If you’ve ever watched movies from what they call the Golden Age Of Hollywood, you’ve probably seen a bit where a character is on the phone with someone who has just hung up, presumably in an abrupt or unexpected manner. Then this happens:
What exactly was the character trying to do? Were they trying to get the operator to reconnect the call? The movies showed them doing this on dial phones, so they didn’t need an operator to place a call, although if they were the receiving party they wouldn’t necessarily know the number. Would telephone operators reconnect calls for you this way, back in the day?
Or was there some kind of technological magic going on by which you could automatically reconnect the call by jiggling the receiver just so? I do know that it was once possible to dial a sequence of numbers just by clicking the hook button a certain way, but that seems to me something that phone phreaks would have done, not a frantic character in a movie.
Jiggling the hook caused the phone on the other end to ring, so if somebody hung up by accident, they’d pick it up. It also might alert the operator, who’d be able to reconnect you.
Probably the same mind-set as smacking the TV when it shows its ass.
The grocery store I worked in during high school had a phone in the back for receiving orders, but couldn’t be dialed out on. We all learned how to punch the buttons and call out. No phreaking.
Back when they had human telephone operators, the switch board had lights on it that told you whether the phone was on-hook or off-hook. By quickly putting the phone on-hook and off-hook you would get the light to flash,which had a decent chance of getting the operator’s attention.
Back in the days when operators would dial the call for you, this would signal the operator to reconnect the call for you. By the time of dial phones and automatic dialing/switching systems, this was getting to be a bit obsolete. Still, just because they come out with something new doesn’t mean that they immediately rip out all of the old equipment and put in new. That would cost too much. So while major cities might have fancy new switching systems, many smaller towns likely still had operators doing manual connections, or at the very least had operators watching over partially automated systems. So it’s likely that the technique of jiggling the hook to get the operator’s attention might have continued working in many areas for some time.
Even after it stopped being an effective technique for getting the operator’s attention, people would have continued to do it out of habit. Get disconnected? Jiggle the hook and keep saying “hello, hello, hello.” That’s just what you do. What else are you going to do?
Even in systems where they had automatic switching equipment, if the other end goes silent, you really aren’t sure if they hung up or if they are just having a problem with their phone. So even in systems well past the golden age of Hollywood, jiggling the hook will get you a dial tone if they hung up, but will remain connected if they didn’t. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s or so that phone systems would disconnect both ends if either one hung up. Before then, it was common for the phone system to keep the connection active until both parties hung up.
Yes, you can pulse-dial by flashing, but if you think you are connected, you aren’t going to dial anyone. If your phone system was old enough to have an operator, you don’t need to dial anything to get to them - just taking the receiver off-hook is enough. “Flashing” is just that - making the light over your switchboard jack flash, to get their attention.
Tapping the hook would indeed dial a zero if you had a dial tone, but the previous posters are correct. If you flashed the hook as they described you could get the operator’s attention even without a dial tone. And flashing it ten times would dial a zero only if you had direct dial capability. Even if the phone system allowed it, if you were calling from a hotel, for example, you might have to go through the hotel operator.
If somebody stole the dial on your dial phone you could still call any number by jiggling the switchhook the requisite number of times, with a slight pause between numbers.
If the tone on your touchtone phone went on for instance on, say, the 3, you could still call numbers with 3s in them by jiggling 3 times for each occurrence of a 3, then push buttons for the rest of them.
You could dial the operator by jiggling it 10 times.
[I typed “juggling” every single time.]
This would work on both a step system and whatever the other kind was called–the newer* kind.
If you didn’t have dial tone this might or might not have worked, depending on why you didn’t have DT.
I’m not sure if this is relevant at all, but IME if I accidentally hang up (cheekbone hits the off button on a cordless phone), I can usually get the call back by toggling a couple of times. I don’t actually know anything about why this works, but it does for me.
And if you went through a private switchboard, say at a hotel or a college, and it was a really old system, an operator had to unplug the calls after hangup, so you didn’t really hang up until the operator did that. On a busy board this might not happen very quickly. Sure, a light would flash, but there would be a lot of lights flashing, on a busy board.
My college had such an old board that operators had to ring the calls. That is, make the phone ring. If you knew somebody on the switchboard they could alert you to certain calls with a distinctive ring, if they wanted to bother. Just make one up. I used to use shave-and-a-haircut just for giggles.
When busy, there was a tendency to ring once and then forget about it until some minutes later when not so busy. Oops. But you know, the college had to resod the football field so couldn’t afford a new phone system.
When I worked at a place with an old-style plug-in switchboard, jiggling the ‘hook’ too often was likely to cause one’s calls to be delayed or go astray. They told me that it made a loud clicking noise in their headphones.
That assumes that 10 times is a Zero, and that Zero is the operator number – neither of which were universally true. But it’s wrong anyway – jiggling is to get the operators attention directly. You can’t trust everything you see on the internet son
You’ve gotten dialing methods confused with switching systems.
The old-fashioned rotary dials used pulse dialing, from the pulsing of the electrical current which did the work.
The newer touch-tone dialing system uses DTMF, for dual-tone multiple frequency, from the fact each keypress sends two tones down the line at once, determined by where on the grid the key is.
Step-by-step refers to a specific design of automatic telephone exchanges, or the hardware in Central Offices which placed calls once Ethel down at the plugboard went the way of ethyl gasoline.
Crossbar is a newer kind than Strowger; it’s just that there’s now an even newer kind. But nearly all ESS exchanges had a pulse converter, meaning it would work nearly anywhere until maybe a decade ago—and probably still works most places.
when I asked my grandma about it she said it was sort of an old way to do a 911 type of call ……in the 20s and 30s it was done for wither a dropped call or an emergency so the operator would call the ambulance, fire or pd
The bit about flashing for the operator, in the days before dialing, is likely true.
Before everyone switched to tone dialing, there was pulse dialing. “Dialing” actually did the same as jiggling the hang-up button. It opened and closed the circuit to the telephone switch equipment. Do this at a certain rate, and the switching equipment interpreted it as numbers. I actually managed to do this back in the day, as did the people in the grocery store above. 1 click was 1, 2 clicks was 2, etc. 10 clicks was zero. The rotary dial just pulsed at the correct rate. I read about one couple whose kid was racking up long distance, so they put a lock on the dial. He continued to phone by pulse-dialing with the cradle buttons.
What’s actually happening in those old movies is the same as when your computer freezes today and you click your mouse like crazy. There’s a certain “feedback” or white noise to a live line. If the line goes dead - the other person hangs up or a serial killer cuts the phone wire - the phone is deadly quiet. It’s obviously a malfunction. Maybe the switching equipment got “hung up” since there’s no dial tone. Normally, if you disconnect and then connect the circuit again, the switch detects this and gives a dial tone. Just like when you pick up the handset, the open circuit is closed, and the switching equipment detects this and gives a dial tone. Try jiggling the cradle button, basically connecting and breaking the circuit to the switching equipment, to see if that wakes up the other end and gets the switch to recognize you are there - trying to get some life out of a dead phone. Either the phone will give a dial tone - call again, then - or the phone may reconnect you if something made the connection pause.
(If you’re on a call and the other end hangs up, you should get a dial tone within a few seconds. Presumably the caller is reacting to not getting one, or just getting annoyed that they did get one. ) Same idea as someone who turns the light switch off and on a few times to see if the dead light bulb will wake up.
Nope, you’re going to be dialing it the same way. When I was a telephone installer–which admittedly was long, long ago–they took us into the central office to show us what happened when peopled dialed. Getting real basic. “Here is what happens when you have a step system, here is what happens when you have a ___ dialing system.” People whose lines connected to a step dialer could not have a touchtone phone, and sometimes it was the installer who had to tell them that. I guess in theory we were also supposed to explain why. But it wasn’t something on the phone, it was something in the CO. Basically, if your exchange number was 365 (for example) you would be going through a step dialer and you couldn’t have touchtone but the house next door might have a 321 exchange number and they could have a touchtone. And both these systems were in the same CO, although by the time I worked there some of the COs in Denver had only the newer systems. Mine, however, also had the old step systems.
When I first started working there the people in some garages thought you also couldn’t have a touchtone if you were on a party line but people in our garage had read the manual, and you could. The installer had to do some rewiring. We figured people in those other areas figured it would just be easier to tell people they couldn’t do it. But if they didn’t go through a step thing, they could have a touchtone even if they were out in the boonies on an eight-party line (and we had some of those).
I should point out that in the 60’s and 70’s there was a common “bank inspector” scam. The con men would convince some gullible or elderly person that they needed help catching a crooked teller - would they withdraw a large sum of money, count it, and then the bank inspector would swing by and pick it up and put it back in their account?
To prove their bona fides, they would urge the person to call the bank themselves; this relied on a trick that at that time, if the *caller *did not hang up, the connection stayed open. The mark would “hang up” and then they played them a dial tone and a ringing over the line while the person thought they were dialing the bank, and someone sounding all professional would confirm the bank inspector’s story. Sometime when touch tone dialing and electronic switching came along, the persistent connection characteristic disappeared.
