Seems like I remember as a kid dialing something or other, which caused all the phones in a house to ring, letting two people talk from, say, upstairs and downstairs. Does this, um, ring any bells?
I think it was a local thing (the actual number); around here it was 11911, then hang up.
I used it to great effect with the babysitters.
I remember being able to do this as well. This might help, if it has a listing for your area.
I remember dialing the home phone number and then hanging up immediately. The other phones in the house would ring, and then when someone “answered” you had to be ready to take the phone off the hook before they hung up. This was in the late 1970s. I remember it being impossible by the time I got to high school.
Back when I was a telephone installer ('70s) there was a code you could dial. We had several, depending on whether the exchange used the very old step-dialing method or a newer one. You dialed the number then hung up, and the phone would ring. Installers used it to check to make sure all the phones were ringing (in a house with multiple phones, for instance, there might not be enough juice, or something could be wrong with the ringer).
People whose phones I installed were always asking how I did that, and I always told them.
At some point those numbers stopped working, or anyway the only one I remembered (5611) stopped working. But nowadays you can buy phones that also work as intercoms–I have one from Radio Shack. While it doesn’t ring as a telephone would, you can use it to call someone in another room. We generally use it though to locate a handset that we’ve misplaced.
This worked for me up until I no longer had a landline in 2003.
Yes! I had forgotten all about that. In L.A. when I was a kid it was definitely 119911.
It was/is known as a “Call Back Number.”
When I was about nine years old, a frined clued me in to a trick that worked, but it was hard to free up the number later. You used one number higher at the start of your exchange.
Example. If your number was 555-9876, you would dial 655-9876.
This made the phone ring, but when you picked up you got a very bizarre high-pitched dial tone type of sound. And one time when we were doing it too much, we ended up having aterrible time making it stop and we unplugged all the phones for awhile.
No, there was no babysitter present. Why do you ask?
Never heard of this. I’ll sometimes call my wife’s cellphone using the landline when she’s down in the kitchen and I’m upstairs, however - a little like an intercom.
When I was a kid out on the farm we had a party line. To get a dial tone you had to flip a little lever on the side of the phone. To call someone on the same line, you’d flip the lever to get the dial tone, dial, then flip the lever back immediately (because if you didn’t you’d get a busy signal). You could, if you wanted, dial your own number, put the receiver back on the hook, and then run and hide and watch your parents come answer the phone and wonder why there was no one on the other end. I, of course, never did such a thing.