h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Mysteries of the Telephone Explained - A3673307
Author: Gnomon - U151503

Anybody remember the old phones?

This Researcher certainly does, and goes all wistful at the sound of that dial turning

"Invented in the 1896"
A superfluous article there.

"although phones these days all use keypads"
Except for retro phones and the few old rotary phones still in use. I think. I believe it is still possible to use pulse dialling but I'm ready to be corrected on that.

Nice entry Gnomon

My wife-to-be's grandmother still uses the same rotary phone she has has had for years. They do still exist.

Apart from that, nice entry!


Geggs

Good as ever, Gnomon.

There's a US spelling of 'dialling' (with one 'l') in the first paragraph.

The title-choice intrigues me too. I like it, but the reader won't wholly anticipate the subject of the Entry from it. In other words, it seems more like my kind of title than yours!

Please don't change it on my account, though. Let's see what others think.

>>beside 7,8 and <<

There's a space missing there!

RF

Surely the most mysterious bit of all is the bit in between dialling the number and hanging up?

RF

My original final mystery was "How do I get my teenage daughter off the phone?" but I decided to remove that. What do people think?

Hmm, not sure about the title... after all, I'm sure there are millions of mysterious things about the telephone you haven't explained here...

How do crossed lines happen?
How do they work out the bills?
How do telephones work when there's a power cut...

etc.


Oh, and as for pulse dialing - you might want to add that trick tried by all teenagers when mum or dad put a lock on the dial of the telephone...

Pressing repeatedly on the little switches used to 'hang-up' had the same effect as dialing - it used to send pulses, so you could ring your friends even if there was a lock on the phone.

I'm pretty crap at titles for my entries, so I'll stay schtum about your title, only to say that I liked the entry a lot. Very interesting. Are there other phrases that might originate from the arcane world of ancient telephony? "On hold", "Waiting for the penny to drop"? Just a thought.

I read somewhere that some people had noticed that the old phones used to 'ping' at midnight; something to do with the exchange sending a test pulse. Apparently the exchanges still do this but only an old phone will make the noise.

This is an OK-ish sort of entry by your standards, Gnomon, but it does have a sort of 'incomplete' feel to it.

I was expecting an explanation of how your voice is changed to an electric signal and sent down a wire - as RF said, the most mysterious bit of all.

I can answer two of Whisky's questions, which shouldn't be too hard to flesh out into the entry. An old-fashioned 'crossed line' happened, of course, when the operator put the wrong plug in the wrong hole - hence the name. Modern crossed lines, a bit rarer, happen via magnetic resonance between adjacent phone cables that are coincidentally twisted together at the right frequency, or poorly insulated. It's basically the same mechanism that makes AC transformers work. Telephones work in a power cut, because the power is sent down the phone cable, usually from a different branch of the National Grid. Telephone networks in modern offices run from the National Grid and are usually subject to power cuts.

And I definitely think the 'teenage daughter' mystery should be included. You can certainly add a bit of solid fact of the phone developing as a social tool (mysteries of mobile phones is, I suppose, a whole other entry), and of the oft-remarked difference between males and females talking on the phone.

Stay tuned, I might be back with more.

B

I can see that I'm going to have to do more work on this. Thanks for your encouragement, everyone. It never occurred to me that it is a mystery how the voice gets carried along the wires. I've known how that works since I was a little kiddie. I'll come up with something.

Yes, the teenage daughter is a good one. My own teenage daughter is not actually permanently attached to the phone, but I know of a few who are.

And I'll include the one about which ear you should use, left or right.

Err, well, if you can hear sod-all in your right ear, then your choices are rather limited

BT is a bit of a 'family business' for me, so I'll be back later with more comments.

Interesting article Gnomon. You might like to add something as to why 999 was chosen as the emergency number as described in the following link.

http://www.fire.org.uk/advice/999history.htm

One reason I was told was that 999 was an easy number to dial in a smoke filled room. It had to be a three digit number at one end of the dial or the other. For various technical reasons 111, 222 and 000 were precluded, so it ended up as 999.

In reply to Spinks. BT do still ping your telephone periodically. You don't hear it on the telephone but you do on my modem.

Donald

000 is the emergency number in Australia, by the way. Obviously there's some technical difference in the system that makes it a perfectly viable choice here. All a bit odd, really.

When the 999 emergency number was established in 1935 it was a problem. O would have got you the regular operator which is not what was wanted. With changes in dialing codes and such, it is no longer a problem but the 999 emergency number was retained.


Donald

Nice entry, although I think mentioning 'dialing' somewhere in the title might help.

"The phrase for ending a call is 'hanging up'. This is mainly an American term but is well understood in the UK."

How do you make this out to be mainly an American term but understood in the UK? Hang up, hanging up is something that I've always heard it called here, all my life, so I think it's fair to say that it's not mainly American. Even 'put the phone down' comes a very far second to hang up!

One of the biggest problem with mobile and cordless phones is that there's no satisfaction in pushing a button to terminate a call when you're mad. There's nothing like slamming a phone down on it's cradle to smooth ruffled feathers.

The other query I have is this -

"The number 112 is now the standard Emergency number in most countries in the European Union, including the UK."

Does that mean that we should be dialing 112 now? Instead of 999? Or can either be used? This is the first time I've heard of it being used over here.

You got me thinking about the design of a device that would generate a rotation-dependent sequence of pulses when turned one way, but not the other.
I found this description of the (two) main mechanisms that were developed :
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/howdial.htm
Elegant, aren't they?
(Shockley was a great man, but in some sense he stole beauty from the world)
Pin

A word of caution for those dialling the speaking clock (123). It's very easy to dial 112 instead if you've got a slightly shaky thumb.

"Emergency Services. What is your address please?"

"Er... can you tell me the time?"

B

I reckon you might want to note the direction of the dialing in the following:

'You operated the dial by placing your finger in the appropriate hole and turning the dial [Counterclockwise right?] until your finger struck against a curved piece of metal called the 'finger stop'.'


- Jimi X