“I’m gonna call up Ed and see what he thinks about this business.”

January 19, 2021 10:04 AM

Dial Comes To Town is a twenty-minute educational short film from 1940 by Bell Telephone intended to introduce Americans to phones with rotary dials.
It was uploaded to YouTube from the Prelinger Archives on archive.org.
posted by Going To Maine (50 comments total)

We've got an ancient rotary phone attached to a wall in the kitchen that was there when we moved in. We don't have a landline, so it's not operational, but it is always fun to play "What is this object?" with any guest under the age of, say, 16. They generally have no idea.
posted by gwint at 10:10 AM on January 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Want to know more? The Connections Museum in Seattle is an excellent resource. They've assembled a massive collection of telephony equipment and switching systems - AND they make it all work again for posterity.

Want to see what goes on behind the scenes when you dial a rotary phone? Here you go.
posted by JoeZydeco at 10:20 AM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

I miss my landline. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of it. I had a 212 number!
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 10:22 AM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

I think it’s widely underappreciated that there was a time when a long distance call from Vancouver to Paris meant that there was a physical wire running from your handset across North America, under the ocean and partway across Europe.
posted by mhoye at 10:22 AM on January 19, 2021 [18 favorites]

New aspiration for my dotage:

Hoverphones? P'shaw, I want a phone that respects gravity. Same as always!
posted by adept256 at 10:32 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

My grandmother and mother both worked as "Number Please" telephone operators in my hometown in NJ before dials came in. My mom said that operators knew everything about what everyone was doing in town.
posted by octothorpe at 10:39 AM on January 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

My father-in-law worked for the phone company for decades. In the sixties he built a lakeside cottage next to the one his own father had built in the forties. The family then used the newer cottage as their summer home and rented out the older one by the week to vacationers.

The two cottages both had phones, of course: rotary phones my F-i-L had installed himself. Up until the old cottage was torn down maybe eight or nine years ago, I am sure the renters must have been looking at the rotary phone with ever growing mystification as the years advanced.

The best part was the two cottages were on a party line, so one number rang the phones in both cottages. If the call was for the weekly tenants, my in-laws would alert them with the intercom, which was an honest-to-bog candlestick phone: you know, where you grip the base in one fist and hold the little Dixie cup earpiece to your ear with the other hand? It was brilliant. I always felt like I was calling Stan Laurel or Spanky or someone.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:43 AM on January 19, 2021 [10 favorites]

I had to dig up a rotary phone for one of the local fire chiefs for him to take to schools. He did a fire safety program, and none of the elementary kids knew how to "dial" 911.
posted by Marky at 10:56 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Wow, that old-school dial tone was awful.
posted by hanov3r at 10:59 AM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

This clip around 2.5 minutes in of the two old guys shouting "hello? can you hear me?" is just as relevant with modern cell phones. Or increasingly with landlines, which these days are VOIP calls compressed to total crap.
posted by Nelson at 11:07 AM on January 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

We still have a rotary phone because the sound is good and the handset comfortable. Mostly it’s used to dial a misplaced cellphone, but when I’m expecting a long serious conversation from home, it’s often worth settling down near the jack.

Plus also people’s double takes were funny back when people &c.
posted by clew at 11:27 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

I miss my landline. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of it. I had a 212 number!

Same. I keep telling myself that 917 is the new 212.
posted by plastic_animals at 11:28 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Reminded me of this great video from a couple years ago: Can two 17-year-olds figure out how to dial a rotary phone?
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:29 AM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Seriously! It's hard to appreciate how crap modern calls are until you try the old hardware. When my brother was quarantining downstairs in our house, I wired together a couple of old rotary phones with a 9V battery so we could chat, and the experience was notably better than any other communications channel I've used in the past decade. No latency! No compression artifacts! No clipping the start of a sentence! You don't realize how many conversational cues you've sacrificed until you hear the inrush of breath before the other person starts talking. We could have a full hour-long conversation without talking over each other once.

It didn't scale and sucked for long distance, but old POTS had its advantages.
posted by phooky at 11:31 AM on January 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

I don't know. Sounds a little fancy-schmancy to me. Give me that girl at the switchboard any day. Works for me.

Seriously, growing up in the 50's, I had no idea that a rotary phone was a modern invention. How long are we going to "dial" numbers on our "devices," anyway? Language ordinarily evolves faster than I can keep up with it, but we're still dialing numbers? That word should have gone out with the push-button Princess phone (if that rings any bells with the young'uns out there).
posted by kozad at 11:38 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

How long are we going to "dial" numbers on our "devices," anyway?

Shhhhh! Don't give them ideas! The twice a month I have to dial one manually, 10-digit phone number is at least easier than a 50-character URI!
posted by gurple at 11:54 AM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

dial://8.6.7.5.3.0.9.local-exchange.us:pots
posted by phooky at 12:00 PM on January 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

My grandmother and mother both worked as "Number Please" telephone operators in my hometown in NJ before dials came in.

I can remember when phones had no dials -- which was fifteen years later than when they appeared back east, mind you. And I can recall hearing about television before it came to my small town Idaho home and all the times I spent peering at the tubes in the back of our huge old radio hoping to see a cartoon. Just as you wee bairns will tell your kids about donning VR helmets before you got your retinal implants.
posted by y2karl at 12:21 PM on January 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

Perhaps something like this...
posted by jim in austin at 12:22 PM on January 19, 2021

Seriously! It's hard to appreciate how crap modern calls are until you try the old hardware.

Indeed. We have a landline here for some of the same reasons mentioned above (calling misplaced cell phone, more comfortable for lengthy conversations) and others (no worries about battery life during power outage, previously mentioned lifetime Bell employee father-in-law got us a sweetheart deal of a plan before he retired). There are a couple of terrible cheapass cordless handsets that we use, as well as a 1970s TouchTone phone that I bought at a yard sale for two bucks. The thing was built when Bell still owned the phones and we rented them: it is sturdy enough to use for hand-to-hand combat, and I'm sure it will still be working long after I am in the ground.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:32 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

You should find a Rolodex™ to go with that.
posted by adept256 at 12:45 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

I was told years ago that rotary phones had a major impact on area codes. Why was New York City 212 and Los Angeles 213? They were the biggest cities and it was thought that most calls would be going there. So they got the quickest and easiest area code numbers to dial. 917 on a rotary phone is a real pain to dial.
posted by njohnson23 at 12:59 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

How long are we going to "dial" numbers on our "devices," anyway?

Probably for a really long time. Have you ever seen a list of words and phrases left over from the age of sail?
posted by Horkus at 12:59 PM on January 19, 2021

I love stuff like this, thanks so much for posting!! I also love the idea that everyone in the town goes to a meeting and looks at a gigantic phone dial
posted by capnsue at 1:09 PM on January 19, 2021

Probably for a really long time. Have you ever seen a list of words and phrases left over from the age of sail?

I am taken aback by your comment,
posted by Mogur at 1:11 PM on January 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

I also love the idea that everyone in the town goes to a meeting and looks at a gigantic phone dial

The video raised some questions for me about 1940 that I didn’t know I had.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:49 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

How was this missed by the MST3K gang?
posted by brookeb at 1:55 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

It's hard to appreciate how crap modern calls are until you try the old hardware.

I think the switches and network were also optimized to carry voice signals. I din't know much about telecom, but making a network that can carry data and voice is I think, much harder.
posted by thelonius at 2:00 PM on January 19, 2021

All I can say is that Gramps is a old so-and-so and the women in that town had many interesting hats.
posted by emjaybee at 2:10 PM on January 19, 2021

I think the switches and network were also optimized to carry voice signals. I din't know much about telecom, but making a network that can carry data and voice is I think, much harder.

Yes and no. The old copper switched network gave you an actual dedicated analog circuit. It supported clear sound, very low latency, and a dedicated 2 way channel. Also it worked up to very high frequencies which is how we got 56 kbps modems.

Modern landlines are now packet switched fiber, often over IP now and sometimes true VOIP. Old days were still X.25. These are digital systems "optimized" for voice. By which I mean that they compress your voice to about 5kbps and do all sorts of crap to limit sound quality. Including, often, half duplex connections. They're also terrible for modems; I think you max out at about 30kbps with an old fashioned modem on modern phone lines. The only "good" news is that these circuits are cheaper for the phone company. So we get shittier phone quality in exchange for cheaper cost of service. Except strangely enough the cost of a phone line keeps going up.
posted by Nelson at 2:48 PM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

I have a 312 number. It’s useless. I never talk to anyone. Yet you will pry it from my cold dead hand.
posted by rlk at 2:54 PM on January 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

> previously mentioned lifetime Bell employee father-in-law got us a sweetheart deal of a plan before he retired

That's what I would need. I had a landline until a few years ago, but now that it's about $70 a month it's not a reasonable expense for me.
posted by The corpse in the library at 3:37 PM on January 19, 2021

When digital phone switches were first becoming a thing (mid 80s) I had a summer job working for my dad's employer taking apart push button phones and rewiring them, so they worked with the new digital switches in the datacenter. I think they were used for test purposes. I must have rewired 1000 of those things that summer.
posted by COD at 4:42 PM on January 19, 2021

the clicky sound of the rotary dial was always fascinating for me as a kid, if it was a 9 it took so long to turn, i'd forget the next number I was supposed to dial.
posted by th3ph17 at 4:50 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Have you ever seen a list of words and phrases left over from the age of sail?

I'm champing at the bit to upset the applecart here.
posted by traveler_ at 4:54 PM on January 19, 2021

I was told years ago that rotary phones had a major impact on area codes. Why was New York City 212 and Los Angeles 213? They were the biggest cities and it was thought that most calls would be going there. So they got the quickest and easiest area code numbers to dial. 917 on a rotary phone is a real pain to dial.

Indeed. All the area codes in the original North American Numbering Plan (NANP) had the same template: three digits, middle digit is a one or a zero, first and last is not one or zero. When you're dialling a rotary phone, the higher the number is (zero is high here), the longer it takes to come back around.

So: 212 is the shortest, so that is New York. 213 and 312 are next: LA and Chicago. The third tier is three codes: 214, 313, and 412 -- that's yer Dallas, Detroit and Pittsburgh. The highest original one in terms of clicks is 907: Alaska. No one lives there except a few sport fishermen, and they do not believe in phones.

The NANP map is a decent if low-res population density map of mid-20th century USA.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:05 PM on January 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

Also it worked up to very high frequencies which is how we got 56 kbps modems.

By the time 56k modems came around telcos were all digital. 56k modems were only 56k downstream - the digital signal went straight from your ISP into the network and then got converted to analog and back again only once. There was no way to encode signals above 33k and have them survive telco digitization.

T-carrier lines were created in the 60's and widely deployed by the 80's. Before T-carriers there were FDM multiplex long-haul lines, but again, those would have had significantly limited bandwidth for each individual line.
posted by GuyZero at 5:09 PM on January 19, 2021

Which is to say - beyond calls that only got switched at your local exchange, you haven't had a dedicated piece of copper between phones since the 50s or 60s. Multiplexing, either FDM or pulse-based TDM, has been around a long time.
posted by GuyZero at 5:11 PM on January 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

And, as a comparison, the first L-carrier FDM multiplexing tests took place between 1935 and 1937 - several years before this film was released!
posted by GuyZero at 5:17 PM on January 19, 2021

Dial tones! Dial tones on a stick! Except the film showing how to use them is silent.

The coasts did get everything first, didn't they?
posted by droplet at 5:37 PM on January 19, 2021

So [212, 213, 312] got the quickest and easiest area code numbers to dial.

Let's be clear: Bell didn't give a whit about you, the subscriber. The goal was to minimize how long the machinery was needed to process the rotary dial pulses and get your signal switched to the correct long-distance trunk. The quicker they could get your call routed, the more calls they could process per minute or hour.
posted by JoeZydeco at 6:52 PM on January 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Pretty sure the actress who plays the daughter in this film was Dinah in The Philadelphia Story.
posted by yarrow at 7:04 PM on January 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

You get the sense that the specific old-timeyness of these old-timers is the exact inspiration for Abe Simpson and Jasper.
posted by condour75 at 8:05 PM on January 19, 2021

I still have my rotary phone even though I no longer have the wiring. I keep hoping there will magically be a way to connect it again. I miss being able to talk with the phone propped between ear and shoulder.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 10:16 PM on January 19, 2021

I find it interesting to note that Fisher Price still sell a rotary toy pohone for toddlers.
posted by Harald74 at 5:00 AM on January 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

Another interesting thing is to ask people of different ages to mime "talking on the phone" for you. Note the age of people who poke out their thumb and little finger vs the age of people mimicking cradling a mobile phone in their hand.
posted by Harald74 at 5:02 AM on January 20, 2021 [4 favorites]

WandaVision just keeps going farther down the rabbit hole with every new episode.
posted by Naberius at 5:56 AM on January 20, 2021

The synchronized movements, identical suits, set expressions, and goggles worn by the Mysterious Cutover Engineers gave me some clues for how Devo got its aesthetic...
posted by pianoblack at 8:05 AM on January 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

there is a secret motherlode of around 300 films in this ilk/direction at
https://techchannel.att.com/showpage/ATT-Archives

mysteriously they are still being supported by at&t, but the page was built around 10 years ago, so i'm not sure how long they will continue to make sure it functions. less than half of these migrated to youtube at all.
posted by spoh at 9:17 AM on January 20, 2021 [4 favorites]

there is a secret motherlode of around 300 films in this ilk/direction at...

hey this is great!

and per this film on single-sideband microwave transmitters : "By 1977, the Bell System's microwave network carried 70% of the long-distance transmissions in the United States."

So again, it's unlikely that anyone you know ever had an uninterrupted dedicated copper link on a long-distance phone call.

What's even crazier is that AT&T spent a ton on building out their microwave system only to abandon it 20-ish years later as optical transmission became a lot more efficient at carrying higher level of traffic.
posted by GuyZero at 10:36 AM on January 20, 2021 [3 favorites]