I got my old Automatic Electric Company pay phone (a gift from my dad ages ago) out of storage in the basement, and jigged with the wires for a bit, and got it to work. Now it’s attached to the wall by my computer! A melding of high and low tech!
The phone placard still has numbers on it from years ago, including the local police emergency number, 222-3333. That number was designated because it was a ‘low pull number’ and could be dialed quicker than say, 999-0000.
Mine looks just like this one except mine is silver, not black.
I bought a dial phone (at the antique store, TYVM) because I hate the digital ring sound on my cordless. The black beast rings, and the ringer on the cordless remains off. I dial it when I can’t find the cordless
In Maine, with my wife whilst staying at a wonderful Bed & Breakfast near Camden. I remember picking up the phone and thinking, “wow, those are odd buttons…”
Then realized it was indeed a yellow rotary phone , just like I had in the 70’s. Nice !
The best phone in my in-laws house is a rotary from the mid-70’s. I don’t know how their area escaped when just about everywhere else in south-western Ontario had to switch to touch tone dialing in the late '80s., but they still have service. I used that phone last week.
I make it a point to always have an old rotary dial phone somewhere in the house. Currently it is in a file drawer, but whenever the power goes out, the cordless phone goes out with it. A big enough blackout will also take out the cell towers, I’m guessing. But you can plug in the rotary dialer and still be in touch.
You don’t need a rotary phone to do this. A regular corded touch-tone phone will work just as well in a power outage. The power for the tone generator comes through the phone line, not the house power.
I’ve told this story before, but these threads always remind me of my dad…
About eight or so years back, he had a rotary phone. He is one of these old guys who rents a phone from the telco, because that’s the way he’s always done it, despite probably having paid the value of the handset many times over. Anyway, he still had this old rotary phone because it had never given any trouble and was never replaced. But modern times overtook him, and he found that when calling banks etc, he was presented with an automated menu, and needed a push button phone. So he called the telco, and the conversation went something like this:
“Hello. I’d like to have my handset replaced.”
“Is it broken?”
“No, but I can’t use it for phone banking.”
“I’m afraid we can only replace it if it’s broken.”
“Ah… so, er… what if it were to be dropped six feet onto concrete and it broke?”
“Why then we’d replace it for you, sir.”
“Indeed. Thank you very much.”
CRAASH
To answer the OP, that would have been the last time I dialled a phone - about 1999 or 2000 or so.
My dad hung onto rotary phones for an incredibly long time, so it wasn’t all that long ago. I guess the last one must have broken or something, because now he’s got this old princess phone which is nearly as old as the dial one was.
My oldest daughter went to a co-op nursery school that had a big closet full of old, cast-off stuff like old purses and phones to play dress-up with. I thought it was dumb, in a school with 20 kids, to have 30 purses and 12 dial phones in there (that closet was my job to keep organized) but when I cleared it out and left in probably 6 purses and 2 phones, the teacher put everything back (grr), saying that dial phones were good for fine motor coordination. Then my daughter and her buddy were each trying to get their hands on one of the phones, and it dropped and landed on my kid’s foot, giving her a goose-egg. she’s probably lucky it didn’t break a toe, those things weighed so much. Grr. Anyway, that was about 4 years ago and I’m sure the phones are still there.
Probably a few weeks ago. I have an all-black dial desk phone that I bought at oldphones.com some years ago specifically to get the cool bell ring and the pleasure of dialing a real dial phone.
Yesterday, We have an old fashioned solid black wall mounted rotary phone on our basement wall. When my dad owned a bar it was the business phone. Still works fine, I can’t believe how heavy the headset is you could kill someone if you hit them with it.
But it came across as you saying a touch tone won’t work in a power outage.
I have used the pulse function on a phone in the last two months. I wanted to see if the lines still worked with that method. They did. You were more likely to misdial an old rotary phone. You’re in a hurry and you stop the dial while it was clicking out the number 9. Start over.
A few months ago – our washing machine was broken and I went down the street to do some laundry at my aunt’s house. I realized there was still a rotary wall phone installed in her basement! I think I called my mother just for the thrill of dialing the phone … she wasn’t home.
I got a kick out of this recently while watching All The President’s Men. Woodward and Bernstein are doing their investigative reporting, and they call a lot of people on the phone. The rotary phone. Long distance. And the camera would just stay there, filming the dialing of a rotary phone. It felt like it took forever. I’m sure when I first saw the movie, I didn’t think twice about it, nor did anyone else in the audience.
