Evil Squirrel's Nest

Pick a hole, any hole!

If you were born sometime in the last two decades, there’s a good chance you’re looking at the picture leading of today’s Flashback Friday post and wondering what in the hell that weird looking monstrosity is.  It kinda looks like a phone…. but what’s with that cord?  And the handset big enough to bludgeon a possum with?  And the…… um….. wait a minute!  Where’s the dial!?!?!?  I can’t use this thing!!!  It must be broken!!!

Bad phone!!! Bad!!!

Calm down, grasshoppers!  Those of us older folks know exactly what that is and how to use one…. though we’d be a little rusty with it ourselves now since they’ve been obsolete  for over 20 years.  That is the good old rotary telephone, from back in the days when it took you longer to dial a number than it could now to receive and send a text.  Rotary dials have been around since the early days of the telephone, and although eventually the more familiar and convenient touchtone dial was introduced in the 1960′s, rotary phones were still commonplace in the 80′s.

I’ll bet this would stop everyone’s texting addiction real fast…

So how did this strange medieval apparatus work?  Simple… if you wanted to dial Jenny, rather than hit the buttons 8, 6, 7, 5, 3, 0, 9 and then wait to be called a prevert, you had to stick your finger into the corresponding holes for each number, rotate the dial clockwise until you reached the finger stop right before the zero, and then release your finger and let the dial work its way back to its set position…. and repeat the process for each number.  As the dial spun its way back once released, it gave off a sequence of pulses dependent upon the distance it had to travel backwards from the finger stop.  Dialing the 8 created eight pulses which triggered the routing system at the call center the same way the touchtone sound for the number 8 would on today’s phones.

Hey baby!!! Guess where my finger’s been!

If you dialed the infamous Jenny number on a rotary phone, you’d realize that back in the day it required much more patience to make a phone call.  Since most of the digits are towards the end of the dial, it required a lot of finger spinning and waiting for the dial to return from the finger stop.  Did you know this was a consideration when the first area codes were assigned back in the 1950′s?  The larger cities, such as New York City (212), Los Angeles (213) and Chicago (312) were allowed to have the codes that required the least amount of time to dial on a rotary phone since more calls would be made to customers in those area codes than in some of the podunks like South Dakota (605).  This consideration was not taken into effect when it was determined that 911 would be reserved for local emergency services.  Most other countries in the world that are much more civilized than we are use a number that takes a lot less time to dial on a rotary phone should you find yourself being pursued by an icepick murderer…

The 9 will still be pulsating when your aorta gets severed…

One of the most fascinating bits I found in the Wiki article on rotary phones involves a plan by a Washington DC anti-drug coalition to have the phone company replace its touchtone pay phones with rotary dials in the late 1990′s to discourage the practice of using pay phones to call the pagers of drug dealers, since pagers were not compatible with pulse dialing.  Alas, this was a case of applying obsolete technology to technology that itself was well on the way to becoming obsolete.  15 years later, pay phones are almost as hard to find as a rotary dial…

Dammit!!! Has anyone seen a phone booth around here!?!?

Growing up in a zoo house of five kids, we wore through a lot of things pretty fast, and one of them was telephones.  We seemed to alternate through many different rotary and touchtone phones through the 80′s and 90′s.  My favorite was a phone we had maybe 15-20 years ago that was a bizarre hybrid of the old and new dialing system.  It had push buttons just like a normal phone today would, but it still sent out pulses rather than tones.  Seriously, other than a little finger strain, what was the purpose of the push-button pulse phone anyway?  Only some demented evil genius would come up with something like that…

Behold!!! Plutonium dialing with the power of 1.21 gigawatts!!!

Sadly, rotary phones are not just obsolete in the popular notion, but they are actually obsolete from a technical standpoint as well.  Most telecommunications technology created over the past two decades no longer recognizes pulse dialing, which makes rotary phones about as useless as the pound key.  But those of us who lived with these marvels of popular science will always remember them with a warm, fuzzy sense of nostalgia.  A relic of a simpler day and time when the letters on a phone were for dialing Beechwood 4-5789, and our pointer fingers were always the most buff appendage on our bodies.  We here at The Nest would like to give the rotary phone a 21-pulse salute….

OMG!  The days when everyone had their telephone number printed on their phone!!!  Now that’s nostalgia….