All this so that in the distant future, your great-grandchildren can receive spam robo calls telling them that their car's warranty is about to expire.
@Thx1138sober Or that they're going to be arrested because their social security number has been associated with criminal activity, which of course they can avoid if they just pay money by way of buying Google gift cards.
I love how at that time they needed a 20 minutes film to explain people just how to dial a number on a rotary phone, but nowadays when you get an iPhone they don’t even ship it with a manual.
Not only that but telephone operators were very polite and helpful. True customer service. You could call them for many things. The time, the weather, etc. I remember my mom calling our neighbor's son in Europe in the Army during the 1970s and having an operator put the call through. In fact my mom was a telephone operator briefly.
@@rael5469 Why operators were woman. They tried males and boys first early on with telephones... But men get nasty and cross... So the phone company hired females!
Done on purpose. Deliberate sow confusion and division. There are "Think Tanks" full of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists paid to manipulate and control people en mass. Same with politics and advertising... million dollar businesses...
@@kbobdonahue1966 When you had to take gloves off outside to use them the finger could stick in the hole. The bad old days. As for the operators,I had a girlfriend who would dress and make up like the images of B17 and B29's art. Strangely,nostalgically erotic
Miss White nailed her presentation, considering she had to memorise a solid 8 minutes without skipping a beat. Even more amazing it's immortalised on TH-cam 81 years later!
she didn't "memorized" anything, she just knew how the system worked and proceeded to explain it. When I do a presentation over a subject that I know a lot about I also do not "memorize" anything, I just explain the concept, plan or idea I am presenting.
My father worked for Bell System. I have his original splicing oak stool, tool sets, and anniversary gifts from the company all marked Bell System. Amazing stuff....
Wow my dad worked for AT&T here in NYC from 1960s till about 2009 and I remember the choices he got for his anniversary gifts Thry offered him it was a catalog.He showed it to all of us and wanted something we all could use we wound up getting this really nice big clock which I still have and works had to take it to be looked at only once.You gotta love those people who grew up during the Great Depression and WW2 they really saw the bad but made them like they say that best generation.
I started as a Long Distance Operator (Traffic Dept) with a supervisor just like that lady! Married the mother of our children from there! Installed residential and business phones. Spliced the cables on poles and in the ground. Did it all, up to 47 years later when I was provisioning internet equipment for the masses. Even turning up equipment in cellular offices for 5 G when I left. All with a high school diploma! They never skimped on the training!
My grandfather was a great man. A farmer born in 1886, knew Civil war veterans, WW1, WW2, and Korea vets. Saw the first airplanes and the moon landing, but not on TV - he had no time for it. I was fortunate enough to spend 3 summers with him, helping him farm. I learned a lot from an OLD man. How times have changed!!
Me too. It’s not the introduction of new stuff that bothers me as much as the taking away of old stuff that I’m still comfortable with. Backwards compatibility used to be important, but it seems not anymore.
When Gramps finally got enough nerve up to engage that new telephone , and successfully call his friend , well , I couldn’t help but wipe away a few tears from my eyes . Simply beautiful.
@peterbelanger4094 I hear ya same with my pops and he worked for AT&T!!! And it was other stuff too like using apps he couldn’t understand the concept “so how many channels?” “No no it’s not like channels just choose what you want” it’s like he needed a clicker in his hand and needed to channel surf.Times change but he always said “f**k that times do t change!!!”
@Paul Morley A phone is any device that you can use to talk to people in real time, where you hear their voice on the other end. How it works and what else it can do, doesn't matter. Hell, you could even say my desk top computer is a phone too, because I can use it to make video or voice calls with Google Voice or apps like Zoom. It technically wouldn't be wrong.
When I was a kid in the early 1960's, you could dial your own phone number, hang up and few seconds later, it would ring. It really pissed of my sister, whenever we did that, because she'd run like the devil, to pick it up, thinking it was one of her friends calling.
We had an upstairs extension phone. If you dialed 1-1-9-1 on one of the phones, it would make the other ring....this worked clear into the 70's. And yeah, it would get my younger sister all ticked off when I'd do it to her. And what about phone exchanges? Instead of a 7-digit phone number, it was two letters (the first two of your exchange) and then 5 digits. One of the popular radio commercials was for a home improvement company and it went "People you know call Maybro, HAzel 1-9988." And when you were calling within your exchange, you only had to dial those last 5 numbers. (edit) I just remembered. One of the classic radio commercials in Pittsburgh during the mid-60's was for another home improvement company...."No money you'll be riskin' when you call Joe Ziskind, so dial this number and do it quick. HAzel-1-7866." And also, before there was 1-800-(whatever), there were toll-free calls that featured the ZEnith exchange.
In 1975 I lived in a very rural region of the US. My phone was two rings on a three person party line. Placing a call within town required four digits, direct. To call outside, you needed the operator, a live person. To make a cross country call, you’d first call the local operator to connect you to the state “Bell” system, who, in turn, would place the call for you.
I lived in the mountains of southern Oregon in 1975 and we had a party line then also. We never had to talk to an operator unless you had a question, but you definitely had to take turns using the phone.
Right ! I forgot about the three person phone line system. As a kid - mom would just so mad as the 3 person would spend all day just sitting on the open line. And she would bang the phone hard just to get back to my mom for belly g her to hand up and stop eavesdropping, or should would report her. ( well she did and got a new 3 way line. ) one week later. Put a different person on a third-party line start doing the same thing as the first woman. Shared three-way phone nine ! That would be really funny if used today !
@@billneo how about the “ BELL Company” Break up from their monopoly forced by the government. They were every where and almost ever state as the only phone company.
70 years after this video, I taught my grandmother how to use the internet for the first time. She was just as nervous, but then just as impressed as Grandfather was about the new rotary dial. :-)
@@SirManfly this girl youtuber made a rotary phone on youtube and its actually a cell phone. Its really cool, look her up shes like some young inventor, super tiny channel go check it out
A telephone operator, dial phone, push phone, even the concept of a standalone land telephone is foreign to kids. All they know is a mobile where you can, among texting, WhatsApping, YouTubing, tiktokking, twittering, photo making etc, also call people. How old fashioned!
@@pastelskies8466 what on earth are you talking about ? Telephones started in the 1870s and 1880s and definitely used wires. The earliest radio (wireless) communications were sometimes called wireless telephony or wireless telegraph, but that was circa 1910.
Just realized how old I am, 74. We had The Telephone Co, Southwester Bell, come to the schools and explain to us how the dial phones worked. I still have the 1947 dial phone from home and it still works great. It was fun teaching my 15 year old Grandson how to use the dial phone. He got really excited and called his Mother. You would have thought it was the first phone call he ever made.
I so enjoyed listening to the lady explain how to make a call. She was so pleasant, courteous and precise and her smile was so friendly and she seemed so kind and helpful. I could work around someone like this all my life and enjoy them everyday!
Strict dress codes for ladies back then. The old Bell System was a strict place to work. I was sent to company schools and learned how to do things the Bell System way.
Makes me consider my grandmother, who was born on the family farm with no phone (or indoor plumbing), and 3 lights and one outlet in the whole house. She’s still with us today, in this world of touchscreen pocket computers and every modern convenience one could ask for. I asked her once, a few years ago, what it was like to live through that kind of massive change - from heating your bath water on a coal stove to indoor plumbing being installed to cars being commonplace, from ancient 3-channel radios to television to color television, from the first commercial transatlantic flight to men walking on the moon to launching rockets to space every few days and landing them back on earth…just so many things. And you know what she told me? “It’s amazing, yes…all of it. These are all things I could barely even dream of as a child. But you know what - you will likely see the same types of advancement in your lifetime as well.” I hope she’s right!
That's fascinating! My late grandparents said to me once something quite dissimilar: they said "Everything's been invented in our lifetimes; there's nothing left to invent!" I suppose in the face of such overwhelming advancement, they couldn't conceive of how it might possibly continue further!
I'm 40 and that's exactly how I feel about a lot of technologies we have today. Smartphones are a great example- I never imagined we would have super thin screens, pocket-sized computers, or wireless high speed internet, but here I am using all 3.
Really, we memorized every phone number we used frequently. I know very few of my frequently used numbers now.....they're all filed, by name in my "contacts" list, and I just hit the "call" button to dial them.
For the longest time I refused to program numbers into my cell phones; my rationale being “If I ever don’t have my phone I want to have the numbers I need to call memorized.” But eventually the number of people became too great and I gave up. Pretty sure I only know my parents’ numbers now.
Now, that memory storage area can be used for better things than strings of 7 or 10 digit numbers. Well, 4 digits actually, the area code (if there was one) was easy and the prefix was a word. Our number 843-xxxx was THornwall 3 then the rest. What did your area have?
Loved this! In 1972 when I was 9 we moved into a new home. The Southern Bell guy pulled up in his van and opened up the side door. Displayed inside were the phones, desktop or wall units in all available colors (white, black, yellow, red, pink, avocado, and sky blue). Being the nerdy kid I asked when the new push button phones were coming out. They’ll be out shortly, he said. I asked, what about the new extra buttons (# and *) what are they for. New features, he said. So dad ordered 3 sky blue phones, the one going in the kitchen matched the color of our GE appliances. About a year later a new kid moved into the neighborhood. We went over to his house and, gasp, he had the new push button phones. Dad, can we get the new push button phones. Nope, these work just fine he said. I still have one of the desktop units displayed on a shelf. The Rotary remained in my parents home up until at least the late 80’s.
In those days one didn’t own the phone equipment; it was loaned to one as part of the phone service. These devices were build like tanks- virtually indestructible! Slamming a phone receiver down in a rage was wonderfully cathartic. It was a non-violent way to demonstrate one’s displeasure with a company or to end a relationship.
I love when Lewis Black said the rotary desk phones were so big and heavy that you could use one to kill a charging puma. I recall those days as well. lol
I remember seeing the phone bill as a kid in the 1970s. The phones were leased, a monthly fee per phone. So when AT&T was broken up around 1984 and you could buy your own phone so many people did. No monthly fee, the phone was paid for before long. You had to drop off the old phones to an AT&T store.
I remember being able to get an operator by pressing the 0 even in the 90s. Think that you still can get one on landline service with some carriers, for international long distance
I was a long distance operator for about 18 years. I started with Southern Bell which became South Central Bell. I transferred to Southwestern Bell which later became AT&T. The lower rates began at 5:00 p.m. and they got very low at 11:00 p.m. The cheap rates were in effect from Friday night until Monday morning. I hated the job most of the time, but I look back on those days fondly now. The job wasn't so bad after all.
Remembering when "It's long distance!!!" made people run to the phone (hurry up, so expensive) and Mom saying "You have to hang up, it's going to storm."
I sure do. Both of them. And "don't talk too long its long distance." LOL! And "call after 5 (or 8); the rates will be cheaper. Also "reversing the charges" and "person to person" so you wouldn't have to pay for the call if someone else answered and your party was not there.
I have an old chronograph watch with indicators on the dial for the long distance price intervals. If you talked up to 2 minutes it was a flat price but 2.01minutes was the same price as 4.00!
I'm old , in my sixties , an older friend of mine while talking on a cell phone will still say stuff like " gotta call you back , I"m on long distance .
@@jettydoom Haven't you heard? 60 is the new 50! Gotta love us Boomers! Your friend is cute. Now my father turns 91 next week and has dementia and can no longer use the telephone. But about 5 or 10 years ago, he would call information (411) to get the number of a business whos name of which he was not sure, but he knew where they were. When the person said they couldn't help he would say "well, you go down the street from your building and turn onto blah blah blah...and would continue. " The lady would inform him that she was in Rhode Island or Wisconsin or some place. My father would get stunned because he thought they were still in the old Bell Telephone building which was located in a town (our county seat) about 20 minutes away! I'd have to tell him "father...the phone company left that building 20 years ago and besides, you have the cable company for phone service now, not Verizon."
I'm now 73 years old. When I was 3 years old I picked up the phone and told the operator that I wanted to talk to my Grandma. She connected me. We lived in a small town. If my Grandmother were still alive I could now do that with my iPhone.
@@bobgillis1137 BUT back THEN it would have cost extra, by the minute. Today there's really no such thing as "long distance", except for out-of-country.
You have to appreciate the level of thoughtfulness that the writers put into this script. This formalized style is the best. It treats everyone like they're smart and not the type of dumbing down that we see today.
Before dial, it was all operator interaction. You give the operator the number like MElrose 3333, they would confirm the number MElrose 3333? Then, either you would be connected or told, "Sorry, that number is busy." Until dial, there was no dial tone, ringing tone or busy signal.
@@ChadnNancy you sure got that right. after two years i cant get my teammates to boot an aws ec2 linux instance. but this video can get a guy born in 1885 to dial a phone
It was actually quite smart. Those folks were all used to human-human interaction. Machines doing work for them autonomously wasn't obvious at all for them. Instead of just telling them to turn the meaningless looking wheel, the demonstration showed how the more it was rotated, the more lights, corresponding to numbers, would turn on at the telephone exchange. It instantly told them how the dialed number is really registered, even if all the details obviously weren't explained. They must have also felt that the phone company employees aren't looking down on them. Since the time was spent to show all that, it was assumed they will understand it, like intelligent people. People always like to know why they must do something, not just be told to do something.
It is such a novelty to watch the way something was presented, how they spoke, how slowly they spoke, and what an effort they went through! Thank you for sharing this!
I can't even decide which was funnier, the the old codger who was born as the civil war ended, or the teenager calling a new kind of phone 'yummy' Jeepers, she might still be alive today.
You could still get a phone with the 'pulse' feature (simulating dialing) on push button phones clear up until the early 90's. Because touch tone carried an extra $1 a month on your phone bill.
Nowadays, we take for granted monthly updates on our cellular phones. During the time of this film, the convenience of the dial added to the phone must have been a big amazement in that time period. Interestingly, you see the grandfather worrying about the complication of the rotary dial until he tries it for the first time, and the granddaughter, excited for such new technology, peeking at her grandfather to check out his reaction! Beautiful piece of film, worth the whole 20 minutes of it!
The most amazing thing about rotary dial phones is the Strowger switch that makes them possible and the story behind its invention. Almon Strowger was an undertaker who got fed up with the telephone operator sending calls to his rivals so he invented a method of "dialing" a number to connect to another telephone. Just seeing one of these devices operating is quite mesmerizing, they're so clever and were still in use in the UK in some remote exchanges in 1990. Pretty good for something invented in 1889. Google the name, it's fascinating.
Yes fantastic I watched the bt video on TH-cam about telephone exchanges. The step by step (Strowger) system, cross bar system, Reed really, and system x a modern digital exchange? It was very interesting to see how how the technology developed through the decades to what we have now. Have I missed anything are modern digital telephone exchanges still based on System X? Great video thanks for sharing.
@@m3snusteve It’s interesting that the initial dial workhorse hardware was not a Bell System invention, although Bell improved upon it. I don’t know what the most modern circuit switching is; packet switching on digital networks.
Just had one installed last week, and I love it! Took a while to familiarize myself with this modern marvel, but SO much better than the party line, or making Earnestine patch me through long distance over the holidays!
I sent this to my mom a few years ago (she is a retired operator from AT&T) when she was complaining about learning her first iPhone. We had a great laugh
I remember we had a "party-line"...That was a shared line due to the limited capacity of the phone system back then. We had to wait until our next door neighbor would get off her phone before we could use ours...We often thought she was listening in on our calls...Sometimes we'd even catch her because we could hear her breathing!.
Not at all surprising, as today's youth have zero clue how to dial on a rotary phone today -- unless they have a grandparent with an "ancient" phone in their home!
My dad retired from the “telephone company” then so did I. This presentation made me chuckle at terms like Traffic (the call themselves) and Plant (installation and repair). My dad was Traffic Manager for years. I remember when I was young he occasionally had to stay at work all night participating in various cut-overs. I started in Traffic as one of the first male operators (on the old cord board) then moved to Commercial as a Service Rep. Then went outside as a pay phone collector and technician. Now most of those jobs are changed drastically or no longer exist. To those that accuse the lady of making multiple takes, remember she’s an actress hired for the film. However, there were Outside Service Reps and Service Assistants that were employed to travel and educate the community in new procedures. Trust that those people knew their jobs and their lines by heart. This is a great film.
Those were the days when reporting trouble with your phone meant that a friendly, skilled technician would be pulling up to your house in an equipment laden van or truck within a matter of an hour so. In the early 80s a friend of mine who was somewhat into phreaking managed to get hold of a phone number which, once you were connected to it after a couple of rings, would repeat whatever you said into the mouthpiece. I imagine this was some type of special test line for technicians to call to confirm that a newly installed phone was functioning properly?? Probably a tape loop system? I also remember him coming up with a conference call number which was an absolute cacophony of mostly teenagers talking over each other, pretty much around the clock.
@@MrRKWRIGHT On our exchange, if you dialed 7091 and quickly hung up, your phone would ring back. Or if you dialed your own number, you would get a busy signal and hear the teen agers yelling at each other "Whats your number!"
Wow. I remember when the town I lived in cut over from the rotary dial phones and analog switch at the Central Office to a digital switch and push button phones. That happened here in Iowa back in 1981. I worked for the phone company too at the time and got to see one of the last analog switches in use at a Central Office. What a chatter they made!
In 1970 my company threw out all the dial phones and installed touchtone. I took them home and built a switching system so I could turn my Christmas lights on or off using the dial phone. I took the system to the church bizarre at Christmas time and my booth made more money with people paying 50 cents to try them than any other booth.
1940 - 30 minutes to show people how to spin a dial. 2020- smartphones, thousands of apps, phone settings, viruses, operating systems and no instruction manuals for any of it.
What people fail to realize is we no longer use telephones. It's called a "Smartphone" but it's really a computer with a program (app) to allow you to communicate with other devices with the same technology. Many "smartphones" are more powerful than the desktop/laptop you are using in the house.
I had mine for three years before a friend showed me that it had a flashlight feature. There are no doubt lots of things that it can do that I don't just don't know how to do, but am unaware exist. Why didn't it come with an instruction book?
I worked at "Western Electric" in the late '50's. When I lived in northern WI even till the early 60's, we had 10 party lines~~the greatest source of info for the town gossipers. LMAO
We had a party line of 5 in the late 70's just outside of Madison in the subdivision. It had to be one of the last offered because it was gone a few years later and mom was still pinching pennies.
My mother- in- law still thinks she's on a 10 party phone. When she answers the phone with "Are you there?" and talks real loud like the local battery on the phone is getting flat.
I worked a cord board in Santa Barbara from '81 to '85. I still have a calculagraph I used. That was the time stamp apparatus to keep the times for the calls.
I was going to write the same thing but you said it better. Realize that in less than 100 years we went from a dial phone to wireless cells that play videos, games, music and have internet (itself a modern marvel) access in a package smaller than a telephone handset of old. Technology has given us more benefits in the past 100-150 years than the preceding thousands of years. We truly do live in a mind-boggling time.
@@jeffg1524 My Grandfather was born in 1908. He didn’t see his first electric lightbulb until he was twenty-years-old. He said he: “…just had to figure out how it worked….”. He unscrewed the lightbulb and stuck his thumb in the socket. He said he: “… found out quickly how it worked!”. He grew up on a ranch in Montana. They heated the small wooden house with a cast iron wood burning stove. They used the same stove to do all their cooking. There was no electricity. They used oil burning lanterns for lighting. They had no telephone, no refrigeration, no appliances of any kind, no radio, no television, no record player. They had no running water and therefore no sink, no bathtub and no toilet (no toilet paper). Their water was drawn from a well that was no more than a hole in the ground with a bucket and a rope. Sometimes one would pull up a drowned rat along with the water. They road to the distant small town upon a horse drawn wagon. He said that when winter came they used barrel staves [The young generation probably has no idea what a barrel stave is.] tied to their shoes with rope as makeshift snow skis. Before he died at the age of ninety-two he had flown his own private small airplane and flew as a customer on commercial jet airliners. He and his family of course came to have a comfortable home with all the modern conveniences. As a young man he had an office job for the railroads where he would type through three layers of carbon paper on a manual typewriter. That built some very strong fingers! There were no computers and no keyboards back then. He bought his first electric typewriter in the 1960’s and for him, and all the family, it was a marvel. The family gathered around his color television to watch the first moon landing in 1969. I was eleven-years-old at the time and there are no words to describe how thrilling this momentous event was for us and the whole world. He bought a small handheld four function calculator when they were first available in the 1970’s. It cost $100 then which was like spending $500 now. If you had asked him about “The Good Old Days” he would have told you that life back then was a miserable struggle against almost starving and freezing to death. I have only spoken about technological things that have made our lives more secure, comfortable and convenient. During over the first two thirds of my grandfathers life non-male, non-white, non-christian, non-hetero people were, to varying degrees, openly suppressed, denigrated, devalued, humiliated, scorned, brutalized, ostracized and murdered. The “Good Old Days” never existed; it is a naive fantasy.
@@CitizenOfTheWorld2025 Absolutely, Chris. People who pine for the days before modern technology have no idea what they're talking about. Do we really want to go back to the days of horse and buggy, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, international travel by sail, no modern, life-saving medicine, etc....I mean c'mon. Most would wilt and curl up into a feeble ball if they had to face that kind of life. And do we really want to go back to a time where women couldn't vote and minorities were treated as less than human? To those who want a "simpler" time be thankful you live in this time, because for most of human history just surviving was the principal focus of daily life.
Yes, all because of the TCP/IP network architecture that was designed going back to the 1950's with DARPA. Vint Cerf who works for Google was one of the primary engineers in this project. The most ingenious invention ever was TCP/IP. For me at least it is as I work in this same field. 🙂
My mother was involved in the rollout of the "Direct Dial" system in 1960 - 1962. She was an exchange supervisor for the GPO in Sheffield. Still got the newspaper cutting as it was big news back then!
I'm a little bit confused here ... you mean Sheffield England ? So you're saying they didn't do that same system until 20 years later ? ... I'm really tired and getting ready to go to sleep I think I misunderstood you because I know they had dial phones in England during World War II
@@gardensofthegods local numbers were dial, but between cities the switching apparatus had not been fully in place. WW2 had prioritised Govt communications and similar, leaving roughtly afterwards intra city communications , then between cities, some remote exchanges did not become automatic for some time (though some were the first automatic exchanges,
Wow I can't wait for these dial phones to come out! Right now if I drop my phone the wrong way, I can't even dial because the glass breaks. These dial phones look sturdy and reliable! Plus with the new dial tone feature I know BEFORE I dial my number whether or not my call will be put through. No more of dialing THEN finding out "no signal"! Also to dial someone you only need four numbers? Right now I need to dial ten! How efficient of a change! My favorite part is that these new dial phones are wired to the wall so I don't lose it. How innovative!
Sturdy is an understatement. You could beat someone to death with a bakelite phone and then dial 911 with it. The 4 numbers is because it's very local only (and party line too given what she said about other people on the line), to get outside of your immediate area you'd have to call the operator.
I feel exactly the same way. In many ways we've gone backwards with phone service. Now, if you want to reach someone: 1. They have to have their phone charged 2. They have to have their phone near enough to hear the ring 3. They have to be in range of the tower (maybe not so in a basement/large building) 4. They have to have the ringer on 5, The phone, designed to last 2-3 years, has to work Progress doesn't always go in the right direction.
I was thinking the same thing. Having an operator place your call is more convenient than dialing it yourself. They push it as progress when it's actually a way to maximize profits.
All these years later her presentation can only be rated as EXCELLENT. I remember these phones still in service in the 1970s. I had a few. I remember that an old 1950 something phone was one of the first things I ever took apart to see how it worked. It was very satisfying to dial a number. It felt purposeful. I think I could remember at least a few dozen numbers back then. Times were so different. Grandpa living at home, the people were so much thinner. That phone book would soon become so thick that you could use it as a booster for a toddler to sit on. We now use this glass faced marvel that can provide voice and video to virtually anywhere on the planet. All in my short little lifetime. What do you think will be the next few great leaps in technology of person to person communication?
The next great leap in technology of person-to-person communication? Easy, everybody gets chipped at birth and all you need to do is think of a person and you are in instant contact with them. The only downside is all of the spam calls...
Same as always: Grandfather used as a laughingstock straw man representing anti-technological ignorant stubbornness -- and that is just as distasteful now as it was then.
I love how everything in this presentation, along with the people, are so slow and deliberate - back in the days before television started speeding up our lives and shortening our attention spans.
I really like the shining optimism and vibe of the instructing woman. I'll think of her when I'm down in the dumps of despair and will imagine her voice telling me, "Fear not. Keep going!"
The grandfather in this film reminded me of my mom when got herself a smart phone. When she learned how to text and send pictures by email, I was very proud of her as the grandfather got acclimated to the new dial phone.
Twenty years ago at my sister's house her daughter's phone broke and my sister told her to use the phone in the dining room. "That old phone has never worked" said my niece. "But I talked on it just the other day" said my sister. Then my niece went into the dining room and lifted the receiver and started stabbing her finger into the holes on the dial ring like it was a touch-tone phone. "Mom, I told you, this old phone won't work". It never has.
ROFLMAO I can see that happening. What a great family memory to have. I bet it was so funny when your sister showed your niece how to use the rotary phone.☎😂
@@midcenturymodern9330 ... a few years ago I changed from the phone company to my cable company, which uses a modem to tie in the land-line. Believe it or not, that modem supports pulse dialing and has enough juice to ring the bells on all 3 rotary phones in my home. One of them is a 20s vintage style like in this video's stage demo that's meant to be mounted under the counter in a business. It also has the external (extra loud) bell that would be mounted remotely so you could hear it all over the store.
@@midcenturymodern9330 ... you can thank the cost of labor for that. Even though older phones needed some maintenance the wear items were pretty easy to replace. These days you just pop in a new $10 phone (made outside the USA) every few years. I doubt we could make a phone for that price in this country.
Thank you! That dial tone left me in stitches! Hilarious! Just died hearing it! Also was great to see people, the woman giving the presentation in particular talking in a manner that is so hard to find today-sensible and clearly understandable!
I couldn't believe the same irritating buzz was also the ringing tone you'll hear while listening for the person to pick up, and the same buzz again for the busy signal. I guess it was pretty primitive tech, the kind that works even without power
@@KairuHakubi The tones were exactly the same as they are today; poor recording. Bells have been replaced by various electronically generated tones. Some cellphones can emulate the original bell.
@@davidcarson4421 I find it hard to believe poor recording quality has changed the familiar versions of those tones I grew up with into the harsh buzzing heard in this video. It's not like it turned everyone's speech into screeching grinding noises. What's more, all three sounded identical, whereas those were completely, utterly different sounds in my day (and their 'rhythm' was also completely different) or do you mean to say that then, as now, the recording quality was bad over the phone? Because that's true. That has almost gotten worse in the modern age as they've compressed the hell out of everything.
He kinda did when talking to his friend Ed at about 2:40 telling him that there were airplanes doing skywriting over the town to hoax the eyedroppers on the line who were muffling the signal.
This is exactly what I needed to learn today. Thank you. I remember my grandma showing me these old phones when I was young at some museum and trying to teach me, but I couldn't understand. Now I'm 25 and understand
My father worked in the central office of the telephone company in our central Missouri town all through the 50s and 60s and 70s. As a child, It was really fantastic and wondrous to hear all those thousands and thousands of clicks.
There's something really satisfying about old telephone exchange equipment. I used to volunteer at Bletchley Park (where they did the WWII codebreaking) and they'd reconstructed one of the Colossus computers using old Post Office telephone equipment, and it was a sight to see and amazing to hear.
Ms. White really has it together. Such poise. Mom used things until they were broken. So, our dial phones lasted well into the 80's. I remember being frustrated when I needed push-button to enter something and it was a dial phone. I'd have to go through the operator since we only had a "rotary" phone. Such hardship. Fun fact: I work in the very building that used to make many of the rotary telephones in the U.S.
"Aw shucks, you young'uns are never satisfied these days. Folks are getting more worried about being modern than they are over their three square meals". Boy, did Grandpa call it!
Yeah, I wonder how long between the release of the new system with that awful dialtone till they changed it to the one I was familiar with in the 60s, or a less irritating one before the 60s version, due to complaints from the public about how awful it was. I can't imagine picking up a phone and hearing that sound.
Responding to David Paxton below: Yes, Miss White did nail her presentation! Her delivery was sincere and deliberate without being condescending. It’s a simple process to dial a phone, but she explained it without treating her audience as simpletons.
@@LearnAboutFlow they made a standard broadcasted presentation for those in and at home wondering about how to use the new rotary phone, and a background about its capabilities. Everything was elegant in those days, and don't try to say they weren't because I know its all of you's favorite thing to do. Yes I'm using mafia talk because I won't bother saying "all of your guys favorite" which sounds off.
@@LearnAboutFlow not exactly, you should common sense and know there were a great plenty of phone styles, colors, materials, previous years, and makes with script that greatly channeled different types of looks. The one presented here is an example phone. There could be a sage green rotary phone in 1940, a black talker in 1921, and a desktop 1935 Mocha toned telephone with brass embellishment and an ebony mantle with ivory keys tones. Really to think they only had one phone?
Mary, of "Peter Paul and Mary" was commenting on telephones with some banter during a performance. She said, "We never use to have the problem of 'where is the phone?' It was always on the little table in the hallway attached to the wall with a cord." and... "Now they have 'call waiting' which allows you to be rude to TWO people at the same time."
@ Charles, I have a pen-pal in NY who has a nearby friend. Pen-pal and Friend will be talking and then the FRIEND says OOPS! Have a call coming in and leaves my pen-pal hanging! The friend is VERY RUDE!
For those wondering about the dial tone sound: That wasn’t the actual dial tone sound coming from the display prop. That was just a cheap buzzer they were using to simulate dial tone for the demonstration so that it could be heard by everyone in the room. The dial tone people heard on the phone never sounded that crude. Source: Pacific Bell/SBC/AT&T switch tech, 30 years, retired.
It's funny, when I first read your comment I wondered why you would need to explain the obvious and then I remembered that most people today were not born yet when all phones had dial tones. My boss thinks I'm quaint when I always listen for a dial tone before I dial forgetting that modern phones dont' have dial tones. My home phone does because it was made in 1948 and yes it still works. In fact it works better than every phone I have had since and I have gone through about a dozen cell phones which never seem to last more than about a year before they self destruct and I even had some extension phones that I got new that broke down/wore out within a few years. I find the old phone comfortable and easy to use. I also don't get robo calls on them. The new phones (read anything manufactured in the last 30 years) are awkward and uncomfortable to use and have more damned buttons than the space shuttle and are just as reliable.
nunya biznez - Hi! I agree, and land lines usually had much better clarity. People on both ends of the call could actually talk at the same time and still hear each other. But land lines were on their way out when I retired. And it is amazing to have a Star Trek communicator in your pocket. 😃 Ed: It also interesting that few people are familiar now with the sound of a cheap hardware store buzzer and so can’t tell the difference between that sound and dial tone.
Dial tones actually used to sound the way they did in this video. It 'was later changed to a more mellow sound. The dial in the clip had no letters They must have been added a short time later or been omitted to make the film simpler. I was born in Brigham City Utah and was not aware the phones had or did not have dials. We moved to Los Angeles and the phones all hard dials. We had a seven digit number but the first two numbers were Represented as letters. We were on the CLeavland exchange. This however was changed to the CLinton exchange. As both were CL changing the name made no sense. We never found out why.. The dial phones of my childhood could only make local calls. For long distance you dialed 110 which in Los Angeles gave the Long Distance Operator. Emergency was 116. In school we were taught "If you're in a fix dial 116." to remember how to report a fire. There was also 1156 which was not made public but was used by telephone service personnel to check that a phone rang property. We called it the ring back. In 1956 we moved back to Brigham City. There were now dials on the phones. Phone numbers were shorter. My grandmother's was 408. Just as Brigham City was about to get dials we moved back to the CLinton exchange in Los Angeles. We made a trip to Brigham City in '1958 and there were dials. About this time direct dialing came in and we could call all over the United States and Canada by dialing. In the Early 1960's all phone numbers became digitized. The letter mmon a phone dial or keypad are a remnant from a bygone era.
Kind of a "make sure current calls didn't disconnect" kind of thing? Also, sort of like Indiana Jones trying to take the stones and putting the bag of sand in place of it?
I work in IT, and when we changed over the phones from dial up to VoIP, it was still referred to as a 'cutover' and had to be done vey quickly just as seen here.
Loved the film. Bell was part of the community in days gone by. I performed a "cutover" to the latest 5ESS switching equipment back in 2000. No stopwatches just a bunch of us pulling out fuses and circuit cards at midnight. Good times!!!
So glad they improved the open line signal from the way it was in 1940 to my 70s childhood. The sound here is like a mechanical saw grinding its way through a lead pipe, good grief. Bell was almost a governmental agency, really. Probably should've been one. Those old rotary phones were operational until the early 80s.
That was a good presentation, to the point, without too much technical stuff to frighten off subscribers. Also, the old electro- mechanical (Strowger) system, I feel, served us excellently for quite a while.
@@paulwarner5395 I remember the railroad exchange that used Strowger step by step switching when I worked for the railroad in college. Boy was that a noisy place! Southern Pacific Railroad INternal Communications (SPRINT) later got sold off. You may have heard of it.
Served them well too. They could fire most of the local operators and make you do their job for them.... 2014....self checkout at WalMart. Not what we were promised in 1993 with entire carts scanned at once. You're just pulling out everything and scanning each thing over a 1975 scanner...like a minimum wage drone...except you pay them.
@@STho205 Walmart = scan and go now! Grab your can from the shelf scan with your phone Bag it in your cart 🛒 (put your frozen in ice chest) Approve the scanning and pay with your phone 📱 Scan the completed qr bar code and head out 🛍🛒🏃♀️💨
And we still say we dial a number, even though phones have not had dials for a couple of decades. 2:55 -- House phones back then were almost always party lines. A whole block might share the same line. A pattern of rings would indicate which house the call was for, but nothing stopped anyone who wanted to from picking up and listening in. This would create a lot of noise on the line though, so you could generally tell.
The dial is actually a spring loaded, speed governed timer. If you dial 0 and let go of the dial, the timer will spring back sending 10 equally spaced pulses which will be picked up by the electronic circuit at the central office. If you dial 9, then 9 pulses, etc.
I remember having to turn in our dial phone for one of them newfangled push button phones. It was the 70's. My grands never converted and kept their 10lb monster dial phone the rest of their lives.
My Mom's kitchen phone is still a rotary model that is attached to the wall. She also got cordless phones in the living room and upstairs, but the old dial phone is alive and well at her house....and you never have to replace the batteries in it.
When I was a kid, my ballet studio had a dial phone instead of a push-button phone. I had to call my mom one time from the studio (this would have been in the early 90s, I think), and I picked up the receiver... and then just stared at the dial. I had to get my dance teacher to show me how to use the dial, because I'd never used one before. my dance teacher and my mom both got a good laugh out of it--But I think that was the last dial telephone I ever saw in actual regular use.
My parents had one when I was growing up in the 2000s. A 70s (I believe) rotary dial phone. Worked just fine, so we kept on using it until like the early 2010s, when we finally got a modern phone due to benefits like voicemail, etc. I think my parents still have the old rotary though, stored in a box somewhere.
@@thunderbird1921 The nice thing is that they still work. I will be installing my grandpa's dial phone when I get a landline. He used it as his only phone untill he died in 2019.
@@slome815 Yes they do still work. I still have a couple in service. I like them because they continue to work when the power is out. You can dial in the dark. Cell towers only last 12 hours in a lot of places outside of cities.
Recently retired from the phone company and it amazed me that much of the same terminology is still used today; central office, cutovers, plant department. Cable is still installed the same way, strand is placed the the cable is lashed to it, although it’s pretty much all fiber these days.
My mother was a Bell operator in the late 1940s. So many calls had to be placed by the operator in those days. Imagine Grandpa in this video seeing an iPhone today.
I recall my mother telling me of the trouble my grandmother had when dial phones came in. She simply could not cope, and it took all the joy from her life because she loved listening in on the old "party line" phone like the one in this video. Granny was an Irish immigrant born in the 1890's, very much "old country"--the change to dialing was just too much technology for her. Grandad farmed with horses until about 1960--he wasn't much for changes in technology either. I cannot imagine what they would think of the world today.
My great great oma and opa came from Poland before the Nazis came. Many Americans don't realize what our families sacrificed coming from the old country's in Europe. This was a British colony not that long ago
Listening in on the party line is why those old ones slowed down, even shows that. We could have had nice simple phones, but evr body a snoop and digging for gossip.
@@Wisdom-Nuggets-Tid-Bits yes, it's like walking into a room with two people already in there talking, any or all of the 5 families on the line could join the conversation. However nobody could could call out or receive a call until the line was completely free, including if one of the 5 didn't hang up their phone all the way by mistake and didn't hear the "alarm" sound that happens 5 minutes after the "outside call" terminated the call. At any time the operator could break into a call if somebody with an emergency was trying to call into the line for one of the 5 families and tell everybody to free up the line for an incoming call. No caller I.D. so whenever the phone rang you had no idea what family it was for, many times people told regular callers to let it ring a certain number of times then hang up, and then call right back. The previous number of rings alerted the correct family to answer on the callback.
I like that this documentary assumes that everyone is on a party line. Love it. Raise your telephone and listen for dial tone. So many did not do that procedure.
The Bell system was once the 2nd largest company in the U.S. with over 900,000 employees, with General Motors at over 1 million first. The only privately run phone company in the world, with the best service, customer satisfaction rate and quickest installation and repair numbers world wide. I am an installation and repair tech for Verizon, going on 25 years now, the guy looking at the box on the side of the house shown at the beginning of this film. I took out many of those old steel units, converting them over to modern test network interfaces. They had no test equipment in them because back then because the phone company owned the entire system...including the phones and wiring inside your home. We installed, serviced and removed it, if requested. No body does that anymore. I feel lucky to be a part of this amazing company that is fast becoming obsolete. They have not hired in twenty years and i will be the last. Almost 140 years in existence. Not too many companies can say that!
phone companies nation wide are eliminating the old "COPPER DROP" services, and replacing it with fiber optic cable, so people can have good internet service/ T.V.. service/ phone service. a lot of technology came out of bell labs/ western electric, including all of the splinter companies( fairchild transistor/ intel).
@@gregoryclemen1870 Sadly though POTS lines are virtually indestructible and work through power outages and severe weather. But as you mentioned they are being phased out as you can’t get new POTS service and it’s just a matter of time before all of it is discontinued. Still have mine and it’s expensive so I’ve stripped the service down to local service only.
I do know that the copper drop service lines are being phased out, and fiber optical data lines are being installed, so you can access the internet/ T.V. service/ phone service ,it is just a fact of life that inexpensive phone service is a thing of the past!!!!!. many people that I know have pulled the plug on "LAND LINES", in favor of cell phone service .I remember in 2008, we had an inland hurricane (IKE), and there was no electric service for a week. the land lines were still in service, but the cell phone service was out, due to the repeater towers not having power, and no back up generators to keep them up and operating. no one saw that one coming.it did not matter to me, I have a land line, with no cell phone ,even though it cost me 100 dollars a month for phone/ internet access ,they have you boxed in, and they know it, and can charge you what they want!!!!.
Not quite, The Kingston Upon Hull Telephone Company (now KCom) survived the nationalisation of the rest of the UK's telephone companies in 1911. Apparently they installed their first electromechanical exchange in 1922 and became fully digital in 1989, before BT. Of course BT still handled long distance services.
Thank you for posting this. Back then, I never could figure out those silly dials. I went many years without making a phone call after those things came out.
![How to be Pretty - 1940's Guide for High School Girls [in Restored Colour ]](/img/n.gif)
I can’t believe I sat through a fake town meeting for a town that doesn’t exist and that I loved every minute of it.
the presentation reminded me of the Apple presentations that Steve Jobs would give, showing us all how to use the new phone
you just like all-white crowds. it makes you nostalgic for when america was great, right?
@@mikeha you can BET Steve Jobs watched those old presentations :)
This video put real town meetings to shame.
ur funny lol....totally agree. albuq.
All this so that in the distant future, your great-grandchildren can receive spam robo calls telling them that their car's warranty is about to expire.
@Thx1138sober
Or that they're going to be arrested because their social security number has been associated with criminal activity, which of course they can avoid if they just pay money by way of buying Google gift cards.
Or they can refinance their credit card, or their student loan.
I get those all the time and I don’t drive.
That’s what happens when the government forces your company to divest itself and force it to allow unauthorized devices to connect to the network
Or that my computer protection company went out of business and i'm getting a refund.
When I was a kid, i simply remembered all my friends' phone numbers. Now I can barely remember my own.
So true . I remember all my childhood phone numbers including the ones where the prefix was the first two letters of a name.
prefix 349: 2053 home, 2073 aunt, 8861 aunt, 2482 aunt, 2606 grandma, 2514 aunt, 2933 grandma. Only ones I remember from the 80s
I agree
These days there are so many more to remember because everyone has a cell phone and they numbers are longer because you have to include the area code.
In high school my alias was Gern Blanstien.
I love how at that time they needed a 20 minutes film to explain people just how to dial a number on a rotary phone, but nowadays when you get an iPhone they don’t even ship it with a manual.
Not only that but telephone operators were very polite and helpful. True customer service. You could call them for many things. The time, the weather, etc. I remember my mom calling our neighbor's son in Europe in the Army during the 1970s and having an operator put the call through. In fact my mom was a telephone operator briefly.
thats the only use your grandkids have - explain new tech to you :)
dont rob em of their purpouse.
The manual comes installed! ;)
@@rael5469 Why operators were woman. They tried males and boys first early on with telephones... But men get nasty and cross... So the phone company hired females!
Done on purpose. Deliberate sow confusion and division. There are "Think Tanks" full of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists paid to manipulate and control people en mass. Same with politics and advertising... million dollar businesses...
I’m glad films like this have been archived and are still available to watch
Yes, thank God, these films are still availabel. Otherwise we would not know how to make phone calls these days.
Yeah, too bad most of them have been "archived" improperly and in awful quality
@@davesmith3023 A film can be archived and NOT available to watch.
Agreed.
I’m definitely getting one of these when they come out.
😂😂😂
I'm going to wait for the technology to mature.
This will be retro 6G
You can pick one up around 1941. 😆
@@kbobdonahue1966 When you had to take gloves off outside to use them the finger could stick in the hole. The bad old days.
As for the operators,I had a girlfriend who would dress and make up like the images of B17 and B29's art. Strangely,nostalgically erotic
Miss White nailed her presentation, considering she had to memorise a solid 8 minutes without skipping a beat. Even more amazing it's immortalised on TH-cam 81 years later!
That film was edited. I'm sure she did not do it in one take.
And non-rhotic, too!
Notice the movies-of-the-time casual leaning pose used by Miss White that was considered so cool.
she didn't "memorized" anything, she just knew how the system worked and proceeded to explain it. When I do a presentation over a subject that I know a lot about I also do not "memorize" anything, I just explain the concept, plan or idea I am presenting.
That’s some good change management
My father worked for Bell System. I have his original splicing oak stool, tool sets, and anniversary gifts from the company all marked Bell System. Amazing stuff....
Wow my dad worked for AT&T here in NYC from 1960s till about 2009 and I remember the choices he got for his anniversary gifts Thry offered him it was a catalog.He showed it to all of us and wanted something we all could use we wound up getting this really nice big clock which I still have and works had to take it to be looked at only once.You gotta love those people who grew up during the Great Depression and WW2 they really saw the bad but made them like they say that best generation.
I started as a Long Distance Operator (Traffic Dept) with a supervisor just like that lady! Married the mother of our children from there! Installed residential and business phones. Spliced the cables on poles and in the ground. Did it all, up to 47 years later when I was provisioning internet equipment for the masses. Even turning up equipment in cellular offices for 5 G when I left. All with a high school diploma! They never skimped on the training!
I SAW A STOOL IN AN ANTIQUE STORE. SHOULDA BOUGHT IT
Who wold have thought that 80 some years later there would be more people watching this now, than it was put out originally?
Plus many of us are watching this from our phones
@@sweetpeach3293
Talk about irony.
@@nicoleknight9412 yes, but when we can watch this on an iron, then we can really talk about irony. 🤣
I’m at the age that I understand how gramps feels.
"Oh, _sha!_ Soon as a man gets used to _one_ thing, by golly, somebody wants to _take it away_ from 'im!"
My grandfather was a great man. A farmer born in 1886, knew Civil war veterans, WW1, WW2, and Korea vets. Saw the first airplanes and the moon landing, but not on TV - he had no time for it. I was fortunate enough to spend 3 summers with him, helping him farm. I learned a lot from an OLD man. How times have changed!!
Me too. It’s not the introduction of new stuff that bothers me as much as the taking away of old stuff that I’m still comfortable with. Backwards compatibility used to be important, but it seems not anymore.
go gramps !
I love technology. But when it comes to the modern self drive cars, I feel like grandpa. I will never surrender control of my automobile.
It's hard to believe this was only nine years ago. We've come such a long way since then.
Are you 5 or a bot dummy
😂
I found this comment funnier than I should've
Nine years ago? ... What year is it where you live? Are you John Titor? 😆
@@MercyOnASinnerLikeMe so many moving parts
When Gramps finally got enough nerve up to engage that new telephone , and successfully call his friend , well , I couldn’t help but wipe away a few tears from my eyes . Simply beautiful.
My sister and I, STILL can't get our 83 year old dad to use a smart phone.
@@peterbelanger4094 Leave him the hell alone. It's not important. I really hate the pressure to conform to new technology "just cuz".
@@Captain_MonsterFart be polite will ya!
@Captain_MonsterFart Exactly.
@peterbelanger4094 I hear ya same with my pops and he worked for AT&T!!! And it was other stuff too like using apps he couldn’t understand the concept “so how many channels?” “No no it’s not like channels just choose what you want” it’s like he needed a clicker in his hand and needed to channel surf.Times change but he always said “f**k that times do t change!!!”
Gotta say, this public service announcement was more entertaining than most of the reality shows on TV nowadays!
VERY TRUE!!!!
That's a pretty low bar. Watching paint dry is more entertaining.
Those people who were getting ready to pull the switch on the old phone service looks like they were going out of space with the goggles and gloves
I like how everyone in town got all dressed up and assembled at the local civic center just to see the telephone people. It’s very quaint 😆
@@jamesmcinnis208 ok zoomer
Watching this video on my phone. Strange juxtaposition of technologies.
what do you mean?
watch on your LAPTOP then it won't be so awkward
@Paul Morley A phone is any device that you can use to talk to people in real time, where you hear their voice on the other end. How it works and what else it can do, doesn't matter. Hell, you could even say my desk top computer is a phone too, because I can use it to make video or voice calls with Google Voice or apps like Zoom. It technically wouldn't be wrong.
Ironic.
Are you watching it on a rotary phone.
When I was a kid in the early 1960's, you could dial your own phone number, hang up and few seconds later, it would ring. It really pissed of my sister, whenever we did that, because she'd run like the devil, to pick it up, thinking it was one of her friends calling.
I did that to my son and wife up to about 10 years ago.
That was a “feature”
so who answered?
We had an upstairs extension phone. If you dialed 1-1-9-1 on one of the phones, it would make the other ring....this worked clear into the 70's. And yeah, it would get my younger sister all ticked off when I'd do it to her.
And what about phone exchanges? Instead of a 7-digit phone number, it was two letters (the first two of your exchange) and then 5 digits. One of the popular radio commercials was for a home improvement company and it went "People you know call Maybro, HAzel 1-9988." And when you were calling within your exchange, you only had to dial those last 5 numbers.
(edit) I just remembered. One of the classic radio commercials in Pittsburgh during the mid-60's was for another home improvement company...."No money you'll be riskin' when you call Joe Ziskind, so dial this number and do it quick. HAzel-1-7866." And also, before there was 1-800-(whatever), there were toll-free calls that featured the ZEnith exchange.
Thanks for reminding me, I totally forgot that feature!
In 1975 I lived in a very rural region of the US. My phone was two rings on a three person party line. Placing a call within town required four digits, direct. To call outside, you needed the operator, a live person. To make a cross country call, you’d first call the local operator to connect you to the state “Bell” system, who, in turn, would place the call for you.
I lived in the mountains of southern Oregon in 1975 and we had a party line then also. We never had to talk to an operator unless you had a question, but you definitely had to take turns using the phone.
Right ! I forgot about the three person phone line system. As a kid - mom would just so mad as the 3 person would spend all day just sitting on the open line. And she would bang the phone hard just to get back to my mom for belly g her to hand up and stop eavesdropping, or should would report her. ( well she did and got a new 3 way line. ) one week later. Put a different person on a third-party line start doing the same thing as the first woman.
Shared three-way phone nine !
That would be really funny if used today !
And you'd have to check your bank balance 1st to make sure you had enough to pay for a cross country call!😅 they weren’t cheap.
@@billneo how about the “ BELL Company”
Break up from their monopoly forced by the government. They were every where and almost ever state as the only phone company.
The old lady across the street was always listing in you could hear her breathing on the other end.
70 years after this video, I taught my grandmother how to use the internet for the first time. She was just as nervous, but then just as impressed as Grandfather was about the new rotary dial. :-)
I want a rotary phone 📞 😂
Truth be told I’m old enough to have had one on my home in the early 70’s !! 😜
@@SirManfly So am I.
@@SirManfly this girl youtuber made a rotary phone on youtube and its actually a cell phone. Its really cool, look her up shes like some young inventor, super tiny channel go check it out
@@SirManfly We've still got one. The audio is superior to newer phones.
makes you think what tech 70 years hence will make you nervous then impressed taught to you by your great grandchildren
Funny..."dialing a number" is as foreign a process to kids today as it is to the grandpa in this film.
EXACTLY!
They can't memorize numbers , either . Lol
A telephone operator, dial phone, push phone, even the concept of a standalone land telephone is foreign to kids. All they know is a mobile where you can, among texting, WhatsApping, YouTubing, tiktokking, twittering, photo making etc, also call people. How old fashioned!
To think the original phone system was wireless to begin with. We're back to wireless yet high tech. lol
@@pastelskies8466 what on earth are you talking about ? Telephones started in the 1870s and 1880s and definitely used wires. The earliest radio (wireless) communications were sometimes called wireless telephony or wireless telegraph, but that was circa 1910.
Just realized how old I am, 74. We had The Telephone Co, Southwester Bell, come to the schools and explain to us how the dial phones worked.
I still have the 1947 dial phone from home and it still works great.
It was fun teaching my 15 year old Grandson how to use the dial phone. He got really excited and called his Mother. You would have thought it was the first phone call he ever made.
Those old dial phones are valuable antiques today
My son, born 1999, made a point of stopping when he saw a phone booth to check it out.
It was surreal to me.
@@farnumbp not really. they made millions and millions of them, they're worth maybe ten bucks each.
Beautiful tale. 🥰
@@LMB222 Did Bill & Ted pop out of it?
I so enjoyed listening to the lady explain how to make a call. She was so pleasant, courteous and precise and her smile was so friendly and she seemed so kind and helpful. I could work around someone like this all my life and enjoy them everyday!
Very attractive lady she was.
Yep, that lady is a perfect unison of precision and beauty. She's probably dead though 🥴
Strict dress codes for ladies back then. The old Bell System was a strict place to work. I was sent to company schools and learned how to do things the Bell System way.
Unfortunately, she didn't take heed! She did not know her limits!
She is absolutely stunning 😁
2021: 5G Network
1979: 1G Network
1940: “Oh gee! Network!”
Yes, it was the BELL SYSTEM and it was a network, ANALOG, just like it is NOW!
5G is frying brains.
@@markdemell8056 Sure it is. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I thought it was G Wiz,,,,, Or G willikers,,, Or golly G,,,
G wiz Wally,,,,,That phone is swell,,,
Makes me consider my grandmother, who was born on the family farm with no phone (or indoor plumbing), and 3 lights and one outlet in the whole house. She’s still with us today, in this world of touchscreen pocket computers and every modern convenience one could ask for. I asked her once, a few years ago, what it was like to live through that kind of massive change - from heating your bath water on a coal stove to indoor plumbing being installed to cars being commonplace, from ancient 3-channel radios to television to color television, from the first commercial transatlantic flight to men walking on the moon to launching rockets to space every few days and landing them back on earth…just so many things. And you know what she told me?
“It’s amazing, yes…all of it. These are all things I could barely even dream of as a child. But you know what - you will likely see the same types of advancement in your lifetime as well.”
I hope she’s right!
That's fascinating! My late grandparents said to me once something quite dissimilar: they said "Everything's been invented in our lifetimes; there's nothing left to invent!" I suppose in the face of such overwhelming advancement, they couldn't conceive of how it might possibly continue further!
She sounds very smart. She sounds like an interesting person.
I'm 40 and that's exactly how I feel about a lot of technologies we have today. Smartphones are a great example- I never imagined we would have super thin screens, pocket-sized computers, or wireless high speed internet, but here I am using all 3.
With that much advancement in our lifetime, we'll become the Borg and start assimilating other planets.
@@FinleyHills The US government once considered closing the patent office for the same reason......in 1899!! Boy were they wrong!
It's amazing how many telephone numbers us old folks used to have memorized when we were youngsters.
I know-now I have to think of my own number. Everybody else I pull up by their name in my contacts, and press the button to callthem.
Really, we memorized every phone number we used frequently. I know very few of my frequently used numbers now.....they're all filed, by name in my "contacts" list, and I just hit the "call" button to dial them.
I used to know all my credit card numbers by heart, too. It took me 6 months to memorise my phone number.
For the longest time I refused to program numbers into my cell phones; my rationale being “If I ever don’t have my phone I want to have the numbers I need to call memorized.” But eventually the number of people became too great and I gave up. Pretty sure I only know my parents’ numbers now.
Now, that memory storage area can be used for better things than strings of 7 or 10 digit numbers. Well, 4 digits actually, the area code (if there was one) was easy and the prefix was a word. Our number 843-xxxx was THornwall 3 then the rest. What did your area have?
Loved this!
In 1972 when I was 9 we moved into a new home. The Southern Bell guy pulled up in his van and opened up the side door. Displayed inside were the phones, desktop or wall units in all available colors (white, black, yellow, red, pink, avocado, and sky blue). Being the nerdy kid I asked when the new push button phones were coming out. They’ll be out shortly, he said. I asked, what about the new extra buttons (# and *) what are they for. New features, he said. So dad ordered 3 sky blue phones, the one going in the kitchen matched the color of our GE appliances.
About a year later a new kid moved into the neighborhood. We went over to his house and, gasp, he had the new push button phones.
Dad, can we get the new push button phones. Nope, these work just fine he said.
I still have one of the desktop units displayed on a shelf. The Rotary remained in my parents home up until at least the late 80’s.
This video is a nice window into the past. A real piece of history.
So glad I grew up in this era---good old memories!
Just think, WWII broke out a year later.🤔
And everyone was so polite.
Don’t worry, the cancel culture will call this white privilege, and systemic racism soon.
@@ramongonzalez2112 And if WWIII breaks out, we won't even be using one of these things.
In those days one didn’t own the phone equipment; it was loaned to one as part of the phone service. These devices were build like tanks- virtually indestructible! Slamming a phone receiver down in a rage was wonderfully cathartic. It was a non-violent way to demonstrate one’s displeasure with a company or to end a relationship.
I love when Lewis Black said the rotary desk phones were so big and heavy that you could use one to kill a charging puma. I recall those days as well. lol
They were the most well-made phones of all time.
You could use the phone to club an intruder into submission, then call police and an ambulance with that same phone.
I remember seeing the phone bill as a kid in the 1970s. The phones were leased, a monthly fee per phone. So when AT&T was broken up around 1984 and you could buy your own phone so many people did. No monthly fee, the phone was paid for before long. You had to drop off the old phones to an AT&T store.
@@stevepettersen3283 I leased an old rotary phone into the 1990s. Hawaiian Tel. I think it w $1 per month, or so.
Just spent 20 minutes in 2021, learning how to use a machine I already know how to use. Thanks 40s.
nosatalgic wasnt it lol
It was an interesting video to watch, although the American dial tone and busy signals were horrible sounds, the kinds that sets one's teeth on edge.
I noticed the same thing. (laughs)@@nieldooley2906
🤣🤣
I have bad news for you, you will likely never have to use this knowledge in the future...
And the prank call was officially born!
For long distance you had to dial “O” and an operator would connect you. If I remember correctly we had to call after 6PM for a less expensive cost...
I remember being able to get an operator by pressing the 0 even in the 90s. Think that you still can get one on landline service with some carriers, for international long distance
My sis worked for the phone co as an operator in Anaheim in the ‘60’s-Granma in the ‘20’s😎
I was a long distance operator for about 18 years. I started with Southern Bell which became South Central Bell. I transferred to Southwestern Bell which later became AT&T. The lower rates began at 5:00 p.m. and they got very low at 11:00 p.m. The cheap rates were in effect from Friday night until Monday morning. I hated the job most of the time, but I look back on those days fondly now. The job wasn't so bad after all.
Ha... kinda like peak & off-peak for gas & electricity pricing today. Thanks smart meters.
@@1computernew Everything looks better in the rear view mirror!
Remembering when "It's long distance!!!" made people run to the phone (hurry up, so expensive) and Mom saying "You have to hang up, it's going to storm."
I sure do. Both of them. And "don't talk too long its long distance." LOL! And "call after 5 (or 8); the rates will be cheaper. Also "reversing the charges" and "person to person" so you wouldn't have to pay for the call if someone else answered and your party was not there.
I have an old chronograph watch with indicators on the dial for the long distance price intervals. If you talked up to 2 minutes it was a flat price but 2.01minutes was the same price as 4.00!
I'm old , in my sixties , an older friend of mine while talking on a cell phone will still say stuff like " gotta call you back , I"m on long distance .
@@jettydoom Haven't you heard? 60 is the new 50! Gotta love us Boomers! Your friend is cute. Now my father turns 91 next week and has dementia and can no longer use the telephone. But about 5 or 10 years ago, he would call information (411) to get the number of a business whos name of which he was not sure, but he knew where they were. When the person said they couldn't help he would say "well, you go down the street from your building and turn onto blah blah blah...and would continue. " The lady would inform him that she was in Rhode Island or Wisconsin or some place. My father would get stunned because he thought they were still in the old Bell Telephone building which was located in a town (our county seat) about 20 minutes away! I'd have to tell him "father...the phone company left that building 20 years ago and besides, you have the cable company for phone service now, not Verizon."
And party lines! There was a sweet old lady on our exchange who always answered on our ring. "It's for us, Mrs. Lamm."
I'm now 73 years old. When I was 3 years old I picked up the phone and told the operator that I wanted to talk to my Grandma. She connected me. We lived in a small town. If my Grandmother were still alive I could now do that with my iPhone.
That’s true!
Its a long distance call to Granny now.
I would still rather talk to a LIVE operator than some automated crap directory!!
@@bobgillis1137 BUT back THEN it would have cost extra, by the minute. Today there's really no such thing as "long distance", except for out-of-country.
@@jdinhuntsvilleal4514
uhh. I referred to calling Granny up in the sky.
You have to appreciate the level of thoughtfulness that the writers put into this script. This formalized style is the best. It treats everyone like they're smart and not the type of dumbing down that we see today.
Most people today are idiots…
I agree with you! It was well done, clear, and did this job well!
It's interesting they felt so compelled to explain how it worked so deeply beyond just "here's how to dial."
It was a massive change and this right here is the real start of the internet.
Before dial, it was all operator interaction. You give the operator the number like MElrose 3333, they would confirm the number MElrose 3333? Then, either you would be connected or told, "Sorry, that number is busy." Until dial, there was no dial tone, ringing tone or busy signal.
@@ChadnNancy you sure got that right. after two years i cant get my teammates to boot an aws ec2 linux instance. but this video can get a guy born in 1885 to dial a phone
It was actually quite smart. Those folks were all used to human-human interaction. Machines doing work for them autonomously wasn't obvious at all for them. Instead of just telling them to turn the meaningless looking wheel, the demonstration showed how the more it was rotated, the more lights, corresponding to numbers, would turn on at the telephone exchange. It instantly told them how the dialed number is really registered, even if all the details obviously weren't explained. They must have also felt that the phone company employees aren't looking down on them. Since the time was spent to show all that, it was assumed they will understand it, like intelligent people. People always like to know why they must do something, not just be told to do something.
@@dobrovik DevOps much? 😉
It is such a novelty to watch the way something was presented, how they spoke, how slowly they spoke, and what an effort they went through! Thank you for sharing this!
...and nobody said 'like'. : )
@@stevenbrown6277 🤣🤣🤣
Technical Communication is a wonderful thing when done well
I can't even decide which was funnier, the the old codger who was born as the civil war ended, or the teenager calling a new kind of phone 'yummy'
Jeepers, she might still be alive today.
This was a short subject between movies at the theaters
This makes me feel old. I vividly remember using a rotary phone and I remember getting touch tone. I was amazed at how much quicker touch tone was.
got the touch tone phone in 67. back then it was a real cool thing to have one.
You could still get a phone with the 'pulse' feature (simulating dialing) on push button phones clear up until the early 90's. Because touch tone carried an extra $1 a month on your phone bill.
I remember my Dad complaining about touch tone phones in the 1970s, since he preferred rotary dials.
@@billy2182 🤣🤣🤣🤣 RIGHT!! that dollar was a BIG deal back then
My home had a shitty plastic rotary phone in the early 2000s for some reason. Fun to dial with it but a pain when your calling in batch
Nowadays, we take for granted monthly updates on our cellular phones. During the time of this film, the convenience of the dial added to the phone must have been a big amazement in that time period. Interestingly, you see the grandfather worrying about the complication of the rotary dial until he tries it for the first time, and the granddaughter, excited for such new technology, peeking at her grandfather to check out his reaction! Beautiful piece of film, worth the whole 20 minutes of it!
The most amazing thing about rotary dial phones is the Strowger switch that makes them possible and the story behind its invention. Almon Strowger was an undertaker who got fed up with the telephone operator sending calls to his rivals so he invented a method of "dialing" a number to connect to another telephone. Just seeing one of these devices operating is quite mesmerizing, they're so clever and were still in use in the UK in some remote exchanges in 1990. Pretty good for something invented in 1889.
Google the name, it's fascinating.
Yes fantastic I watched the bt video on TH-cam about telephone exchanges. The step by step (Strowger) system, cross bar system, Reed really, and system x a modern digital exchange? It was very interesting to see how how the technology developed through the decades to what we have now. Have I missed anything are modern digital telephone exchanges still based on System X? Great video thanks for sharing.
In Alfred Hitchcock's film "Dial M for Murder" he shows the call being processed by electromechanical switches hammering out each digit.
@@Alanpie314 I didn't know that.
I think I seen one :) going to check it out again.
@@m3snusteve It’s interesting that the initial dial workhorse hardware was not a Bell System invention, although Bell improved upon it. I don’t know what the most modern circuit switching is; packet switching on digital networks.
Just had one installed last week, and I love it! Took a while to familiarize myself with this modern marvel, but SO much better than the party line, or making Earnestine patch me through long distance over the holidays!
You whipper -snappers with your technology
One ringy ringy, two ringy ringy...
Mr. Veedle?
@@OneAdam12Adam I was gonna say that! You must be old like me. (Although I remember it as "ringy-dingy.")
"Is this the party to whom I am speaking?"
I sent this to my mom a few years ago (she is a retired operator from AT&T) when she was complaining about learning her first iPhone. We had a great laugh
I remember we had a "party-line"...That was a shared line due to the limited capacity of the phone system back then. We had to wait until our next door neighbor would get off her phone before we could use ours...We often thought she was listening in on our calls...Sometimes we'd even catch her because we could hear her breathing!.
Jeezuz! That's scary
To think they actually showed films (film!) back in communities and schools at the time to educate people about the 'new' technologies! Love these
You mean like the 90s when we learned about the internet?
yup sure did, those old 16 mm projectors ,that are in the same place as the rotary phone
I remember watching Nathan's school those were the years
I grew up in the 90s and we still used to watch physical films on old projectors up until about 6th grade
Not at all surprising, as today's youth have zero clue how to dial on a rotary phone today -- unless they have a grandparent with an "ancient" phone in their home!
My dad retired from the “telephone company” then so did I. This presentation made me chuckle at terms like Traffic (the call themselves) and Plant (installation and repair). My dad was Traffic Manager for years. I remember when I was young he occasionally had to stay at work all night participating in various cut-overs.
I started in Traffic as one of the first male operators (on the old cord board) then moved to Commercial as a Service Rep. Then went outside as a pay phone collector and technician. Now most of those jobs are changed drastically or no longer exist.
To those that accuse the lady of making multiple takes, remember she’s an actress hired for the film. However, there were Outside Service Reps and Service Assistants that were employed to travel and educate the community in new procedures. Trust that those people knew their jobs and their lines by heart.
This is a great film.
Hi Robert, very great comment! Can I ask roughly what year your dad retired and when you started working in telephone? Thanks!!
Those were the days when reporting trouble with your phone meant that a friendly, skilled technician would be pulling up to your house in an equipment laden van or truck within a matter of an hour so. In the early 80s a friend of mine who was somewhat into phreaking managed to get hold of a phone number which, once you were connected to it after a couple of rings, would repeat whatever you said into the mouthpiece. I imagine this was some type of special test line for technicians to call to confirm that a newly installed phone was functioning properly?? Probably a tape loop system? I also remember him coming up with a conference call number which was an absolute cacophony of mostly teenagers talking over each other, pretty much around the clock.
My dad was field engineer for ma bell 🔔 for 30 years.
@@MrRKWRIGHT On our exchange, if you dialed 7091 and quickly hung up, your phone would ring back. Or if you dialed your own number, you would get a busy signal and hear the teen agers yelling at each other "Whats your number!"
Wow. I remember when the town I lived in cut over from the rotary dial phones and analog switch at the Central Office to a digital switch and push button phones. That happened here in Iowa back in 1981. I worked for the phone company too at the time and got to see one of the last analog switches in use at a Central Office. What a chatter they made!
In 1970 my company threw out all the dial phones and installed touchtone. I took them home and built a switching system so I could turn my Christmas lights on or off using the dial phone. I took the system to the church bizarre at Christmas time and my booth made more money with people paying 50 cents to try them than any other booth.
Wow..... 1970! They were trailblazers.
Thank you, that was very clear. I feel confident I can master this!
1940 - 30 minutes to show people how to spin a dial. 2020- smartphones, thousands of apps, phone settings, viruses, operating systems and no instruction manuals for any of it.
You're so right , I"m not stupid but I think I only use about 20 percent of what is in my phone
And most people use then to make phone calls, send text messages and look at pictures of cats and food.
What people fail to realize is we no longer use telephones. It's called a "Smartphone" but it's really a computer with a program (app) to allow you to communicate with other devices with the same technology. Many "smartphones" are more powerful than the desktop/laptop you are using in the house.
I had mine for three years before a friend showed me that it had a flashlight feature. There are no doubt lots of things that it can do that I don't just don't know how to do, but am unaware exist. Why didn't it come with an instruction book?
@@jettydoom I doubt if I use 10% !!
I worked at "Western Electric" in the late '50's. When I lived in northern WI even till the early 60's, we had 10 party lines~~the greatest source of info for the town gossipers. LMAO
Well,, I see that your up to date on today;s acronyms.
@@markdemell8056 Whereas your use of punctuation is sadly lacking. 🤪
We had a party line of 5 in the late 70's just outside of Madison in the subdivision. It had to be one of the last offered because it was gone a few years later and mom was still pinching pennies.
My mother- in- law still thinks she's on a 10 party phone. When she answers the phone with "Are you there?" and talks real loud like the local battery on the phone is getting flat.
I worked a cord board in Santa Barbara from '81 to '85.
I still have a calculagraph I used. That was the time stamp apparatus to keep the times for the calls.
Less than eighty years later one can have a video call to almost anywhere on the planet with a small “piece of glass” in one’s hand- its incredible!
I was going to write the same thing but you said it better. Realize that in less than 100 years we went from a dial phone to wireless cells that play videos, games, music and have internet (itself a modern marvel) access in a package smaller than a telephone handset of old. Technology has given us more benefits in the past 100-150 years than the preceding thousands of years. We truly do live in a mind-boggling time.
but not better!
@@jeffg1524 My Grandfather was born in 1908. He didn’t see his first electric lightbulb until he was twenty-years-old. He said he: “…just had to figure out how it worked….”. He unscrewed the lightbulb and stuck his thumb in the socket. He said he: “… found out quickly how it worked!”.
He grew up on a ranch in Montana. They heated the small wooden house with a cast iron wood burning stove. They used the same stove to do all their cooking. There was no electricity. They used oil burning lanterns for lighting. They had no telephone, no refrigeration, no appliances of any kind, no radio, no television, no record player. They had no running water and therefore no sink, no bathtub and no toilet (no toilet paper). Their water was drawn from a well that was no more than a hole in the ground with a bucket and a rope. Sometimes one would pull up a drowned rat along with the water. They road to the distant small town upon a horse drawn wagon. He said that when winter came they used barrel staves [The young generation probably has no idea what a barrel stave is.] tied to their shoes with rope as makeshift snow skis. Before he died at the age of ninety-two he had flown his own private small airplane and flew as a customer on commercial jet airliners. He and his family of course came to have a comfortable home with all the modern conveniences. As a young man he had an office job for the railroads where he would type through three layers of carbon paper on a manual typewriter. That built some very strong fingers! There were no computers and no keyboards back then. He bought his first electric typewriter in the 1960’s and for him, and all the family, it was a marvel. The family gathered around his color television to watch the first moon landing in 1969. I was eleven-years-old at the time and there are no words to describe how thrilling this momentous event was for us and the whole world. He bought a small handheld four function calculator when they were first available in the 1970’s. It cost $100 then which was like spending $500 now. If you had asked him about “The Good Old Days” he would have told you that life back then was a miserable struggle against almost starving and freezing to death.
I have only spoken about technological things that have made our lives more secure, comfortable and convenient. During over the first two thirds of my grandfathers life non-male, non-white, non-christian, non-hetero people were, to varying degrees, openly suppressed, denigrated, devalued, humiliated, scorned, brutalized, ostracized and murdered. The “Good Old Days” never existed; it is a naive fantasy.
@@CitizenOfTheWorld2025 Absolutely, Chris. People who pine for the days before modern technology have no idea what they're talking about. Do we really want to go back to the days of horse and buggy, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, international travel by sail, no modern, life-saving medicine, etc....I mean c'mon. Most would wilt and curl up into a feeble ball if they had to face that kind of life. And do we really want to go back to a time where women couldn't vote and minorities were treated as less than human? To those who want a "simpler" time be thankful you live in this time, because for most of human history just surviving was the principal focus of daily life.
Yes, all because of the TCP/IP network architecture that was designed going back to the 1950's with DARPA. Vint Cerf who works for Google was one of the primary engineers in this project.
The most ingenious invention ever was TCP/IP. For me at least it is as I work in this same field. 🙂
My mother was involved in the rollout of the "Direct Dial" system in 1960 - 1962. She was an exchange supervisor for the GPO in Sheffield. Still got the newspaper cutting as it was big news back then!
I'm a little bit confused here ... you mean Sheffield England ?
So you're saying they didn't do that same system until 20 years later ? ... I'm really tired and getting ready to go to sleep I think I misunderstood you because I know they had dial phones in England during World War II
@@gardensofthegods local numbers were dial, but between cities the switching apparatus had not been fully in place. WW2 had prioritised Govt communications and similar, leaving roughtly afterwards intra city communications , then between cities, some remote exchanges did not become automatic for some time (though some were the first automatic exchanges,
@@gardensofthegods He was referring to the rollout of "Subscriber Trunk Dialling" - there's a decent wikipedia article on it.
Wow I can't wait for these dial phones to come out! Right now if I drop my phone the wrong way, I can't even dial because the glass breaks. These dial phones look sturdy and reliable!
Plus with the new dial tone feature I know BEFORE I dial my number whether or not my call will be put through. No more of dialing THEN finding out "no signal"!
Also to dial someone you only need four numbers? Right now I need to dial ten! How efficient of a change!
My favorite part is that these new dial phones are wired to the wall so I don't lose it. How innovative!
Looks good, but I'll wait for the new "Dialphone 14" to come out. Should be any day now......
Sturdy is an understatement. You could beat someone to death with a bakelite phone and then dial 911 with it.
The 4 numbers is because it's very local only (and party line too given what she said about other people on the line), to get outside of your immediate area you'd have to call the operator.
I feel exactly the same way. In many ways we've gone backwards with phone service. Now, if you want to reach someone:
1. They have to have their phone charged
2. They have to have their phone near enough to hear the ring
3. They have to be in range of the tower (maybe not so in a basement/large building)
4. They have to have the ringer on
5, The phone, designed to last 2-3 years, has to work
Progress doesn't always go in the right direction.
inherited granma's phone
@@ryandean3162 haha 911 that's cute
God! I wish I could go and live in that age of pure beauty and simplicity!
many of us did - and it was GREAT
@@ezrc9294 lucky you sir
We used the dial tone to tune guitars.It was the "A" note.That would make it possible to start there then move on to the other strings
A 440..:-)
It was a slightly flat b
I would tune death growl vocals to THAT sound!
That is cool to hear.
"The phone company wants us to dial so they can lay off most of the operators." Actual quote from my grandfather.
He wasn't wrong.
People have been made redundant for as long as humans have had capitalism. Only a fool would pay someone money they didn't have to.
Kinda like U-Scan-Um at the supermarket.
I was thinking the same thing. Having an operator place your call is more convenient than dialing it yourself. They push it as progress when it's actually a way to maximize profits.
@@reecenewton3097 You mean those devices that free up employees to take on other equally needed tasks?
All these years later her presentation can only be rated as EXCELLENT.
I remember these phones still in service in the 1970s. I had a few. I remember that an old 1950 something phone was one of the first things I ever took apart to see how it worked. It was very satisfying to dial a number. It felt purposeful. I think I could remember at least a few dozen numbers back then. Times were so different. Grandpa living at home, the people were so much thinner. That phone book would soon become so thick that you could use it as a booster for a toddler to sit on. We now use this glass faced marvel that can provide voice and video to virtually anywhere on the planet. All in my short little lifetime. What do you think will be the next few great leaps in technology of person to person communication?
I still have a rotary Western Electric in my workshop and a 2nd one in the garage.
I wonder all the time what is coming next. Everything today seems impossible to make outdated, but it happens all the time anyway!
@@Just_Sara that's why companies have resorted to planned obsolescence. So they can still make things and keep people buying them.
The next great leap in technology of person-to-person communication?
Easy, everybody gets chipped at birth and all you need to do is think of a person and you are in instant contact with them.
The only downside is all of the spam calls...
Same as always: Grandfather used as a laughingstock straw man representing anti-technological ignorant stubbornness -- and that is just as distasteful now as it was then.
I love how everything in this presentation, along with the people, are so slow and deliberate - back in the days before television started speeding up our lives and shortening our attention spans.
I really like the shining optimism and vibe of the instructing woman. I'll think of her when I'm down in the dumps of despair and will imagine her voice telling me, "Fear not. Keep going!"
Writing this comment in late 2019, it's interesting to note that the young girl at the beginning of this video would now be in her mid-90's
WBDE I was thinking the same thing during the video. And that grandpa’s daddy had to have been alive during the civil war.
And people today who are his age are texting, Viagra replenished, and dating after their 2nd divorce.
@@brianarbenz7206 Okay boomer
Most (if not all) of the folks in that movie have already undergone gruesome death. Cheers!
@@whatevernamegoeshere3644 Okay Millennial
Gramps at the meeting turns around and gives the eavesdropping lady the stink eye, love it!
The grandfather in this film reminded me of my mom when got herself a smart phone. When she learned how to text and send pictures by email, I was very proud of her as the grandfather got acclimated to the new dial phone.
Twenty years ago at my sister's house her daughter's phone broke and my sister told her to use the phone in the dining room. "That old phone has never worked" said my niece. "But I talked on it just the other day" said my sister. Then my niece went into the dining room and lifted the receiver and started stabbing her finger into the holes on the dial ring like it was a touch-tone phone. "Mom, I told you, this old phone won't work". It never has.
ROFLMAO I can see that happening. What a great family memory to have. I bet it was so funny when your sister showed your niece how to use the rotary phone.☎😂
Oof makes me feel old
Lol. Brilliant.
@@midcenturymodern9330 ... a few years ago I changed from the phone company to my cable company, which uses a modem to tie in the land-line. Believe it or not, that modem supports pulse dialing and has enough juice to ring the bells on all 3 rotary phones in my home. One of them is a 20s vintage style like in this video's stage demo that's meant to be mounted under the counter in a business. It also has the external (extra loud) bell that would be mounted remotely so you could hear it all over the store.
@@midcenturymodern9330 ... you can thank the cost of labor for that. Even though older phones needed some maintenance the wear items were pretty easy to replace. These days you just pop in a new $10 phone (made outside the USA) every few years. I doubt we could make a phone for that price in this country.
Thank you! That dial tone left me in stitches! Hilarious! Just died hearing it! Also was great to see people, the woman giving the presentation in particular talking in a manner that is so hard to find today-sensible and clearly understandable!
Dial tone and busy signal did not record well on this film. Ringing was a little better.
I couldn't believe the same irritating buzz was also the ringing tone you'll hear while listening for the person to pick up, and the same buzz again for the busy signal.
I guess it was pretty primitive tech, the kind that works even without power
@@KairuHakubi The tones were exactly the same as they are today; poor recording. Bells have been replaced by various electronically generated tones. Some cellphones can emulate the original bell.
@@davidcarson4421 I find it hard to believe poor recording quality has changed the familiar versions of those tones I grew up with into the harsh buzzing heard in this video. It's not like it turned everyone's speech into screeching grinding noises. What's more, all three sounded identical, whereas those were completely, utterly different sounds in my day (and their 'rhythm' was also completely different)
or do you mean to say that then, as now, the recording quality was bad over the phone? Because that's true. That has almost gotten worse in the modern age as they've compressed the hell out of everything.
@@KairuHakubi Trust me. I worked for Bell System for 30 years. They have not changed. The recording is poor for the tones and the bell.
I like when an old movie shows a row of operators frantically connecting peoples calls
gotta wonder what happens to the ones who weren't frantic.
Fun Fact: The operator on both "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Petticoat Junction" were both named Sarah.
I wonder how many people today would know how to operate a swith board? Lots of companies had them at one time.
@@1940limited Automation put them out of business. Personally, I hate it! Give me a live person any time!
@@nicoleknight9412 Agreed!
Glad to see Grandad is letting the family live with him.
👍🏼👏🏼
And one week later, Gramps was making prank calls.
Yeah, he's just the type!
A true inspiration.
"Is your refrigerator running?"
"Huh? We still have an icebox!"
"Oh, ....OK, I'll call again, next year!"
It was Gramps that monopolized the phone yet women ended up getting a bad rap for doing just that. lol
He kinda did when talking to his friend Ed at about 2:40 telling him that there were airplanes doing skywriting over the town to hoax the eyedroppers on the line who were muffling the signal.
A time when grandpa just lives in his son’s house, instead of an old people’s home or nursing home .
Communal living worked when the generations genuinely liked each other's company and respected boundaries.
Really a much healthier system, socially speaking!
Well as a 70 yo still living in my own house, with a daughter who's divorced, can't afford rent, and wants to share a house, I can relate to this.
@@msr1116 True, so sad it’s gone 😭
@@flamencoprof We need more people like you 👍
Miss White looks suspiciously like MissTomlin... "One ringy-dingy ..."
"A crisp and professional good afternoon to you sir"
Oh god, only one other person got this joke....SNURT!
@@chaunceyfeatherstone2142 "Hello is this Felicia? Felicia...Get over to the corner of 5th and Main quick....BOswick-9 is about to pay off!"
@@chaunceyfeatherstone2142 th-cam.com/video/G0l9fE2RAj8/w-d-xo.html
@@thebrinx9632 Hah! Vito got lunch for the week!
This is exactly what I needed to learn today. Thank you.
I remember my grandma showing me these old phones when I was young at some museum and trying to teach me, but I couldn't understand.
Now I'm 25 and understand
They still work and are still around!
@@Captain_MonsterFart last I saw one I was 4 or 5
my mum missed the town hall meeting where they explained how to email a photo
🤣
I wish Apple would have a town meeting every time they roll out a new operating system update.
🤣🤣🤣
My father worked in the central office of the telephone company in our central Missouri town all through the 50s and 60s and 70s. As a child, It was really fantastic and wondrous to hear all those thousands and thousands of clicks.
AT&T - The Last Great Monopoly
There's something really satisfying about old telephone exchange equipment. I used to volunteer at Bletchley Park (where they did the WWII codebreaking) and they'd reconstructed one of the Colossus computers using old Post Office telephone equipment, and it was a sight to see and amazing to hear.
@@G1NZOU bletchly park saved many lives in WW2. Hard work but it payed off.
Ms. White really has it together. Such poise. Mom used things until they were broken. So, our dial phones lasted well into the 80's. I remember being frustrated when I needed push-button to enter something and it was a dial phone. I'd have to go through the operator since we only had a "rotary" phone. Such hardship. Fun fact: I work in the very building that used to make many of the rotary telephones in the U.S.
People didn't own the phones back then. "ma bell" did. You leased them.
Outstanding presentation from that lady! That degree of care & dedication is hard to find today
"Aw shucks, you young'uns are never satisfied these days. Folks are getting more worried about being modern than they are over their three square meals". Boy, did Grandpa call it!
Oh, he said "shucks". Thought it was something else.
As I am watching this on my new tablet.
@ Poor Finian Watching some people with cell phones these days is really puzzling! Act like a cell phone is about like their lungs.
Same as it ever was
Says the person using the Internet.
10:45 When I was a kid the dial tone was much more pleasant than that!
Yeah, I wonder how long between the release of the new system with that awful dialtone till they changed it to the one I was familiar with in the 60s, or a less irritating one before the 60s version, due to complaints from the public about how awful it was. I can't imagine picking up a phone and hearing that sound.
Responding to David Paxton below: Yes, Miss White did nail her presentation! Her delivery was sincere and deliberate without being condescending. It’s a simple process to dial a phone, but she explained it without treating her audience as simpletons.
When didn't they do this. They actually used to treat the audience as smart, because well they were.
And imagine, all those years later she was revealing the letters on a game show.
@@LearnAboutFlow they made a standard broadcasted presentation for those in and at home wondering about how to use the new rotary phone, and a background about its capabilities. Everything was elegant in those days, and don't try to say they weren't because I know its all of you's favorite thing to do. Yes I'm using mafia talk because I won't bother saying "all of your guys favorite" which sounds off.
@@LearnAboutFlow oh, come now I doubt that. Its just the way they spoke, clear concise and in tune with information that anyone can grasp.
@@LearnAboutFlow not exactly, you should common sense and know there were a great plenty of phone styles, colors, materials, previous years, and makes with script that greatly channeled different types of looks. The one presented here is an example phone.
There could be a sage green rotary phone in 1940, a black talker in 1921, and a desktop 1935 Mocha toned telephone with brass embellishment and an ebony mantle with ivory keys tones. Really to think they only had one phone?
I really enjoyed that. I was born in 1959 so I used rotary phones when I was a kid. Simpler times for sure.
U old
Mary, of "Peter Paul and Mary" was commenting on telephones with some banter during a performance. She said, "We never use to have the problem of 'where is the phone?' It was always on the little table in the hallway attached to the wall with a cord." and... "Now they have 'call waiting' which allows you to be rude to TWO people at the same time."
@ Charles, I have a pen-pal in NY who has a nearby friend. Pen-pal and Friend will be talking and then the FRIEND says OOPS! Have a call coming in and leaves my pen-pal hanging! The friend is VERY RUDE!
For those wondering about the dial tone sound:
That wasn’t the actual dial tone sound coming from the display prop. That was just a cheap buzzer they were using to simulate dial tone for the demonstration so that it could be heard by everyone in the room. The dial tone people heard on the phone never sounded that crude. Source: Pacific Bell/SBC/AT&T switch tech, 30 years, retired.
It's funny, when I first read your comment I wondered why you would need to explain the obvious and then I remembered that most people today were not born yet when all phones had dial tones. My boss thinks I'm quaint when I always listen for a dial tone before I dial forgetting that modern phones dont' have dial tones. My home phone does because it was made in 1948 and yes it still works. In fact it works better than every phone I have had since and I have gone through about a dozen cell phones which never seem to last more than about a year before they self destruct and I even had some extension phones that I got new that broke down/wore out within a few years. I find the old phone comfortable and easy to use. I also don't get robo calls on them. The new phones (read anything manufactured in the last 30 years) are awkward and uncomfortable to use and have more damned buttons than the space shuttle and are just as reliable.
nunya biznez - Hi! I agree, and land lines usually had much better clarity. People on both ends of the call could actually talk at the same time and still hear each other. But land lines were on their way out when I retired. And it is amazing to have a Star Trek communicator in your pocket. 😃
Ed: It also interesting that few people are familiar now with the sound of a cheap hardware store buzzer and so can’t tell the difference between that sound and dial tone.
th-cam.com/video/6V9Sok5CWI4/w-d-xo.html
@@nunyabiznez6381 gramps?? is that you??
The dial tone, the signaling, rode the SS7 signaling network. I’m a former Bellhead too.
Dial tones actually used to sound the way they did in this video. It 'was later changed to a more mellow sound. The dial in the clip had no letters They must have been added a short time later or been omitted to make the film simpler.
I was born in Brigham City Utah and was not aware the phones had or did not have dials. We moved to Los Angeles and the phones all hard dials. We had a seven digit number but the first two numbers were Represented as letters. We were on the CLeavland exchange. This however was changed to the CLinton exchange. As both were CL changing the name made no sense. We never found out why..
The dial phones of my childhood could only make local calls. For long distance you dialed 110 which in Los Angeles gave the Long Distance Operator. Emergency was 116. In school we were taught "If you're in a fix dial 116." to remember how to report a fire. There was also 1156 which was not made public but was used by telephone service personnel to check that a phone rang property. We called it the ring back.
In 1956 we moved back to Brigham City. There were now dials on the phones. Phone numbers were shorter. My grandmother's was 408. Just as Brigham City was about to get dials we moved back to the CLinton exchange in Los Angeles. We made a trip to Brigham City in '1958 and there were dials.
About this time direct dialing came in and we could call all over the United States and Canada by dialing.
In the Early 1960's all phone numbers became digitized. The letter mmon a phone dial or keypad are a remnant from a bygone era.
This is almost 85 years ago! That’s crazy.
As a young telecoms guy, really cool to see the stations and how cutovers worked back then.
Kind of a "make sure current calls didn't disconnect" kind of thing? Also, sort of like Indiana Jones trying to take the stones and putting the bag of sand in place of it?
Some amazing history and stories out there. I’m a retired “Bell Head” and the people who were leaving when I first started told some amazing stories.
I work in IT, and when we changed over the phones from dial up to VoIP, it was still referred to as a 'cutover' and had to be done vey quickly just as seen here.
If been in telecom 27 years! This video is awesome! So basic but good information back then.
4 weeks later the first "Is your refrigerator running......."
Do you have Prince Albert in the can?
"Is this the Wall residence? No? There's no Walls? Then tell me, what is holding up your roof?"
"Uh, my icebox doesn't run anyway. Thanks."
Call the local grocery, do you have pigs feet??
Crank phone calls before Caller ID or *66. Those were the days!
Loved the film. Bell was part of the community in days gone by. I performed a "cutover" to the latest 5ESS switching equipment back in 2000. No stopwatches just a bunch of us pulling out fuses and circuit cards at midnight. Good times!!!
Did you have to wear goofy goggles like those guys? WHat the heck was that for, do you suppose?
So glad they improved the open line signal from the way it was in 1940 to my 70s childhood. The sound here is like a mechanical saw grinding its way through a lead pipe, good grief. Bell was almost a governmental agency, really. Probably should've been one. Those old rotary phones were operational until the early 80s.
Until the 80s? We used it in the early 2000s in Russia 😮
Oddly enough, some people still use them if their house is equipped with the fiber optic lines that still support the old mechanical connections.
this has more character development than disney star wars
What doesn't??
@@worldtraveler930 disney star wars
Just stopped by to shake the hand of this edge Lord 🙏
Lol!
Yes, as a matter of fact, instead seeing Luke in the Mandalorian, I was really expecting to see this Grandpa underneath that hood.
That was a good presentation, to the point, without too much technical stuff to frighten off subscribers. Also, the old electro- mechanical (Strowger) system, I feel, served us excellently for quite a while.
The equipment shown here is Western Electric Crossbar. Strowger was a step system.
@@paulwarner5395 I remember the railroad exchange that used Strowger step by step switching when I worked for the railroad in college. Boy was that a noisy place!
Southern Pacific Railroad INternal Communications (SPRINT) later got sold off. You may have heard of it.
Served them well too. They could fire most of the local operators and make you do their job for them....
2014....self checkout at WalMart. Not what we were promised in 1993 with entire carts scanned at once. You're just pulling out everything and scanning each thing over a 1975 scanner...like a minimum wage drone...except you pay them.
@@STho205 Jeezus, what a whiny little baby you are!! I guess the self checkout is just too hard for you to figure out, huh?! -- pathetic.
@@STho205 Walmart = scan and go now!
Grab your can from the shelf scan with your phone
Bag it in your cart 🛒 (put your frozen in ice chest)
Approve the scanning and pay with your phone 📱
Scan the completed qr bar code and head out
🛍🛒🏃♀️💨
And we still say we dial a number, even though phones have not had dials for a couple of decades.
2:55 -- House phones back then were almost always party lines. A whole block might share the same line. A pattern of rings would indicate which house the call was for, but nothing stopped anyone who wanted to from picking up and listening in. This would create a lot of noise on the line though, so you could generally tell.
"Mrs. Waldbaum's having her ovaries removed"
@@tomservo56954 "Mrs Swan talking about her cottage cheese and peach diet". 8 people party line for 6 months when I was a teenager.
We also drive a car even though driving was something you did to horses in the nineteenth century.
The dial is actually a spring loaded, speed governed timer. If you dial 0 and let go of the dial, the timer will spring back sending 10 equally spaced pulses which will be picked up by the electronic circuit at the central office. If you dial 9, then 9 pulses, etc.
I love these. My grandmother worked for Ma Bell from 1930 to 1975.
I remember having to turn in our dial phone for one of them newfangled push button phones. It was the 70's. My grands never converted and kept their 10lb monster dial phone the rest of their lives.
My Mom's kitchen phone is still a rotary model that is attached to the wall. She also got cordless phones in the living room and upstairs, but the old dial phone is alive and well at her house....and you never have to replace the batteries in it.
When I was a kid, my ballet studio had a dial phone instead of a push-button phone. I had to call my mom one time from the studio (this would have been in the early 90s, I think), and I picked up the receiver... and then just stared at the dial. I had to get my dance teacher to show me how to use the dial, because I'd never used one before. my dance teacher and my mom both got a good laugh out of it--But I think that was the last dial telephone I ever saw in actual regular use.
My parents had one when I was growing up in the 2000s. A 70s (I believe) rotary dial phone. Worked just fine, so we kept on using it until like the early 2010s, when we finally got a modern phone due to benefits like voicemail, etc. I think my parents still have the old rotary though, stored in a box somewhere.
@@thunderbird1921 The nice thing is that they still work. I will be installing my grandpa's dial phone when I get a landline. He used it as his only phone untill he died in 2019.
@@slome815 Yes they do still work. I still have a couple in service. I like them because they continue to work when the power is out. You can dial in the dark. Cell towers only last 12 hours in a lot of places outside of cities.
Recently retired from the phone company and it amazed me that much of the same terminology is still used today; central office, cutovers, plant department. Cable is still installed the same way, strand is placed the the cable is lashed to it, although it’s pretty much all fiber these days.
I was a toddler when we got a dial phone. I remember being taught how to dial emergency. Now I am watching this on my Smartphone.
My mother was a Bell operator in the late 1940s. So many calls had to be placed by the operator in those days. Imagine Grandpa in this video seeing an iPhone today.
Something from outer space ☺️
aaaah the good ole days , , , , , i love this
Gosh I can’t wait till my town gets one of these new fangled gizmos.
The timeless quality about this is amazing. And the acting seems better than almost we get now.❤❤😊
I think that it IS better. They spoke correctly and concisely.
I recall my mother telling me of the trouble my grandmother had when dial phones came in. She simply could not cope, and it took all the joy from her life because she loved listening in on the old "party line" phone like the one in this video. Granny was an Irish immigrant born in the 1890's, very much "old country"--the change to dialing was just too much technology for her. Grandad farmed with horses until about 1960--he wasn't much for changes in technology either. I cannot imagine what they would think of the world today.
We had a party line of 5 in the early 80's and my sister used to listen and also get mad she couldn't call out.
When I was a kid my grandmother said she saved money by not switching from party lines.
My great great oma and opa came from Poland before the Nazis came. Many Americans don't realize what our families sacrificed coming from the old country's in Europe. This was a British colony not that long ago
Listening in on the party line is why those old ones slowed down, even shows that. We could have had nice simple phones, but evr body a snoop and digging for gossip.
@@Wisdom-Nuggets-Tid-Bits yes, it's like walking into a room with two people already in there talking, any or all of the 5 families on the line could join the conversation. However nobody could could call out or receive a call until the line was completely free, including if one of the 5 didn't hang up their phone all the way by mistake and didn't hear the "alarm" sound that happens 5 minutes after the "outside call" terminated the call. At any time the operator could break into a call if somebody with an emergency was trying to call into the line for one of the 5 families and tell everybody to free up the line for an incoming call. No caller I.D. so whenever the phone rang you had no idea what family it was for, many times people told regular callers to let it ring a certain number of times then hang up, and then call right back. The previous number of rings alerted the correct family to answer on the callback.
I like that this documentary assumes that everyone is on a party line. Love it. Raise your telephone and listen for dial tone. So many did not do that procedure.
The Bell system was once the 2nd largest company in the U.S. with over 900,000 employees, with General Motors at over 1 million first. The only privately run phone company in the world, with the best service, customer satisfaction rate and quickest installation and repair numbers world wide. I am an installation and repair tech for Verizon, going on 25 years now, the guy looking at the box on the side of the house shown at the beginning of this film. I took out many of those old steel units, converting them over to modern test network interfaces. They had no test equipment in them because back then because the phone company owned the entire system...including the phones and wiring inside your home. We installed, serviced and removed it, if requested. No body does that anymore. I feel lucky to be a part of this amazing company that is fast becoming obsolete. They have not hired in twenty years and i will be the last. Almost 140 years in existence. Not too many companies can say that!
phone companies nation wide are eliminating the old "COPPER DROP" services, and replacing it with fiber optic cable, so people can have good internet service/ T.V.. service/ phone service. a lot of technology came out of bell labs/ western electric, including all of the splinter companies( fairchild transistor/ intel).
@@gregoryclemen1870 Sadly though POTS lines are virtually indestructible and work through power outages and severe weather. But as you mentioned they are being phased out as you can’t get new POTS service and it’s just a matter of time before all of it is discontinued. Still have mine and it’s expensive so I’ve stripped the service down to local service only.
I do know that the copper drop service lines are being phased out, and fiber optical data lines are being installed, so you can access the internet/ T.V. service/ phone service ,it is just a fact of life that inexpensive phone service is a thing of the past!!!!!. many people that I know have pulled the plug on "LAND LINES", in favor of cell phone service .I remember in 2008, we had an inland hurricane (IKE), and there was no electric service for a week. the land lines were still in service, but the cell phone service was out, due to the repeater towers not having power, and no back up generators to keep them up and operating. no one saw that one coming.it did not matter to me, I have a land line, with no cell phone ,even though it cost me 100 dollars a month for phone/ internet access ,they have you boxed in, and they know it, and can charge you what they want!!!!.
Not quite, The Kingston Upon Hull Telephone Company (now KCom) survived the nationalisation of the rest of the UK's telephone companies in 1911. Apparently they installed their first electromechanical exchange in 1922 and became fully digital in 1989, before BT. Of course BT still handled long distance services.
Thank you for posting this. Back then, I never could figure out those silly dials. I went many years without making a phone call after those things came out.
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