
Senate Considers Banning Dial Phones (1930) - rmason
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_Considers_Banning_Dial_Phones.htm
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dmix
The last paragraph makes it sound like old people struggling with the UX of
new technology.

> the dial phone "could not be more awkward than it is. One has to use both
> hands to dial; he must be in a position where there is good light, day or
> night, in order to see the number; and if he happens to turn the dial not
> quite far enough, then he gets a wrong connection."

I’m guessing with the previous version you just picked it up and had an
operator to route the calls?

~~~
ben509
You could, in fact, dial them one-handed. A rotary phone uses pulse dialing;
as the rotor turns it opens the circuit briefly, if you dial 5 it sends 5
pulses. So you can do the same by pushing the switch repeatedly and pausing in
between each number as though the rotor was spinning back.

Same trick works on touch tone phones since the networks still support pulse
dialing.

~~~
bemmu
Once as a kid I managed to misdial the emergency number (112) by just randomly
pressing the switch, unaware of the trick and with no intention of calling
anywhere.

I wonder if the emergency worker believed me when I apologized for
accidentally calling him.

~~~
lopmotr
I had a similar experience doing some wiring on the phone jack and probably
shorted the wires just the right number of times. At some point I heard a
voice telling me I'd dialed the wrong emergency number (999 or 000 or
something) and to hang up and dial the correct one (111 in my country). Lucky
it was wrong because if I hadn't been able to receive their call back since I
was working on the wiring, a cop would probably have turned up.

It sounds like you were in a country where the number 112 was just 4 pulses in
total, which is easy to accidentally dial. Some other countries require 3
sequences of 9 or 10 pulses (000, 111, or 999). 111 in New Zealand where the
digit to pulse count mapping is reversed.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Wind blowing on overhead telephone wires could cause this with is why 999 and
911 where used for Police in The UK and US

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profmonocle
There's another fascinating anachronism in there:

> The Congressional Record would not be mailable, he said, "if it contained in
> print what Senators think of the dial telephone system."

"Not being mailable" is probably a reference to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws)

The idea of being unable to send "obscene" mail, even private correspondence,
is hard to imagine compared to our modern understanding of free speech.

~~~
voxic11
Is it? Obscenity is still not protected by the first amendment in the United
States.

------
ramigb
I was born in 84, My city had the manual phone mixed with the dial phone until
early 90s, so I remember as a kid my grandmother picking the phone and asking
the operator -whom I knew since it was a small city- to connect her to someone
...

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tomohawk
They still have elevator operators for the elevators at the US Capitol
building.

If you watch old movies, you can see the pre-dial telephones in operation as
the operators set up calls. It would take a while. One convenience is that you
could have the operators call you back when they had reached the other party.

~~~
perl4ever
"They still have elevator operators for the elevators at the US Capitol
building."

Some years ago, I was shown how to operate a (enclosed) freight elevator by
someone who apparently thought I was kind of dumb not to know how they worked.
I don't know how common the setup was, nor how old or typical it was, but
among the features it lacked that modern passenger elevators have - it didn't
travel to and stop at a floor automatically; you had to start and stop it with
a control at the right spot; it didn't open and close the doors automatically;
you had to pull on a strap, and close guards separately, and I'm not sure I
even recall any locking mechanism.

~~~
wlll
I used to work in an old mill (NW UK) converted to industrial units and we got
to the top floor using an old lever operated lift. The lever had three
positions, up, down, and stop. The door was a couple of sets of sliding
gratings.

I seem to recall that there _was_ a locking system but I can't quite recall
what it was. It was either that here was some sort of piece of metal that
stuck out from the lift shaft and only allowed the doors to be opened at
certain positions in the shaft, or that the lift wouldn't operate without the
doors being closed, or some combination of both.

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bluejekyll
I’m intrigued by the distinction between manual and dial. I am assuming manual
in this context means: pick up phone, ask the operator to connect you—which
doesn’t sound manual at all.

~~~
chrisseaton
When you dial a connection is made automatically. When you use an operator
they're having to manually make that connection (literally manually using a
wire in their hand back then.)

~~~
bluejekyll
Yes. I’ve seen the pictures. Still, I wouldn’t call that manual. “Operator
assisted” seems like a better name.

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analog31
Amusingly, there are modern analogues. Word processors were harder for many
people to use than typewriters, at first, and those were harder to use than
secretaries. Operating a personal computer was harder than assigning a task to
the computing department.

We got over those things because those technologies eventually made most of us
more efficient. I do my own programming and typing.

But there are still people who have other people do those things. The thing
that probably got the Senators to use dial phones was the realization that
they didn't want the operator listening to their conversations. Today they
probably all have burner phones. But I doubt that Senators do their own
typing, and they probably still use a secretary to make official phone calls
for them.

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jonny_eh
It reads like they went ahead with a compromise where they got phones that
worked in both "manual" and "dial" mode. When were those replaced with dial-
only?

~~~
ben509
Wikipedia has an interesting history of manual switchboards[1]; they broadly
died out in about the '60s with some still used in rural areas into the '90s.

And while the switchboards were automated, I don't think even today our phone
systems are "dial only." Certainly through the '90s I recall dialing an
operator for international and reverse charge calls and I think operators
still serve customers with disabilities. That's not even counting all the
customer support positions that are mostly redirecting calls.

The funny thing is you'd think the web would have ended it, but more sites are
adding chat boxes, or they want your phone number to set up an account...

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator)

~~~
bdamm
Yeah but sites wanting a phone # is more to do with its utility as an
identifier than anything. And for the sales guys to talk with you.

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russfink
Resulting alternative reality: "Hoy hoy, Watson, come here at once. I wish to
dictate a text message."

