What Is This Thing?

Yes! Because you answered correctly within the first twenty minutes of our grand challenge puzzle, you have won a two week, all-expenses deferred, exclusive right to answer dumb homework questions on CR4.

Yep, says "Bell Telephone" on the side. Do you remember these or do you still have rotaries?

My Mom was a Sak Tel Operator in the 50's and she looked like tompkins from Laugh' In with all the cords and things. LOL

It is for speed dialing dial phones... saves wear and ear on the dialing finger. Note that we still dial a number but push buttons!

At that stage we had a phone with a crank handle. One had to "dial" the number with the length of the turn (1 long and 2 short = 12)

Oh yeah, I can remember the days of blistered/grooved fingers. (>60, as OP suggested.) I never ran into one of these, though.

ROFLMAO even if I did have to read it three times to get it.

Very funny, but almost too subtle. I had to read it several times before I caught on and then everyone was looking at me to see why I was laughing so hard.

I grew up with dial phones, party lines, and five digit phone numbers. My grandma only had four digits in her phone number. The small town where I went to school had its own telephone system, with a lady with lots of dry cell batteries who plugged cords into sockets to connect people. The phones had a crank. You would crank the phone and she would answer and you could tell her what number you wanted or just give her the name and she would connect you.

I like your definition!

Funny, furry cat

I recall that a friend of mine had a number that was 23890 (yes, only 5 digits!), and it was a giant pain in the finger to get busy signals time after time!!! If I only had one of those contraptions then! Maybe I wouldn't have minded getting busy signals.

By the way, our family's phone number in the 1950's was 23448. I don't mean to imply that I was born in the 50's -- that was merely our phone number as far back as I can remember.

Dear Friends of the Communications World:

About the Telephone Dialer Pencil, I've seen the Local Telephone Operater use one, she kept it stuck in her hair over her right ear, while not dialing.

Second comment about short phone numbers, # 229 was my mom & dad's home phone and 230 was dad's work number, and yes the Phone was in a dark brown varnished box, with a side crank, a pulldown speaker,a ear phone hanging on the side oposite to the crank, & the Rotary Dial on front.

The Old Retired Micro Wave Sight Maintenace Technician.

Mine was 3 1/2 turns.

In the early '50s, ours was 8817. Then it changed to 4-8817... Then Tuxedo 4-8817... Then 884-8817... Then came area codes (503) 884-8817... and more area codes (541) 884-8817. Of course my folks moved away from that area many years ago. Otherwise I would not blatently publish that number.

Another Bill

Are you sure it's not for cleaning ears?

These new mechanical pencils are hopeless, you always lose the detachable eraser on the end in there and spend hours trying to fish it out of the ear canal with a pair of pliers (or vice grips if you are a mechanical engineer).

They don't make them like they used to that's for sure!

Yes, phone dialer assist. All the phone co operators used them. One of my jobs was working on the operator bays, so am familiar with thise.

Since this is not a weekly puzzle, it would have been more honest a question had you provided the name stamped on the side. I remember seeing such an instrument (if I'm not mistaken, associated with blueprint production), and I'm not sixty.

you are correct. There is/was a sharpener that goes with it, so the draftsman could put a point on the end of lead.

P E bobimm15068

Draftsmen used this type of pencil. I am 80 years old and have not seen one for the last forty years

P E Bobimm

As to the message, the firemen shovel coal to make steam for the steam engine. That was a hard job. Usually, the engineer would spell off the fireman and give him a little break, before the stockers came into being. People liked to hear the steam whistle and passers by would raise their arm up and down simulating pulling the whistle activatin cord so the engineer or fireman would blow the whistle for them to hear. But the whistle used up steam which meant more shoveling, not a lot, but some.

Thus the message. If you want to hear the whistle, come and shovel some coal to make the steam

Yes, I have shoveled coal into the boiler of a steam engine, but I was not a fireman.

P E Bobimm

My Dad was lucky (in a way). The steam engines he drove used bunker oil rather than coal... but in sub-zero temperatures you never NEVER NEVER shut down one of those engines. The bunker oil would become the consistancy of tar, and one would have to go over the entire fuel system with a blow torch to get the oil thin enough to restart the engine... and continue to heat it until the engine got hot enough to sustain itself.

He commented to me though that the steam engines had alot more power than the diesel-electrics he later drove.

Bill

HOGHEADS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!

I'm 24 and I've never seen one these before...probably not as 'mature' as you lot no disrespect of course

So how exaclty were these used? Just as an extension of the user's finger to dial the dial?

Stick a battery in it and you have a handy ear & nose hair plucker.

Many years ago my mom & dad had a contractor come to the house to give a bid on their new kitchen. He asked if he could use their phone since his cell went dead. They said yeah sure go ahead. He didn't know how to use it. He had never seen a rotary phone before.

I think they still have one hooked up in the basement. I'm not sure. I haven't been there in a long while.

Our shop at work has a rotary dial phone. I answer it if it rings--even dialed out once, just for the memories.

Go visit your folks!

I liked the names that we used to remember the number. My grandparents phone number was Walnut 6776. 926776 for the youngsters. Funny what you remember from youth.

Ah, yes...I remember it well!

When self-dialing was introduced, the Telco had to install many local switching stations. The stations were identified by the neighborhood where they were located. The original reason for having letters associated with the numbers on the dial was to provide a numerical method to identify each switching station.

If the phone you were calling was connected to your local station, you only needed to dial the 3 (now up to 5) digits for a particular phone. If your call was going to a phone connected to a different station, you had to dial a 2-digit code which identified that station. The 2-digit code was the numbers associated with the first 2 letters of the station name (mine was TWinbrook = 89).

Of course, if you wanted to call outside your local phone company, you still had to connect to the long-distance operator and tell her the city you were calling. She would connect to the long-distance operator in that city and tell her the number you wanted, which would then be manually connected.

Hi Tvp

Look in your box and see if you can find the " devilish Rotary Phone Lock"

used to keep unauthorized callers at bay.(a truly evil device)

A dial lock was useless for a smart kid that figured out how a pulse-code worked.Press the hang up button once for one, twice for 2, etc.But the pulses had to be just the right speed, or the equipment at the central office would separate them into individual numbers,9 could be 4+5 , or 5+4, or 6+3 etc.Once you figured out the timing, dialing out was simple.I think this still works even today, because they still have rotary translators imbedded in the equipment.

There was a guy in our area that had the number BR549(Junior Sample's Used Cars, from HeeHaw). He never got much peace from the local kids.Then the town grew, and you had to use all seven digits.Gone were the good old days.

I keep one of the pencils above in my drawer with my slide rule and onion skin paper, and a hi tech(for the time) two color typewriter ribbon for my Smith Brothers typewriter.

A lot of places in the old days had phones without dials. That way, they could get calls but, supposedly, people couldn't make calls. Ha! It took the average ten year old kid about thirty seconds to learn the right click rate.

By the way, the first phone I can remember had the number F19. And, we were on a ten person party line, so the phone rang for everybody and most people went to listen; some would even join in if they got interested.

The pencil was in an old box of stuff from my father-in-law. He worked in a local exchange relay station for close to forty years. Part of the board wound up in the Smithsonian. He wound up deaf as a stone from all the clicking.

Thanks, TVP for the stroll down memory lane.

My older brother at some point in the early sixties (or possibly in the late fifties) showed me how to dial by clicking the "hook" quickly a number of times equal to the digit to be dialed. Pause, then do the next digit. My friends were all amused to see me "dialing" this way.

I have often amused myself regarding the almost impossible complexity of the things we take for granted these days. Just the very first few steps in creating this post: press a key and a character shows up in screen: keyboard scanning, keyboard buffering, input processing, video processing, etc. Some steps are actually many smaller steps, and many full books have been written about video processing alone.

The complexity can become absurd. For convenience, I have occasionally emailed a file from one computer in the house to another. The "file" "travels" thousands of miles, and quite possibly, different parts of the file take different routes.

I just had the thought that almost certainly there would be an app for rotary dialing of an IPhone. Of course there is. I wonder if there is an app for a "party line"

The Princess Phone: Wow, a new shape! Tone dialing: holy cow! A couple decades later -- an rs232 adapter for the Ti99 that was bigger than an entire netbook computer is today.

Where I grew up we only used 4 digits. We got phones in our area when I was 11 (try telling today's youngsters they can't use the ONE phone in the house until they are 11 yrs old!). We were on a ten party line, and the phone system used what is called divided coded ringing to differentiate who was being called. We were two long rings followed by a short ring. Of course this lead to an early form of call forwarding, because when we left the farm we would tell one of our neighbors we were going out of town, and they would answer for us so no one would suspect there was no one home. I still remember when I learned how to take the dialer off the base (using a paper clip), then I would replace it so it looked like it was on. The next person to try to use the phone would be greeted with a dialer spinning across the floor. I also learned how to use the hook switch (as someone had written about earlier) to make calls even with the dialer removed. Nines and zeros were the toughest to consistently dial, but I eventually learned the speed required.

Since we were on a party line, calling someone on that same party line required a special protocol. You would dial a special code followed by the 4 digit number, then hang up. You would hear the called party's divided coding ringing sequence occur, and when it stopped that meant they had picked up. You would then pick up and conversation would take place.

Little did I know then that I would later spend almost 30 years in telecommunications as an electrical engineer, learning how all that phone gear worked.

If you can tell us how it was connected manually P2P with patch cords, looking on lights, Trunk overhead lines, marine-cables [submerged in sea ... noise of line selectors in switch rooms, you always lnew which route is through, now route of your call changes packet by packet by the best route selected by thousands of computers at your disposl .... what a new picture.

Thanks to Electronics advancment in quite a short span of time wrt Mechanical Engg.

We had been proud of our line in 60s when we came from vaccuum tubes to Transistor the to IC ....

!!!!!

I'm 41. I found an old "Bell" rotary phone.I kept it on my desk for laughs. Amazing how soothing dialing a number can be.

I will say one thing, the rotary phones almost ever broke down. Now, do you remember having a party line? That was fun.

And the telephone operator that pulled and pushed in the plug for your connection?

A lot of full time jobs were lost with moderization.

P E bobimm15068

When I was 5 yrs old (60 yrs ago) I fount a 3" scrap of wire beeath the community party line near a pole (no outside calling yet). Grandpa said "yes, that is telephone wire". It had a dark spot on the end, I thought it was a hole through it, and that was how I surmised folks could talk, through the hole!! 18 year later, The Bell Tel School taught me different!

I'm not quite over sixty yet but I couldn't have guessed the use of this pencil, even though I served an apprenticeship in telecom in the late sixties. In the UK the operators were issued with ball pens with a solid plastic spherical end about ½" diameter (pre metrication!). Sorry, I couldn't find a picture.

Regarding the old exchange names, I remember a "St Trinians" comedy (English upper class boarding school) where one of the girls end up in court and she hands the old judge a private note. On the note was just her tel nº 437 XXXX. The rest of the people in the cinema just saw phone nº but I recognised the exchange as GERrard, which was in Gerrard street, in Soho, the red-light district of London, where I started my apprenticeship. The implication was obvious to me but lost on the rest.

He who laughs alone gets stared at!

regards

Chas

Several people have mentioned tapping the cradle to mimic the function of the dial. In fact Strowger who patented the automatic exchange in about 1891 (he was a funeral director, and, was upset because one of his rival's relatives worked in the exchange and kept redirecting his calls) intended the pulses to be sent by tapping the cradle. The patent for the rotary dial was awarded to other employees of the company about 5 years later (and 4 years after the installation of the first 75 subscriber exchange).

A Uk perspective on the Rotary dial and the instrument pictured.

in the Uk we had Rotary dial telephones a pay phones for the public in Red telephone boxes all over the country.

A modification of the instrument that we have all been discussing enabled free calls to be made as the modification enabled the dial to to be produced without fully completing the charge code.

I cannot remeber the precise details as it was along while ago!

Sleepy

comes with these:

It's obviously escaped from PlbMak's treasure trove of items intended for the long-lost and lamented Friday Afternoon CR4 Picture Quizzes....

While on the subject of telephones, my ex was a telephone operator at one time.

She got a call from an irate customer who had dialed a "phone sex" number and paid for 5 minutes worth. It seems that he had accomplished his purpose after 2 minutes and the gal at the other end hung up on him.

He wanted the phone company to reimburse him for the other three minutes.

Bill

Its a parchment scraper (eraser).... because it was in use before the invention of paper.