1950s AT&T film: How to dial your phone

Dr2717 sez, "In the mid 1950s, switchboards were giving way to self-dialed phones. AT&T, playing the role of the geeky kid who teaches Mom how to use the new computer, created this film to show people how they would make their own telephone connections using a rotary dial. Lessons taught in this film, among others, include 'Wait for the Dial Tone,' and 'The Difference Between Ringing and Busy Signals.'"

This film opens with the demonstrator pointing out the importance of correctly using the dial telephone. Correct dialing techniques are demonstrated, with an emphasis placed on the following:
* Be sure of the right number
* Wait for the dial tone
* Refer to the number while dialing
* Turn the dial until the finger hits the finger stop
* Avoid confusing the letter "O" with the "0"
* The difference between ringing and busy signals

Now You Can Dial (Thanks, Dr217!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Major Variola (ret)

Someone needs to describe TCP/IP
that way. First, we listen() then we
get a SYN… must use same accent hair
and dress.

PS what kind of resolution did they have
on the “this phone’s number” display
on the dial? Looks monochrome…

Isn’t there a pinch hazard here?

@Anon: witch: hilarious

If you pick up you might hear voices? WTF? Cell phones were invented to give
street schizos cover for talking to themselves.

WHY IS IT “DIAL TONE” AND NEVER “THE DIAL TONE” ????

When she says “four digits that make up your number” she omits the dots between the digits.

I like how she ends with “RTFM”
emmdeeaych

Strange but true: I have Verizon FiOS service, fiber to the house, and for some reason the darned thing still works with my ancient rotary dial phone. Stop to think about that. Someone at Verizon decided to encode the pulse-recognition into the fiber optic boxes. So weird, but I do love the tactile sense of that heavy old handset.
rebdav

The continuing backwards compatibility of pulse dialing is useful if there is an issue with the touch tone system on your phone, you can tap out the numbers in pulse with the hangup. It is mostly a party trick though and easy enough to get wrong.
I like the old school cold war nuke resistant standards for old copper pair telephony and even though there are cheaper alternatives keep a standard wired line because of the durability and ease of DIY improvisation.
- emmdeeaych
  
  It’s not that hard, I’ve called Australia by interrupting the autodialer and then tapping out the number from a phone at a rural kiosk ATM in the middle of the night. Thanks BayBank!
Anonymous

still have my metal ball top dialing pen. just in case.
silkox

In my area, at least, there was a time when you just dialed the last 4 digits of the number — you didn’t need the exchange (DIamond-6, for us) until later. This was after the period when we had a party line, and could tell which house the incoming call was for by the ring pattern. Now we have to dial all 10 digits, even for a call across the street.
Kimmo

My great aunt had one of those bakelite phones; as a little kid it seemed ridiculously huge.

Regarding the decision to employ the numeral ‘oh’, it seems to me a pretty good call.

Consider the certainty that folks would say ‘oh’ meaning zero anyway, and the pains taken in the video to handle the ambiguity make sense.
Wickedashtray

Up until the late ’60′s, you had to lease those phones from Ma Bell. They were made of heavy Bakelite and you could bludgeon someone to death with just the hand-piece. They were built like tanks.

I also remember getting really annoyed when someone had a lot of “zeroes” in their home phone number.
- Anonymous
  
  Area codes were assigned so that the largest cities had the quickest codes to dial (NYC=212, LA=213, Chicago=312). Area codes containing zeroes were only assigned to relatively rural regions.
  - Jardine
    
    Area codes were assigned so that the largest cities had the quickest codes to dial (NYC=212, LA=213, Chicago=312). Area codes containing zeroes were only assigned to relatively rural regions.
    
    Whether the middle digit was a 1 or a 0 was based on how many area codes were assigned to your state or province. If there was only one area code originally assigned to your state/province, the middle digit would be a 0. If there was more than one area code for your state/province, the middle digit for those would be 1. So New Jersey got 201, but New York got 212, 315, 518, 716, and 914. Saskatchewan got 306 (currently their only area code), Quebec got 418, 514, and 819.
adamnvillani

I’ve heard that young people these days are unfamiliar with busy signals.
Anonymous

I have explained to an 18 year old just this year, what a busy signal is.
robcat2075

Telephone monopoly attempts to calm populace before robot takeover.
tyger11

What is that accent she’s using? You hear that accent in a lot of movies from the era, but not anymore.

So, she says there will always be an operator available, for any type of problem with calling. Does this mean we’ll have lots of types of problems calling? I don’t like the sound of that.

No sir, I don’t like the sound of that at ALL.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Her accent sounds normal to me, but I think that you’re referring to the mid-Atlantic accent, commonly used by actors who wished to sound like they might maybe be British.
- Anonymous
  
  Mid-Atlantic English. Very theater-like for the time.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Here’s Joan Crawford slipping in and out of a mid-Atlantic accent to demonstrate that even a ritzy floozie is still a floozie.
- Anonymous
  
  The accent was the pronunciation typically used by telephone operators back in the day.
Anonymous

I miss rotary dial phones and operators. I remember my high schools friends and I were playing the game ‘killer’ where you try to assassinate one another with dart guns. I made had to make an emergency break through to a friend of mine to tell them that another friend had been assassinated. After describing to that friend the assassination in gruesome detail, we both heard a screen as the operator hung up the phone. Good times.
The Dour Salmon

Having both an O and a 0 referred to as “oh” is fantastically complicated. As much fun as having some letters in a phone number, numbers are just far less confusing.

@Tyger11: It’s called the Mid-Atlantic or Trans-Atlantic accent. Here’s the good ol’ wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_English
Anonymous

It sounds like a mild form of the Trans-Atlantic accent. It was meant to be a neutral accent that didn’t fraw too much attention to itself while also not favoring any specific real world accent. The idea was that people in different regions and even different nations that speak English would be able to understand it easily.
Anonymous

I grew up with rotary phones, too, but until today never realized that the confusion between the letter O and number 0 is that much worse because it is the number 0 you dialed to get the operator.
vicmonster

My mom’s original phone number growing up was 44. Her mother got confused when they changed it to BE44. Myself, growing up in the mid 70′s had an aunt who lived down the street who still had the BL4 prefix. We had a party line with nearly 20 homes on it, so you often had to wait quite a while to get a line, or interrupt their conversation; though my grandmother liked to listen in.
What gets me is calling internationally from the office when you are in a hurry. 9-011-country code-city code-number…especially central New Delhi, where the country code is 91 and the city code is 1. I have accidentally connected with my local 911 operator when I had bad reception on more than one occasion.
Anonymous

What a odd looking phone. how do you txt with that?
Mr. Winka

I love the emphasis on writing down the number as she describes how not doing so could annoy someone else with a very concerned look on her face.

The “numeral Oh”? Couldn’t people in the 50′s handle zero?

I’m sure the reason the phone company tried to train the public on using phones (let it ring for 1 minute, don’t accidentally dial the wrong number) was it costs them money to connect and ring a phone that they couldn’t bill for or bill much for in a small percentage of cases.

My family would always used a system to communicate things for free using the phone like “let it ring once when you get home”.
Stefan Jones

I’m old enough to remember when phone numbers were routinely listed and given in (two letter exchange)-(digit)-(four digit format).

To make things weirder, the exchange letters were given names, so:

OR6-5458

Was also known as “Oriole 6-5458″

MAD Magazine occasionally ran gag telephone directories, say of fictional characters, where the exchange names were “appropriate.”

However . . . even as a little kid I memorized my home phone number as a string of numbers. The whole letter thing was confusing.
Jake0748

Favorite phone # – BR-549.
Anonymous

Witch!
Urban Garlic

Seems like a human factors failure, conflating the letter “o” and the numeral “o” in the demonstration number WO4-9970, and then laboriously distinguishing them later. Something’s wrong with zero?

Also, “let the phone ring for about a minute, or about ten rings.” Wow. No answering machines, I suppose, and only one telephone in the house, but still, that’s a heck of a long time.

I recall from 1950s movies that “Quigly” was commonly-used two-letter exchange, because there’s no “Q” on the telephone dial, so there’s no risk of it corresponding to a real exchange name — it’s the predecessor of 555-1212.
- tobergill
  
  More correctly 555xxxx – 5551212 is directory assistance. That is the most annoying movie convention bar none. I picture a director and cast who’ve busted their ass creating a believable situation, only to have it completely trashed by quoting a number that the entire audience knows is fake.
- Crispy Critter
  
  The British Post Office (which, once upon a time, operated almost all of the UK’s telephone network except in Kingston-upon-Hull) actually fixed the human factors failure, simply by placing the letter O with the digit 0. In Paris, there was also a Q on the dial in the 0 position, along with the O. I remember reading somewhere that ROQuette was the only exchange name in Paris with a Q.
Anonymous

My grandparent’s phone number still starts with DE2. (that is how I learned and and still call it) I believe it was for Delemont
Michael Smith

The discussions about the “555″ prefix and payphones made me think that movie producers should use numbers from a pool of payphone numbers. There shouldn’t be much cost in idiots dialling payphones to see if it actually goes to the place described on film.
jackie31337

I had no idea the concept of dialing your own phone was so relatively recent. I remember using rotary phones, but they seem really ancient to me now.

I did always wonder why there were letters on the phone–it seemed like they were only there so 1-800 numbers could spell words. I never knew there was a time when regular phone numbers contained letters. Could they possibly have made dialing any more complicated for people who weren’t used to it? I wonder when they dropped the central office letters and replaced them with numbers.
- Michael Smith
  
  I never knew there was a time when regular phone numbers contained letters. Could they possibly have made dialing any more complicated for people who weren’t used to it?
  
  I assume that previously people called the operator and said “please connect me to number 1234 in $SUBURB”, using the name of the suburb. They didn’t ask for the 123 exchange area. An abbreviation for the exchange area might have been more intuitive, to start with.
- Anonymous
  
  Jackie,
  
  I grew up with the number 422-2254, a.k.a. GArfield 2-2254. So, my exchange was GArfield, and (far enough back–before direct dialing) someone in a nearby neighborhood in my metro would have picked up a phone, connected to the Operator, and asked for “GArfield 2-2254.” This video shows a transition phase in which exchanges still existed, but the calls were routed through automatically. This would have greatly reduced the need for operators, obviously.
gradv

Is that free personal numbers directory still available?
tylerkaraszewski

And my kids will never need to know what a dial tone is, either. And maybe not a busy signal, although I guess those are still around for now.

Progress.
Godfree

Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdjD0GkHEMQ
Michael Leddy

Another one, in two parts at YouTube, Dial Comes to Town, 1, 2.And another. And one more, older still.

My children got me a rotary desk phone a few years ago. I keep it in my office with the ringer set to high, and it amazes younger people whoâ€™ve never heard anything like it.
caipirina

Another thing I need to show my kid some day … like vinyl records and cassette tapes ..

what? rotary dial? button dial? no touch screen?

now i feel old
Anonymous

“let the telephone ring for at least a minute, or about 10 rings to give the person you are calling time to answer”?!?!?!
- Gag Halfrunt
  
  At the risk of pointing out the obvious, remember that there might have been only one phone in the house. You’d hear the phone ring but you might not get to it in time if the caller got impatient and hung up. And with no answering machines and no caller ID, you would just have to wait for the caller to phone you again.
Deltic

How about ‘How to Use the Dial Phone’ (1927): http://www.archive.org/details/HowtoUse1927
Jewels Vern

Most people spun the dial with a finger, but people who dialed a lot used a pencil. Merchants often gave away a plastic tool with an advertising message on it, and high toned places had sterling silver dialers. I know that because I bought a load of sterling scrap and got a dialer in it. It looked like a knife handle without a blade and it took me several weeks of watching Ebay to see another one like it. That antique dialer sold for more than I paid for the whole lot.
Ari B.

My parents had a rotary phone in our kitchen until I was in college (probably around 1999/2000 or so). I remember them getting a “pushbutton” phone for their room when I was a kid, replacing the rotary phone they had there. Prior to buying that touchtone, my folks had switched to a new long distance provider (MCI, IIRC)that required the use of tones to make long distance calls.

Their interim solution? They sent us a little box, about the size of a deck of cards, that had a touchpad on once side, and a round speaker on the other. You’d place the speaker over the handset microphone, and use it to dial.

My dad figured out how to play several songs using it. :-)
nixiebunny

Whee! I love old telephone movies. The huge prop telephone would be a lot of fun at parties.

That lady’s voice sounds a lot like Katherine Hepburn. I kept waiting for Cary Grant to walk into the room.
narddogz

I just tried the pulse option on my land line touch-tone telephone and it still completes a call!

This means a rotary would also work just fine if connected. But I would only want one if it was ginormous like shown in the video.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  A friend of mine has dial phones from the 40s and 50s hooked up to all his phone outlets. They work.
Anonymous

I remember when I first got a cell phone and I was confused because there was no dial tone.
tenner

An interesting bit I noticed in this video… notice how both the demonstration numbers have the same suffix (-9970)?

My father used to work for New Jersey Bell in the good old days and his number at work was always xxx-99xx. He told me that (at least in New Jersey) the 99xx-numbers were often used for official business. To call 555-9970 you could also ask the operator for “555 official 70″ and you’d get through as well (possibly for free).
- nixiebunny
  
  I noticed that 9970 number right away. The other use of xxx-9xxx was for pay phones.
  
  When I was a kid in the 1960s, they demonstrated with the number 555-2368. Robert Martin was the go-to name in the phone directory.
  
  This was confusing 15 years later, when I had a friend named Richard Martin.
  - wrybread
    
    When I was a ne’er do well 13 year old “phreaker” in the early 80s we used to do “99xx scans” on every exchange to find the weird phone company utilities installed on various 99xx numbers. There were lots of really strange things there, my favorite being two different numbers that would connect to each other. So for example there’d be 914-478-9911 and 914-478 9912, and you’d call the first and just get silence, and when someone called the second they’d be patched in. Weird stuff, and hugely exciting to a 13 year old.
Anonymous

CH 48123 the correct time Hartford,ct
claude badley

I was so relieved when in the 60s they downsized from those “Land of the Giants” sized phones to a more ergonomic and less cumbersome design.
axoplasm

The mind blowing part of this film is this “directory book” she keeps looking in. Sure phones today have better buttons or no buttons or whatever but back then you had to look in a BOOK and WRITE DOWN A NUMBER before you could call someone?
- 711525
  
  You didn’t HAVE to look in the book. But you COULD find anyone’s phone number. Up until the break up of MA Bell, everyone’s phone number, unless you paid for it to be unlisted, was available, either in your local directory or by calling information. We still get yellow pages delivered free to our home. I don’t remember when the last whitepages was delivered – with residential numbers, maybe 2001. Today when I pay $1.25 to call information, if the person doesn’t use that service – Verizon, Sprint, etc. the operator doesn’t have the number and I still have to pay!! It drives me nuts.
Jake0748

Giving up some security info here… When I was a kid our family’s phone number was ME5-0748. For some reason those digits have stuck in my head for 50+ years. I’ve had tons of numbers since then that you couldn’t drag out of my brain, even under enhanced interrogation techniques.

My current number is 555-buz-zoff.
- 711525
  
  Jake0748 – So, you’re from the Bronx! We were too. ME5 – means you were near Yankee Stadium. Our number was almost the same as yours. Funny, to be nostalgic about a number – but I think the names – Melrose in this case – added personality and connection to the number. Butterfield 8 as a movie title would never have worked as BU8.