Lying about # of phones hooked up in the 70s

[Morbo]

So I was watching an old episode of The Newlywed Game last night. The question was "What would your husband say to the following: 'The phone cord in our house or apartment stretches from the ____ to the ___'."

One woman said "Well, we have three phone jacks, but we only told the phone company we're using one phone." ::audience laughter::

That begs the question: in the 70s, did you really just tell the phone company how many phones you used, and you could lie about it and they'd have to take your word for it? They had no other way of verifying whether or not you were using more than one phone jack? And if you told the truth, they'd charge you for using more than one phone jack?

[Gary T]

There wasn't necessarily a problem having more than one jack, but having more phones plugged in simultaneously than you were paying for was against the rules. My understanding is that they could tell by ringing your number and monitoring a certain voltage value. You you could get away with it if they didn't make a point of checking, but if they found out a bill would be forthcoming.

[postcards]

Back then, if you wanted a phone in your house, you had to buy it from the phone company, and they sent someone out to your house to install it.

I had friends who'd tap off the existing jack and run their own wire to another room. If they needed service for any reason, they'd have to disconnect everything and hide the extra phones.

Even after the breakup of the Bell System, if you had, say three jacks in your house, you'd be charged for however many were in use. I found this out in my first apartment when I had the phone in one room and my answering machine plugged in another room. I forget what the charge was, but I went out and got a splitter (one input - two outputs) to eliminate that nonsense

[beowulff]

When I was just a budding electronics geek, I picked up a touchtone phone at a hamfest. At the time, we only had rotary phones (my dad was much too cheap to pay for such an extravagance). I hooked it up to a jack in my room, and it worked! Years later (just before the AT&T breakup), a phone guy came out and saw it, and told my folks that they should have been paying extra for the touchtone service for all that time. They never did, though. Afterwards, no one really cared.

[kunilou]

Back then, if you wanted a phone in your house, you had to buy it from the phone company, and they sent someone out to your house to install it.

Correction. If you wanted a phone, you RENTED it from the phone company. Ditto with answering machines, fax machines and anything else that used a telephone line. The phone company wouldn't let you have your own equipment.

The reason they gave was that all those devices draw power from the phone line, and that if you exceeded the maximum power draw (around here it was the equivalent of 5 phones. Other phone lines may have varied) the phones would blow up or something.

Of course, it was easy enough to get phones from non-phone company sources, and you were supposed to report them to the phone company, which would then charge you a monthly fee that just happened to be the same as if you had rented an extension phone from them.

For a historical perspective of the old phone company's power, I refer you to the episode of WKRP in Cinncinatti (http://tvsothertenpercent.tripod.com/wkrp/bomb.html) where Johnny Fever is convinced the "phone cops" are about to arrest him.

[Balthisar]

The reason they gave was that all those devices draw power from the phone line, and that if you exceeded the maximum power draw (around here it was the equivalent of 5 phones. Other phone lines may have varied) the phones would blow up or something.
Back when I had a land-line, you still had to worry about that. All phones come labelled with a REN -- a ringer equivilency number. I think our magic number was 5, also. Most devices (especially AC powered ones) has REN's much less than 5.

[postcards]

Correction. If you wanted a phone, you RENTED it from the phone company. Ditto with answering machines, fax machines and anything else that used a telephone line. The phone company wouldn't let you have your own equipment.


Yes, I should have said 'rented'. My bad. (And that stupid rotary phone probably cost my folks about ten grand in the twenty-five years they had it. What a scam that was!)

However, my family had an answering machine (purchased retail, not from Ma Bell) beginning sometime around 1976. It plugged into the wall for power, though we had to have the phone company come to the house to stall a modular jack for it to go into the wall. They left the original phone hard-wired though, IIRC.

[neutron star]

The reason they gave was that all those devices draw power from the phone line, and that if you exceeded the maximum power draw (around here it was the equivalent of 5 phones. Other phone lines may have varied) the phones would blow up or something.

Wouldn't this just cause the phones to not ring, since they didn't have enough power to activate the ringer? Or at least that's what I remember a teacher telling me once. My teachers were wrong often enough that I never really did take them at their word.

[3acresandatruck]

I was a service rep at Southwestern Bell for a couple of years in the 70's. As I recall, at that time, an individual residence line with unlimited local service ran $8.90 a month, a 2-party line with 40 calls was $4.35. An extension was $1.00 per month, and touchtone service was $2.15 extra (covering all phones on your service). These were the rates in the St. Louis area. Different locations and different companies would have different rates, all negotiated with state public utility boards. As others have pointed out, you weren't originally allowed to connect customer provided equipment. As things changed, CPE was allowed, and such equipment had to be rated on it's ringer equivalence. Gary T is correct in his statement in that the company could ring the line and detect the approximate number of phones present. If you exceeded the line capacity for ringer voltage, it was possible that your phone wouldn't ring properly. It was also in this time period that modular jacks began to replace the old hard-wired sets (the normal setup) and 4-prong jacks (which were referred to as 'portable').

Early on, what beowulff referred to doing wouldn't work, as the line wasn't equipped for touchtone dialing, unless the customer ordered Touchtone Service. Some phones with touchpad dialing were actually equipped to dial with tone dialing OR pulse dialing: in other words, you'd push a button, but the phone did the click-style dialing you associate with an actual dial phone. As Touchtone became more pervasive, we occasionally ran into problems where the wires were hooked up backwards and people couldn't dial out; the phone wouldn't "break dialtone" till the wiring was fixed. Eventually Touchtone became some prevalent that all lines were equipped in the central office to handle tone dialing, but you still had to pay for the feature for a long time.

Heh, we LOVED that WKRP episode; especially when Johnny Fever says of the 'phone cops', "Those boys play hardball".

[jasonh300]

When I was a kid, we had a hardwired Avocado Green Trimline touchtone wall phone in the kitchen and then a Harvest Gold touchtone version of the old model 500 desktop (model 2500 maybe?) in my parents' bedroom. The 500 had a 4 prong jack and could be carried into the study and plugged in if necessary.

But we had a third phone that the phone company never knew about. It was an old "candlestick" phone that never had a ringer. Without the ringer, the phone company had no way of knowing it was there because it didn't draw any ring voltage. My mother had bought it refurbished back in the 60s and used it at her mother's house before she got married.

I also remember my grandparents had a Beige model 500 rotary dial phone that was hardwired with a cord that must've been about 100 feet long because she could carry it anywhere in the house if necessary. After my grandparents had both died, my aunt had that same phone with the long cord well into the 90s...maybe even into the 2000s.

To this day, my aunt still only has one phone in a 2000+ square foot house.

[vison]

I have a red rotary dial phone that has been on my kitchen wall for 42 years. Phone guys always say, "Oh, that old thing, I should take it out of here and give you a nice new one." But, no, Mr. Phone Guy, I am keeping it. In the event of a power outage (not infrequent here) that phone still works unless the actual phone lines are broken and they seldom are.

I paid rent on that phone and 2 others for about 37 years, imagine. We bought a couple of phones and I returned 2 to the Telus store. They didn't really want them, but then, neither did I. I phoned Telus and said I no longer had a rental phone and I wanted a rebate of some of the rent I'd been paying. Lo and behold, they said, "You still have a rental phone" and I said, "Oh, right. Well you can come and get it any time you want but in the meantime I want a rebate of the rent on the other phones we don't have any more" and I got a credit on my bill for $150, which made my eyebrows go up in a pleased way.

And so far no one has shown up to take the old red phone away.

[blondebear]

The 5ESS switch has a metallic line test that gives a ringer count. In 15 years as a central office tech, I never received a request to verify how many phones a customer had.

[Magiver]

Wouldn't this just cause the phones to not ring, since they didn't have enough power to activate the ringer? Or at least that's what I remember a teacher telling me once. My teachers were wrong often enough that I never really did take them at their word. multiple mechanical ringers would sound different as the voltage dropped. Seems to me people tried to disable the ringer but that was a long time ago. If you had an aftermarket phone you could just turn the ringer off. Our first aftermarket phone took batteries.

[RealityChuck]

Eventually Touchtone became some prevalent that all lines were equipped in the central office to handle tone dialing, but you still had to pay for the feature for a long time.For some time, Touchtone service cost TPC* less than rotary dialing, but they charged more for it.

I bought my first phone in 1974. They had just become legal then: prior to that the only option was the rent. I sill have it -- it was a Stromberg-Carlson and built like a brick.

*The Phone Company. Why does everyone hate the Phone Company? ;)

[RealityChuck]

Eventually Touchtone became some prevalent that all lines were equipped in the central office to handle tone dialing, but you still had to pay for the feature for a long time.For some time, Touchtone service cost TPC* less than rotary dialing, but they charged more for it.

I bought my first phone in 1974. They had just become legal then: prior to that the only option was the rent. I sill have it -- it was a Stromberg-Carlson and built like a brick.

*The Phone Company. Why does everyone hate the Phone Company? ;)

[Dewey Finn]

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my mother worked for Western Electric. For some reason, I wanted a telephone to play with, so my mother got a real one from the guys in the office, except that this was strictly against the rules, so they disconnected the ringer and made her promise not to hook it up. (Eventually, we did though.) My mother could also get free wiring installation*, and at one point they had extension phones in just about every room of the house, to the extent that they were drawing so much power that the ring sounded sickly.

*At the time, pretty much the only way to add a phone outlet was to hire the phone company to do it, and the rates were quite high. Now, you can run your own inside wiring, or hire someone to do it.

[Sunspace]

How times have changed.

My great-aunt Grace had the same wall-mounted Bell phone (http://www.phonevault.com/catalog/AntiqueWallPhones/50s60s70s/554gold.asp) in the kitchen of her little yellow brick house in the Armour Hill district of Peterborough for fifty years... until it fell off the wall and broke. Last time I visited her in that house was probably the last time I ever rotary-dialed a phone. She passed away a few years ago.

I get my phone service from the cable company. And sometimes I don't even use it; I use Skype over high-speed internet delivered by the same cable company.

[OttoDaFe]

The Phone Company. Why does everyone hate the Phone Company? ;)I didn't think much of TPC one way or another until I saw The President's Analyst (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062153/). After that . . .

[Balthisar]

For some time, Touchtone service cost TPC* less than rotary dialing, but they charged more for it.
That was the whole point for the invention of touch tone. I thought there was a Cecil article or Staff Report somewhere but I can't find it. It came down to two things, though:

The amount of time leaving a circuit open while waiting for the slow pulse dialing. Remember, until we had fiber optics and compression and the information revolution, you were physically occupying an entire, physical circuit, and there are only a limited number of them. There are still vestiges of this problem when calling certain areas, usually the fast busy tone indicates no circuit available.
The cost of mechanical switching equipment and operation versus digital switching equipment. Rotary or "pulse" dialing is an electromechanical processes. If you're quick, you can pulse dial by using just the switchhook. The making and breaking of the circuit is counted by the switching facility. This used to be all mechanical -- think of a huge bank of relays acting as logic gates. What a nightmare! Make it digital though (tone dialing), and everything can be digital.


Of course telephone companies found that they could have their cake and eat it, too. It's not like they instantly replaced all of their mechanical switching equipment while it was still useful. So, even though it was cheaper for them to offer tone service and to their benefit primarily, they knew they could charge early adopters for what seemed like a neat little gimmick. I remember paying for tone service as late as 1996 in Killeen, Texas, but I'm pretty sure it was just standard by time I came back to Michigan.

Not having had a land-line for years, I'm curious as to whether there are parts of the country these days where pulse service doesn't even work any more.

Edit: also meant to add, as recently as 1996, ring generators still worked to get an operator, at least in Killeen, on the public phone network. Tested it ourselves with our Army phones! Remember the old movies where you cranked a handle to get an operator, who would connect your service for you? That's what I'm talking about. I wonder if that's still generally available.

[tanstaafl]

*The Phone Company. Why does everyone hate the Phone Company? ;)
I don't know, but even the Albanians hate their phone company... ;)

I hadn't thought of that movie in years. Surely it's out on DVD by now...

[Max Torque]

To this day, my aunt still only has one phone in a 2000+ square foot house.
Old habits die hard for some folks. I often kid my parents about how, even though they now have a 2.4 GHz cordless phone with a range of something like 3000 feet, they still stand in the kitchen to talk on the phone.

[3acresandatruck]

For some time, Touchtone service cost TPC* less than rotary dialing, but they charged more for it. I asked my supervisor about that back in the 70's. Why'd we charge for it, even if it was cheaper for us? Because people were willing to pay for it.

*The Phone Company. Why does everyone hate the Phone Company? ;)You can't beat Lily Tomlin's succint explanation (as Ernestine): "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the PHONE COMPANY." Not really true at the level I worked at, but still... It was a monopoly. If you thought we were overpriced or had treated you badly or whatever, there wasn't much you could do about it. There was nowhere else to get the service. You could complain to the state utility regulators, but heck, government agencies made the phone company look good in comparison.

[t-bonham@scc.net]

I asked my supervisor about that back in the 70's. Why'd we charge for it, even if it was cheaper for us? Because people were willing to pay for it.But it wasn't cheaper for them, not at first. The phone company had to pay for installing all the new CO equipment to deal with touch-tone dialing. And the cost of maintaining the research labs that came up with the ideas & developed the equipment.

In fact, the pulse dialing was probably cheaper at first, because all those banks of clicking relay switches had been paid for many years before, while the new tone dialing stuff is current money being spent. It's only later, after the initial investment in new equipment is cover that the reduction in maintenance makes it cheaper.

Almost anything new goes through a period where they charge for it, even though the supplier recognizes that in the future, it will be cheaper & more efficient. Way back when, you paid extra to have one of those new-fangled direct dial phones, instead of just having the operator connect you, the way it had always been done.

[SmackFu]

I was a service rep at Southwestern Bell for a couple of years in the 70's. As I recall, at that time, an individual residence line with unlimited local service ran $8.90 a month, a 2-party line with 40 calls was $4.35. An extension was $1.00 per month, and touchtone service was $2.15 extra (covering all phones on your service). Heh. That's not that much less than what I pay now. Must have been a lot back then.

[LouisB]

Heh. That's not that much less than what I pay now. Must have been a lot back then.1968-1973 minimum wage was $1.60 per hour. In the early 1960s it was less than $1.25 per hour; Southwestern Bell would often refuse to install a telephone for a young person just out of school due a lack of credit history. If that young person fell for the sales pitch of the Southwestern Bell service rep and agreed to have two (or more) phones, the credit history problem would disappear. The only recourse if one didn't fall for the sales pitch was to have one's parents co-sign the credit agreement.

[Leaffan]

The cable TV people were the same; if you wanted a second TV you had to have them install the cable and you paid extra for the service. Installing your own cable splitter was illegal and viewed as a form of piracy at the time.