A cow-orker was cleaning out the basement, found a rotary dial wall-mount telephone, brought it to work and mounted it on his cubicle wall. It’s been there for years.
This week, because they were running out of room downstairs, a group of users have moved to our floor - infiltrating the I.S. inner sanctum (bum bum BUMMMMM!) When one of them asked what the phone was for, he answered, “It’s the emergency hot line. If it ever rings, there’s trouble.” He meant it as a joke - but the user believed him! So we’ll string the poor user along for a while. It’s the right thing to do.
Apply ~50-90 VAC to the line connection terminals. There are some ring generators on this page that you can construct. You can also buy commercial ring generators, but these cost $$$.
If you have access to a phone jack nearby, there’s no reason you can’t wire it up to plug in, assuming the phone works properly.
This page tells you more than you ever wanted to know about how to make a phone ring. Long story short, you need to send 40+ volts down the line at 20 Hz. The good news is there appears to be a lot of slack in the standard, so you can homebrew a circuit and any output that is close will be good enough.
Hmmm, how much slack? Will two legs of my 240v three phase work? What about that third leg though, don’t just want it flopping around? I know, I’ll ground it to the phone’s base. (Those old phones have a metal base, right?). That outta scare the crap out of anyone within earshot.
Many years ago when I was a kid we used to “dial” 960 then wait for a dial tone then dial 6. The phone would then ring back. It was a repairman’s code we got ahold of somehow. Hours of fun!
Doubt if it works now.
If you don’t know what you are doing or going to do DON’T DO IT. It could be lethal.
I have an old rotary hooked up in the garage on the house line and rings like gang busters.
Hook your “emergency” phone so you can control the ring with a cut off switch or better yet a transfer switch so when you dial a real line you get the one set up for the “user.”
When he answers you can take him for a “ride.”
I have heard stories that a 120v a/c line somehow got wired to a phone line - newer phones would be toast, but the older phones rang like there was no tomorrow.
My Dad had a box of old hand cranked phones, and when he built the shed a distance from the house where I grew up, he buried cable and installed two stations. If Mom wanted to let him know dinner was ready, or some such thing, she’d crank the ringing generator and make the phone ring in the shed. IIRC, Pop said the cranked generators prodiced ~90 VAC. He also said they were good to connect to two pieces of copper wire, which you’d push into the soil a distance apart, and then crank the generator. Apparently worms didn’t care for the mild electrocution, and would rise to the surface. Time for fishing.
I’m assuming your office has a digital phone system, so just plugging it into an extension on your desk won’t work.
But I also bet your office has a fax machine that is plugged into a standard phone jack.
If you just want to have it ring once or twice, get a long telephone extension cord and run it from the fax jack to the back of the rotary phone. (I’m assuming that the rotary phone has a modular cord. If it doesn’t, the easiest thing to do is to wire it into a standard modular phone jack you can get at any hardware store or Radio Shack. Connect the red wire to the red wire and the green wire, and ignore yellow and black, and then plug the modular cord into the jack. I’ve done this with a 1940’s rotary phone, and it works fine.)
When you want to make the phone ring for the unsuspecting rubes, have someone unplug the fax and plug the extension cord into the fax jack. Just have somebody call the fax number, and the phone should ring just fine. Don’t forget to reconnect the fax when you’re done.
Even if they do, do they have a ‘standard’ jack? Don’t standard jacks (for fax machines/answering machines/modems) have to come from a line before the phone system box.
Not many PBXs still in use, I’d wager. Most systems are fully computerized CBXs. These may or may not supply ringing voltage–I’ve seen some you can plug in ordinary phones and they work fine, but without all the fancy features of the digital phones. Other systems might be completely digital, and the ring signal is just a data packet.
This may be out of left field a little but every theatre that I have worked in has a phone ringer of some sort. Handy little devils they are. Are there any theatre companies near-by that will rent one to you for a day?
Theatre people love messing with people’s minds, or at least I do.
[slight hijack continued] I used to read occasionally of people (seems like most were Southeast Asian immigrants) who got busted by the fish and game guys for “telephoning” fish. I take it to mean that were using crank telephone boxes to send a current through the water, stunning the fish and causing them to float to the surface, making capture of said fish astonishingly easy. [/ slight hijack continued]
