1970 my company threw out all the dial phones and installed touchtone. I took them home and built a switching system so I could turn my Christmas lights on or off using the dial phone. I took the system to the church bizarre at Christmas time and my booth made more money with people paying 50 cents to try them than any other booth.
The dial is actually a spring loaded, speed governed timer. If you dial 0 and let go of the dial, the timer will spring back sending 10 equally spaced pulses which will be picked up by the electronic circuit at the central office. If you dial 9, then 9 pulses, etc.
The grandfather in this film reminded me of my mom when got herself a smart phone. When she learned how to text and send pictures by email, I was very proud of her as the grandfather got acclimated to the new dial phone.
Just realized how old I am, 74. We had The Telephone Co, Southwester Bell, come to the schools and explain to us how the dial phones worked. I still have the 1947 dial phone from home and it still works great. It was fun teaching my 15 year old Grandson how to use the dial phone. He got really excited and called his Mother. You would have thought it was the first phone call he ever made.
Remembering when "It's long distance!!!" made people run to the phone (hurry up, so expensive) and Mom saying "You have to hang up, it's going to storm."
I sure do. Both of them. And "don't talk too long its long distance." LOL! And "call after 5 (or 8); the rates will be cheaper. Also "reversing the charges" and "person to person" so you wouldn't have to pay for the call if someone else answered and your party was not there.
I have an old chronograph watch with indicators on the dial for the long distance price intervals. If you talked up to 2 minutes it was a flat price but 2.01minutes was the same price as 4.00!
I'm old , in my sixties , an older friend of mine while talking on a cell phone will still say stuff like " gotta call you back , I"m on long distance .
@@jettydoom Haven't you heard? 60 is the new 50! Gotta love us Boomers! Your friend is cute. Now my father turns 91 next week and has dementia and can no longer use the telephone. But about 5 or 10 years ago, he would call information (411) to get the number of a business whos name of which he was not sure, but he knew where they were. When the person said they couldn't help he would say "well, you go down the street from your building and turn onto blah blah blah...and would continue. " The lady would inform him that she was in Rhode Island or Wisconsin or some place. My father would get stunned because he thought they were still in the old Bell Telephone building which was located in a town (our county seat) about 20 minutes away! I'd have to tell him "father...the phone company left that building 20 years ago and besides, you have the cable company for phone service now, not Verizon."
I love how everything in this presentation, along with the people, are so slow and deliberate - back in the days before television started speeding up our lives and shortening our attention spans.
Makes me consider my grandmother, who was born on the family farm with no phone (or indoor plumbing), and 3 lights and one outlet in the whole house. She’s still with us today, in this world of touchscreen pocket computers and every modern convenience one could ask for. I asked her once, a few years ago, what it was like to live through that kind of massive change - from heating your bath water on a coal stove to indoor plumbing being installed to cars being commonplace, from ancient 3-channel radios to television to color television, from the first commercial transatlantic flight to men walking on the moon to launching rockets to space every few days and landing them back on earth…just so many things. And you know what she told me? “It’s amazing, yes…all of it. These are all things I could barely even dream of as a child. But you know what - you will likely see the same types of advancement in your lifetime as well.” I hope she’s right!
That's fascinating! My late grandparents said to me once something quite dissimilar: they said "Everything's been invented in our lifetimes; there's nothing left to invent!" I suppose in the face of such overwhelming advancement, they couldn't conceive of how it might possibly continue further!
I'm 40 and that's exactly how I feel about a lot of technologies we have today. Smartphones are a great example- I never imagined we would have super thin screens, pocket-sized computers, or wireless high speed internet, but here I am using all 3.
My grandma had one of these phones all the way up until about 2009. One reason is because you can't just unplug it and replace it, these phones are built into the wall of the house and hers/most homes only have one. It's still there today just not used anymore.
I was at a friend of my grandparents back in the late 70's that still had party lines. Also, my grandfather lived in a town that you only needed to dial the last 5 digits for someone else that lived in town.
I was thinking the same thing. Having an operator place your call is more convenient than dialing it yourself. They push it as progress when it's actually a way to maximize profits.
Before dial, it was all operator interaction. You give the operator the number like MElrose 3333, they would confirm the number MElrose 3333? Then, either you would be connected or told, "Sorry, that number is busy." Until dial, there was no dial tone, ringing tone or busy signal.
@@ChadnNancy you sure got that right. after two years i cant get my teammates to boot an aws ec2 linux instance. but this video can get a guy born in 1885 to dial a phone
It was actually quite smart. Those folks were all used to human-human interaction. Machines doing work for them autonomously wasn't obvious at all for them. Instead of just telling them to turn the meaningless looking wheel, the demonstration showed how the more it was rotated, the more lights, corresponding to numbers, would turn on at the telephone exchange. It instantly told them how the dialed number is really registered, even if all the details obviously weren't explained. They must have also felt that the phone company employees aren't looking down on them. Since the time was spent to show all that, it was assumed they will understand it, like intelligent people. People always like to know why they must do something, not just be told to do something.
So trippy. This change in technology was a once in a lifetime national movement with a veritable army of technicians dispatched all over the country. Now they change how my phone operates every couple of months and i have to figure it out on my own 😅
Most folks are unaware of the detailed infrastructure that supports our daily lives. This short film helps to show what is involved without too many details.
Really, we memorized every phone number we used frequently. I know very few of my frequently used numbers now.....they're all filed, by name in my "contacts" list, and I just hit the "call" button to dial them.
For the longest time I refused to program numbers into my cell phones; my rationale being “If I ever don’t have my phone I want to have the numbers I need to call memorized.” But eventually the number of people became too great and I gave up. Pretty sure I only know my parents’ numbers now.
Now, that memory storage area can be used for better things than strings of 7 or 10 digit numbers. Well, 4 digits actually, the area code (if there was one) was easy and the prefix was a word. Our number 843-xxxx was THornwall 3 then the rest. What did your area have?
This is exactly what I needed to learn today. Thank you. I remember my grandma showing me these old phones when I was young at some museum and trying to teach me, but I couldn't understand. Now I'm 25 and understand
In 1956, my grandparent's house in Rimer, Ohio still had wooden box phones with cranks, 2 shorts and a long ring, party lines, and our 2 maiden aunts ran the switchboard. Operator assisted long distance calls (1+ started in '60) to my grandparents wemt thru my aunt's switchboard, and always started with a 5 minute catch up on everything talk with my aunts until they forwarded the call to grandparents.
In those days one didn’t own the phone equipment; it was loaned to one as part of the phone service. These devices were build like tanks- virtually indestructible! Slamming a phone receiver down in a rage was wonderfully cathartic. It was a non-violent way to demonstrate one’s displeasure with a company or to end a relationship.
I love when Lewis Black said the rotary desk phones were so big and heavy that you could use one to kill a charging puma. I recall those days as well. lol
I remember seeing the phone bill as a kid in the 1970s. The phones were leased, a monthly fee per phone. So when AT&T was broken up around 1984 and you could buy your own phone so many people did. No monthly fee, the phone was paid for before long. You had to drop off the old phones to an AT&T store.
"As soon as man get use to one thing, by galley someone wants to get away from it." That REALLY rings true today, with how FAST things change ESPICALLY websites. "No, I just wondered why they wanted to change something that still works alright." This man is speaking my parents lingo! They old like the old man can't you tell. Speaking of dial tones, you can turn it on and off on cell phones. So that's pretty good! Also the new directory is the first yellow pages?
They had crossbar technology in their telephone exchanges back in 1940! The British Commonwealth was still using step-by-step tech in theirs until much later, with my country, New Zealand, only getting crossbar in the 1980's! I worked on both types, as well as the microprocessor-based tech that replaced it in the 1990's.
I worked at "Western Electric" in the late '50's. When I lived in northern WI even till the early 60's, we had 10 party lines~~the greatest source of info for the town gossipers. LMAO
We had a party line of 5 in the late 70's just outside of Madison in the subdivision. It had to be one of the last offered because it was gone a few years later and mom was still pinching pennies.
My mother- in- law still thinks she's on a 10 party phone. When she answers the phone with "Are you there?" and talks real loud like the local battery on the phone is getting flat.
I remember being able to get an operator by pressing the 0 even in the 90s. Think that you still can get one on landline service with some carriers, for international long distance
I was a long distance operator for about 18 years. I started with Southern Bell which became South Central Bell. I transferred to Southwestern Bell which later became AT&T. The lower rates began at 5:00 p.m. and they got very low at 11:00 p.m. The cheap rates were in effect from Friday night until Monday morning. I hated the job most of the time, but I look back on those days fondly now. The job wasn't so bad after all.
Thank you for posting this. Back then, I never could figure out those silly dials. I went many years without making a phone call after those things came out.
He kinda did when talking to his friend Ed at about 2:40 telling him that there were airplanes doing skywriting over the town to hoax the eyedroppers on the line who were muffling the signal.
16:10 I liked when Grampa silently chastised the nosy neighbor. When that woman wasn't collecting dirt by way of phone, she was probably sitting in her front window scouting her street for any activity she disapproved of.
1940 - 30 minutes to show people how to spin a dial. 2020- smartphones, thousands of apps, phone settings, viruses, operating systems and no instruction manuals for any of it.
What people fail to realize is we no longer use telephones. It's called a "Smartphone" but it's really a computer with a program (app) to allow you to communicate with other devices with the same technology. Many "smartphones" are more powerful than the desktop/laptop you are using in the house.
I had mine for three years before a friend showed me that it had a flashlight feature. There are no doubt lots of things that it can do that I don't just don't know how to do, but am unaware exist. Why didn't it come with an instruction book?
To really get a grip on how old this is, this was made back in 1940. Both of my parents were born in 1941 and both passed away when they were around 80. 😮
Yeah, I wonder how long between the release of the new system with that awful dialtone till they changed it to the one I was familiar with in the 60s, or a less irritating one before the 60s version, due to complaints from the public about how awful it was. I can't imagine picking up a phone and hearing that sound.
It’s crazy to me that as a 26 year old I remember using a dial phone to call my grandmother in the 90’s. The leaps in technology I witnessed in my short life so far are insane sometimes, I can’t imagine what the western world looks like in 20 more years.
The first telephone I remember using had no dial. You just gave an operator the number you wanted to call. I remember being really interested in the new switching equipment when the town went over to dial.
Recently retired from the phone company and it amazed me that much of the same terminology is still used today; central office, cutovers, plant department. Cable is still installed the same way, strand is placed the the cable is lashed to it, although it’s pretty much all fiber these days.
Mary, of "Peter Paul and Mary" was commenting on telephones with some banter during a performance. She said, "We never use to have the problem of 'where is the phone?' It was always on the little table in the hallway attached to the wall with a cord." and... "Now they have 'call waiting' which allows you to be rude to TWO people at the same time."
@ Charles, I have a pen-pal in NY who has a nearby friend. Pen-pal and Friend will be talking and then the FRIEND says OOPS! Have a call coming in and leaves my pen-pal hanging! The friend is VERY RUDE!
fun fact the dialing signal is the same as the hang-up switch. the dial repeatedly pulses it, if you have a phone with no dial you you could still enter a number by spamming the hang-up button with a finger the correct amount of times. even though these phones are no longer used may digital systems are still backwards compatable
I was going to write the same thing but you said it better. Realize that in less than 100 years we went from a dial phone to wireless cells that play videos, games, music and have internet (itself a modern marvel) access in a package smaller than a telephone handset of old. Technology has given us more benefits in the past 100-150 years than the preceding thousands of years. We truly do live in a mind-boggling time.
@@jeffg1524 My Grandfather was born in 1908. He didn’t see his first electric lightbulb until he was twenty-years-old. He said he: “…just had to figure out how it worked….”. He unscrewed the lightbulb and stuck his thumb in the socket. He said he: “… found out quickly how it worked!”. He grew up on a ranch in Montana. They heated the small wooden house with a cast iron wood burning stove. They used the same stove to do all their cooking. There was no electricity. They used oil burning lanterns for lighting. They had no telephone, no refrigeration, no appliances of any kind, no radio, no television, no record player. They had no running water and therefore no sink, no bathtub and no toilet (no toilet paper). Their water was drawn from a well that was no more than a hole in the ground with a bucket and a rope. Sometimes one would pull up a drowned rat along with the water. They road to the distant small town upon a horse drawn wagon. He said that when winter came they used barrel staves [The young generation probably has no idea what a barrel stave is.] tied to their shoes with rope as makeshift snow skis. Before he died at the age of ninety-two he had flown his own private small airplane and flew as a customer on commercial jet airliners. He and his family of course came to have a comfortable home with all the modern conveniences. As a young man he had an office job for the railroads where he would type through three layers of carbon paper on a manual typewriter. That built some very strong fingers! There were no computers and no keyboards back then. He bought his first electric typewriter in the 1960’s and for him, and all the family, it was a marvel. The family gathered around his color television to watch the first moon landing in 1969. I was eleven-years-old at the time and there are no words to describe how thrilling this momentous event was for us and the whole world. He bought a small handheld four function calculator when they were first available in the 1970’s. It cost $100 then which was like spending $500 now. If you had asked him about “The Good Old Days” he would have told you that life back then was a miserable struggle against almost starving and freezing to death. I have only spoken about technological things that have made our lives more secure, comfortable and convenient. During over the first two thirds of my grandfathers life non-male, non-white, non-christian, non-hetero people were, to varying degrees, openly suppressed, denigrated, devalued, humiliated, scorned, brutalized, ostracized and murdered. The “Good Old Days” never existed; it is a naive fantasy.
@@clieding Absolutely, Chris. People who pine for the days before modern technology have no idea what they're talking about. Do we really want to go back to the days of horse and buggy, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, international travel by sail, no modern, life-saving medicine, etc....I mean c'mon. Most would wilt and curl up into a feeble ball if they had to face that kind of life. And do we really want to go back to a time where women couldn't vote and minorities were treated as less than human? To those who want a "simpler" time be thankful you live in this time, because for most of human history just surviving was the principal focus of daily life.
Yes, all because of the TCP/IP network architecture that was designed going back to the 1950's with DARPA. Vint Cerf who works for Google was one of the primary engineers in this project. The most ingenious invention ever was TCP/IP. For me at least it is as I work in this same field. 🙂
Twenty years ago at my sister's house her daughter's phone broke and my sister told her to use the phone in the dining room. "That old phone has never worked" said my niece. "But I talked on it just the other day" said my sister. Then my niece went into the dining room and lifted the receiver and started stabbing her finger into the holes on the dial ring like it was a touch-tone phone. "Mom, I told you, this old phone won't work". It never has.
ROFLMAO I can see that happening. What a great family memory to have. I bet it was so funny when your sister showed your niece how to use the rotary phone.☎😂
@@midcenturymodern9330 ... a few years ago I changed from the phone company to my cable company, which uses a modem to tie in the land-line. Believe it or not, that modem supports pulse dialing and has enough juice to ring the bells on all 3 rotary phones in my home. One of them is a 20s vintage style like in this video's stage demo that's meant to be mounted under the counter in a business. It also has the external (extra loud) bell that would be mounted remotely so you could hear it all over the store.
@@midcenturymodern9330 ... you can thank the cost of labor for that. Even though older phones needed some maintenance the wear items were pretty easy to replace. These days you just pop in a new $10 phone (made outside the USA) every few years. I doubt we could make a phone for that price in this country.
I'm 49 and I grew up in a small Southern town. These rotary dial phones were what we had for much of my childhood. As I recall we didn't get our first touchtone phone until sometime in the second half of the 80s. Also, until some point around the mid-80s, we only had to dial five numbers for local calls.
You could still get a phone with the 'pulse' feature (simulating dialing) on push button phones clear up until the early 90's. Because touch tone carried an extra $1 a month on your phone bill.
Just had one installed last week, and I love it! Took a while to familiarize myself with this modern marvel, but SO much better than the party line, or making Earnestine patch me through long distance over the holidays!
I have watched this video exactly 10 years after it's uploaded. I remember 2012 as yesterday though, could be my best years, also the internet itself. Thank you for uploading this! About the people itself and the video, I don't feel out of it. 20th century, especially after Edwardian Era, everything feels modern to me and I am so lucky that I have used dial-up phone at my grandma's house when I was 6. I was born in '97.
I sent this to my mom a few years ago (she is a retired operator from AT&T) when she was complaining about learning her first iPhone. We had a great laugh
The most amazing thing about rotary dial phones is the Strowger switch that makes them possible and the story behind its invention. Almon Strowger was an undertaker who got fed up with the telephone operator sending calls to his rivals so he invented a method of "dialing" a number to connect to another telephone. Just seeing one of these devices operating is quite mesmerizing, they're so clever and were still in use in the UK in some remote exchanges in 1990. Pretty good for something invented in 1889. Google the name, it's fascinating.
Yes fantastic I watched the bt video on RU-vid about telephone exchanges. The step by step (Strowger) system, cross bar system, Reed really, and system x a modern digital exchange? It was very interesting to see how how the technology developed through the decades to what we have now. Have I missed anything are modern digital telephone exchanges still based on System X? Great video thanks for sharing.
@@m3snusteve It’s interesting that the initial dial workhorse hardware was not a Bell System invention, although Bell improved upon it. I don’t know what the most modern circuit switching is; packet switching on digital networks.
The most impressive part is trying to make an effort to minimize downtime rather than simply saying it's going to be offline for an hour or two for maintenance.
My mother was a Bell operator in the late 1940s. So many calls had to be placed by the operator in those days. Imagine Grandpa in this video seeing an iPhone today.
@@TheOzthewiz I also don't want to have to have and conversation with the damned phone to tell it what to do. It's aready spying on me. I just want to crank the thing on the wall and tell a human (operator) who I want to talk to.
@@jdinhuntsvilleal4514 The problem is that fewer and fewer homes even have wires to the house. I'm an Electrical Engineer and could design an interface for a dial phone to your cell phone if there was a huge demand. Any inverstors out there?
I love this. Simpler more wholesome times, sigh. I was born in late 1959, so I grew up with the old school rotary phones. I can remember when we got the push button phones in the late 70s. Then we got answering machines, call waiting, and call forwarding around the same time. We used to remember a bunch of numbers. I can still remember our first two phone numbers from the 60s and 70s. My cell has the old school ring tone that I remember from my childhood.
I also have the original ringtone. What I really miss is the fact that people actually talked on the phone. I don't like that today people feel it's ok to text instead of talking.
I have my cell phone set to an old fashion ring as well and my 30 something daughters absolutely think it’s the most hilarious thing ever! I just turn around and remind them how stupid it is they always have their phones on “silent“ so when they lose their phones they’re in a major panic and I never fail to tell them, “Well IF you left your ring ON so you could actually HEAR it ring, it would be a LOT easier to find! Good luck!“ The little freaks can actually hear that vibration noise the phone makes. The mortal fear that they have of making an embarrassing sound somewhere it’s absolutely comical and so typical of their millennial generation. (They’re good girls though. Really hard workers.)
