A lady I know had a table top phone with the lift off speaker part, that hung from a brass lever with a fork shape, and the base with a microphone trumpet, all made of black telephone stuff. (What was that stuff?) It had woven thread covered stiff wire attached to the phone connector on the baseboard. (with an opposite adapter like the ones that put your RS232 on your antique home phone lines.) It had no dial. You could answer incoming calls, and talk fine, but you could not dial on it.
This was original Western Electric equipment from about 1920 to 1930. Beautiful. Went well with her livingroom decor.
I want to say that’s a princess phone, but Google disagrees with me on that term. I tried to find a picture of what I think you’re talking about but I can’t find one.
In the late 80s-mid 90s there was a glut of novelty phones. I had one that looked like a baby grand piano. You dialed by playing the keyboard. My call answering password was written by Tchaikovsky.
Some friends had a duck phone. Its eyes would glow green when there was an incoming call.
Of course, when you took that round piece out, the person on the other end couldn’t hear you. That was great for listening in on the neighbors’ calls.
We bought our house from the family that built it in 1942. It still had a leased, black, dial desk phone. When the phone company came out to install ours, they had to rewire the whole house. I wanted to keep the old phone, but the installer said he had to turn it in (HA!)
That is so not what I was thinking. But that’s probably what he’s talking about.
The one I’m thinking of is a more traditional handset/base configuration, but the handset is all sorts of fancy. I remember seeing them in Hogan’s Heros and other period pieces.
Did you really think that you could just throw something like that out there with no further information and we’d just accept it?
I assume that your mother felt that it would be improper for her to show a gentleman into the pornographic bedroom while she was essentially alone, or maybe she was afraid the wallpaper would drive him mad with lust, endangering her.
I understand why she’d want to avoid that situation. What I don’t understand is why there was PORNOGRAPHIC WALLPAPER IN THE BEDROOM? It doesn’t sound like your mother was some sort of libertine, so why would they have something like that, especially with young children in the house? Where would they even buy something like that?
Was it really truly pornographic or was it something like cherubs frolicking naked, which perhaps was considered pornographic in those times?
We had one standard-issue black wall-mount rotary phone my entire childhood. I remember being impressed as hell when I found out a friend had a phone in his basement.
The one technology I would not want to do without is caller ID.
How about in old movies or TV shows, when someone is speaking on the phone and they become disconnected, and then they repeatedly and rapidly tap the ‘hang-up cradle’ in an effort to get the connection back. Has that ever worked?
mmm
I never used the 10-10 numbers but I did use prepaid calling cards that my parents would buy cheaply from Costco. You have to dial a toll-free number first and then the number you wish to call.
My mother worked for the telephone company, so she took advantage of the company discount to get phone jacks installed throughout the house (including the bathrooms) and we had extension phones everywhere before this was common. And these were the old-fashioned line-powered phones. At one point, we had so many phones that the ringtone sounded really weak. At this point, there’s only two of them in the house, but they still have two landline numbers (although one rolls over to the main 45-year-old number), DSL and two cell phones.
