Technology - Circuits
toolbar
wsj.com

October 7, 1999


When Dials Were Round and Clicks Were Plentiful

By CATHERINE GREENMAN

 

It's hard to imagine Jon Walz, a film producer and vintage-phone collector in Los Angeles, getting as worked up in 20 years about today's cordless telephones as he does about his Western Electric 302 rotary dial phone. To hear him lovingly describe its clickety dial, the chime of its two-toned ringer and the shiny Bakelite handset (the size and weight of which make him feel small in comparison when he picks it up), Walz could just as well be referring to a long lost toy truck, or even an old teddy bear.

 


Gary Tramontina for The New York Times
Jonathan Finder, a Pittsburgh doctor who collects and sells rotary telephones, shows off some beauties from his collection.

"I guess it's a reminder of slightly better days, when things were more fun and less stressful," said Walz, who is 29. "They remind me of being at my grandma's house."

Walz is one of a dying breed of people who still use rotary phones in their daily lives. Like other touch-tone avoiders, he will gladly wait the extra seconds it takes for the dial to twirl back and forth between the numbers and its starting position in exchange for the feeling of nostalgia that the phones evoke.

"They're like little sculptures, very substantial and beautiful pieces of craftsmanship," he said of his rotary phones. (In addition to the circa 1930's Western Electric 302, Walz has an Art Deco desk model made by Northern Electric as well as a Princess phone from the late 1960's.)

"I'm in a business that recycles itself yearly," Walz said, "so it's nice to have the phones around the house as reminders that things are still stable and that there's quality to them."

Many people who collect rotary dial phones are looking to recapture a piece of their childhood, said Jonathan Finder, a pediatric specialist in Pittsburgh who sells vintage phones through his Web site, www.oldphones.com. "Some want wall phones, some want candlesticks, like the ones they used on 'The Andy Griffith Show,' " he said, referring to the type of phone that uses a stand for an upright receiver.

"I sell a ton of pink Princess phones. There are a lot of professional women who grew up in the 70's who never got them as little girls, and by God, they're going to get one now."

Other sought-after models, collectors say, include phones with hollowed out "spit cup" receivers manufactured in the 1920's and 1930's, as well as phones built before the 1950's. One way they can be distinguished from later models is that their numbers are located inside the finger wheel instead of being distributed, a few at a time, around each finger hole (much as letters are put on the buttons of touch-tone phones).

Many vintage-phone enthusiasts marvel that nearly 80 years later, even the earliest rotary dial phones can still communicate with modern phone networks. Although networks largely recognize numbers through a combination of tones, most can still recognize the series of interrupted pulses in the electrical circuit generated by rotary dials.

Rotary dial phones were introduced to American consumers in 1919, said Sheldon Hochheiser, the corporate historian at AT&T, but they did not become widely used until the mid-1950's. Until then, people relied on phone boxes with magneto cranks or battery switches. The phones sent an electrical signal to an operator, who would get on the line and ask, "Number, please?"

But in a bit of well-known lore among collectors, the patent for the first automatic switch used by rotary phones was issued in 1891 to Almon B. Strowger, a Kansas City, Mo., undertaker who wanted a device that could make direct connections to the phone switching offices. He was convinced that switchboard operators were accepting bribes to steer calls for undertakers to his competitors, so he wanted a way for calls to bypass the operators. Strowger later became a founder of the Automatic Electric Company of Chicago, an early manufacturer of rotary phones.

Even though rotary phones work with most phone networks, most people who use them still have to keep a touch-tone phone around for navigating through the sea of automated recordings now used by many businesses.

Helene Lyons, who sells vintage phones at her shop, Remembrances of Things Past, in Provincetown, Mass., uses a touch-tone phone to get access to her automated voice mail. But she uses her see-through rotary phone from the 1960's to call into automated switchboards like customer service lines. She finds that she often reaches a person more quickly by waiting for one to come on, and she suggests that touch-tone users try this approach, too. "Sometimes someone will come on the line a lot faster if you just hang on instead of pushing all the buttons," she said.

Rotary phone users are somewhat surprised when they have to show young children how to use them. That happened to Rick Walsh, a broadcasting engineer in Hartford who has been collecting vintage phones for 25 years, when he installed an intercom system based on rotary phones at his friend's camp this summer.

Collectors preserve the artifacts of a time before touch-tone and cordless became the norm.


"It seems like it would be pretty intuitive," Walsh said, "but a lot of the kids had no concept of how to use one. One 10-year-old boy who was trying to dial a three put his finger in the zero dial hole, brought it to three, and then released it. You'd have to see it to believe it."

But vintage-phone lovers aside, most people who switched to touch-tone phones decades ago now find that waiting for a rotary dial to make its rounds is too excrutiatingly slow.

Channing Wilroy, an actor and rotary phone devotee from Truro, Mass., who has appeared in several films directed by John Waters, said that when Waters visited his house, he found the rotary phones unbearable.

"He has to be near a phone at all times, and my rotary phones just drive him crazy," Wilroy said. "He screams and carries on when he has to use one."

"It's not until you have something that works faster that you become frustrated with something that works perfectly adequately," Hochheiser said. "And it's not just true with the telephone. I don't think people used to mind waiting several moments for the vacuum tubes in their radios and TV's to warm up either. That would never be tolerated now."


Here are some sites related to old telephones:

TRIBUTE TO THE TELEPHONE:
hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/tribute/index.htm
Includes historical and technical information on how rotary and touch-tone telephones work, lists of antique phone collector clubs and telephone museums, and a glossary of telecommunications terms.

TELEPHONE HISTORY WEB SITE:
www.cybercomm.net/~chuck/phones.html
Contains technical and historical information, links to American telephone company history pages and sources for buying old phones and miscellaneous parts.

PHONECO:
www.phonecoinc.com
Sells antique phones, reproductions and parts.

CYBER TELEPHONE MUSEUM:
www.cavejunction.com/phones
A telephone museum with images and model names of common and rare antique phones.

ABOUT AREA CODES:
www.ba.com/nr/95/nov/infoarea.html
A page on the Bell Atlantic site that documents the history of area codes.

TELEPHONE EXCHANGE NAME PROJECT:
ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html
Tells what exchange name the first two digits of a phone number used to stand for.

HENRY DREYFUSS:
www.si.edu/organiza/museums/design/exhib/hd/start.htm
A site produced by the Smithsonian Institution about Henry Dreyfuss, who designed several common phones for Bell Telephone Laboratories from the 1930's to the 1960's.

TELEPHONE COLLECTORS INTERNATIONAL
www.voicenet.com/~tciplace
The Telephone Collectors International home page features monthly newsletters, like Singing Wires and The Switcher's Quarterly, which is devoted to the preservation of historic telephone switching equipment.

BILL'S 200-YEAR CONDENSED HISTORY OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS:
www.cclab.com/billhist.htm
A history of the telephone written by an F.C.C. employee.

PORCELAIN TELEPHONE SIGNS:
www.pcpages.com/phoneman/signpage.htm
A site for collectors of porcelain telephone signs.

 

 


Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

 

 


wsj.com


Home | Site Index | Site Search | Forums | Archives | Marketplace

Quick News | Page One Plus | International | National/N.Y. | Business | Technology | Science | Sports | Weather | Editorial | Op-Ed | Arts | Automobiles | Books | Diversions | Job Market | Real Estate | Travel

Help/Feedback | Classifieds | Services | New York Today

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

Click here for the Mercedes-Benz M-Class SUV