# Antique phones



## FarmerCline (Oct 12, 2011)

All this freezing weather has kept me inside and bored so I thought this might be a fun thread. I have often been accused of being behind the times and not up on technology.....especially for my age. Only had one of these fancy so called smart phones for about a year now...I do very little texting and much prefer a phone call in most cases. We still have one of the old rotary phones for the landline in the house. Does anyone else still use one of these old rotary phones or am I the only one this far behind the times? 













Hayden


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## haybaler101 (Nov 30, 2008)

What's a land line?


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## CowboyRam (Dec 13, 2015)

FarmerCline said:


> All this freezing weather has kept me inside and bored so I thought this might be a fun thread. I have often been accused of being behind the times and not up on technology.....especially for my age. Only had one of these fancy so called smart phones for about a year now...I do very little texting and much prefer a phone call in most cases. We still have one of the old rotary phones for the landline in the house. Does anyone else still use one of these old rotary phones or am I the only one this far behind the times?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Wow, I have not seen a pay phone in years; I think there are very few of those old things around anymore. Kids nowadays have no idea what it was like back then with pay phones and party lines. We went to only cell phones a couple years ago; hardly anyone called us on the land line, so it seem a good idea to get rid of it. One less expense.


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## SCtrailrider (May 1, 2016)

Theirs one a lot older than that one in use in my grandparents house right now, it's not a pay type tho, it is wooden and has the funnel looking thing ya hold up to your ear... I need to get a pic of it... kids nowadays won't know what it is much less how to use it..


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## IHCman (Aug 27, 2011)

My Dad remembers when the phone came to their farm when he was growing up. I like to tease him that he has lived in a time when there was no phone and now he can't leave the house without his cellphone in his pocket.

Electricity came to my grandparents farm in 1949, the year their first child was born. Dad was born in 1951 and Dad thinks it was 59 when the phone line finally came through.

I'd sure miss caller ID if we had to go back to those old phones.


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

IHCman said:


> I'd sure miss caller ID if we had to go back to those old phones.


Caller ID? All we had to do was ask Goldie (the operator) who was calling. Not only did she know, she also had all the latest community news!

Ralph


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## swmnhay (Jun 13, 2008)

We had a party line IIRC there were 4 people on it.We had 2 short rings.The nosey neighbor would pickup to listen in.


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## glasswrongsize (Sep 15, 2015)

Had one til my house burned in 2010; had a spare, but didn't install it in the new house. I still prefer them as their ringer is far and above better than the new phones, work when power is out, ...can beat the Boogie Man PLUM TO DEATH with the receiver, then it would STILL be working to call the coroner to come fetch him 

Hate when you're in a hurry and you're dialing a 10-digit number and , ALWAYS near the last digit, you would short stroke the dial...had to push down the receiver, wait for dial tone and start all over again. Also, in a hurry, you didn't have time to let the dial recoil on its own and kinda forced it back faster than normal so as you could dial the next digit.

NOW...not only do I have a smart phone with caller ID, I'm patiently waiting for Caller IQ...so I can tell if someone is SMART enough to talk to before I answer the phone. Ideally, it would work if somebody is NORMALLY smart, but is calling with a dumb question.  

One of you gadgetty guys should get to working on an APP for that!!! 

Mark


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## deadmoose (Oct 30, 2011)

Seems to me about 55 is the cutoff age for landlines for those I know. Pretty much anyone under that doesnt have one.


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## Teslan (Aug 20, 2011)

I would still have a wired landline if not for Centurylink not able or not wanting to fix the line so we could actually hear something on it. So ported the number to an At and t cell/home phone system. Would have cancelled it altogether, but since my son 11 doesn't have a cell phone we wanted something for him to call on if an emergency. Works when the power is out also.


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## FarmerCline (Oct 12, 2011)

My grandad worked for the phone company for 30 years and if he removed a phone that was no longer wanted he would bring it home.....that is where this one came from. As a kid I stayed with my grandparents while my parents worked so I grew up using one of these phones. Not sure when they actually fell out of favor......long as they work we just keep using them. I bet most kids today wouldn't even have a clue what it is.....heck I'm not so sure how many others my age would even know how to use it.

Party lines were long before my time but I have heard my grandparents talk about it.....my grandmother used to be a switchboard operator.

Hayden


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## CowboyRam (Dec 13, 2015)

Our party line did not last long; dad went to a private line because the neighbor spent all her time on the phone, and dad was trying run a construction business.

Being that we were in the construction business all of those telephone company guys did not have a drill or bits for making any whole in the studs if needed. They would either pull their lines through the holes that the electricians would drill, or we would have to do it for them. Dad had one job where the Bell Telephone employee did not even want to bother pulling the wire through the holes, so they stapled the wires on the outside of the studs. Dad when rounds and rounds with them on that one; they finally did come in and did it right.


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## Uphayman (Oct 31, 2014)

Graduated from high school in 1974. At that time we were on an eight party line. It was " Facebook" before Facebook came into existence. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing. Maybe that's why I don't do social media.


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## PaMike (Dec 7, 2013)

My buddy has some old phones, he threw them on ebay, and they sold like crazy. He actually mailed a couple our to Hollywood. Apparently set designers needed vintage phones for some movie scene... ...

We don't have a land line in our house, and it does make you think a little bit having small kids. If there was an emergency what would they do? No landline to call 911....

I was at my parents the other night and the landline rang. Made me jump...Kinda wierd...


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## Wethay (Jul 17, 2015)

When I was a kid we had a party line with several neighbors but they were direct dialed phones. If the neighbor was on it you could pick up the phone and listen in, but when it rang only the phone number dialed rang. If the neighbor was on the phone and somebody dialed out number they would get a busy signal. Just over the hill had an adress from another town so it was long distance to call those neighbors. Although our farm has excellent cell coverage on the carrier's map the tower is behind the hill, something the map doesn't take into account. Our drive way is shown on the map and if you want to start a fight in the cell phone store try telling them it's not publicly owned. It's on the map AND it's to long to be private. There is still a landline at the farm because we can't get cell reception.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Only reason I even have a land line is internet faxes are a pain in the *ss.


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## Ray 54 (Aug 2, 2014)

What is this "new" phone thing without a wire???????????????

Yes there is a flip phone hid in my truck,kids had to have a better one. But no service at the house so I pay for 2 phones for a few more years. But that phone in the truck is so I can pester other not for me to be pestered.

Us cordless phone all over the house,but one with a cord to work in power outages.


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## Uphayman (Oct 31, 2014)

We gave up hardline years ago. Living below a hill our cell phone coverage is a bit iffy. So to not lose a connection best bet is when answering, to step out onto the screen porch. Which when it's brutally cold the last 2+ weeks, after a few seconds your teeth start chattering......serious. My Amish customers like to call later in the evening. They probably think I have a speech impediment.


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## endrow (Dec 15, 2011)

The elementary school I went to built in late 50s had 10 small classrooms and the only phone in the whole place was a rotary hanging on the wall in the office . But we thought the place was the Taj Mahal my older cousins went to a one-room schoolhouse I just missed that era


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## endrow (Dec 15, 2011)

mlappin said:


> Only reason I even have a land line is internet faxes are a pain in the *ss.


WE have a fax line and land line for years . The wife could never scan to email but we got that accomplished fax and land line will be history soon


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## endrow (Dec 15, 2011)

Uphayman said:


> Graduated from high school in 1974. At that time we were on an eight party line. It was " Facebook" before Facebook came into existence. Everybody knew what everybody else was doing. Maybe that's why I don't do social media.


Been there and done that mom would never allow us to listen she said the background noise would give us away .


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

endrow said:


> WE have a fax line and land line for years . The wife could never scan to email but we got that accomplished fax and land line will be history soon


Hehehe, thats what I thought as well, scan to email is no issue, however I've scanned warranty registrations for a stove, emailed them to corporate then they have issues trying to read em, try to blow em up and then it goes all pixelated. So tried scanning warranty forms to PDF then emailing those, more issues. Tried something else as well, more issues, takes me 20 seconds to fax in warranty forms and zero issues.


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## IH 1586 (Oct 16, 2014)

The house I grew up in, sold last year had a wall mounted rotary hard wired that got used til early 2000's when I had to install filters between the phone and the phone jacks for the internet to work. Was not going to figure out wiring the filter to keep it working. Took a picture and left it in the phone so it could be hooked up in the future. I hope it's still there. My grandma's house that I live in now had one til a few years ago when a elderly system had to be installed in its place. I wish I had that phone as I would put it back into service.


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## woodland (May 23, 2016)

deadmoose said:


> Seems to me about 55 is the cutoff age for landlines for those I know. Pretty much anyone under that doesnt have one.


My folks are in their mid sixties and only run on cells. Finally talked mom into a smart phone and she regrets not doing it sooner. We still have a landline for the faxes and the shop since there's no service inside two layers of tin. Oh and the landline is also for the telemarketers since no one else uses it. ????


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## IH 1586 (Oct 16, 2014)

Still have landline. All calls go there first then I decide who gets my cell phone number. Works good for screening calls and keeps my cell silent. Still get telemarketers on the cell though.

Still have this table top one.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

FarmerCline said:


> All this freezing weather has kept me inside and bored so I thought this might be a fun thread. I have often been accused of being behind the times and not up on technology.....especially for my age. Only had one of these fancy so called smart phones for about a year now...I do very little texting and much prefer a phone call in most cases. We still have one of the old rotary phones for the landline in the house. Does anyone else still use one of these old rotary phones or am I the only one this far behind the times?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


We used to have an old rotary dial like that in Grandma's house, less the coin slots, and all black, but it was about that size! It was the original phone the phone company put in the house back when they first put a phone in, back in the old PARTY LINE days... Yall remember them of course?? For the youngsters out there that don't remember such things (like before the invention of video games for pity's sake... (Geez I feel old and I'm only 46.) Anyway, back in the day, a lot of the more rural areas of the country and small towns had "party lines"... IOW, one line served a number of houses. You still had "your" phone number (at least we did) but when the phone rang, basically anybody else on the same line could listen to your conversation... though it didn't ring in their house, some old biddy's that were too fond of gossip and knowing everybody else's business would pick up the phone from time to time and listen to see if anyone was on the party line talking, and then put their hand over the talkie part of the handset to muffle the sound and "listen in" on everybody else's conversation. We had at least two (probably more) of those on our party line out here, so you either 1) talked in "code words" prearranged with whomever you were talking to (agreed upon in person last time you visited) or 2) told them you'd come over or talk to them soon or write a letter or whatever, or 3) just contented yourself with the fact that some people suck and have such pathetic lives they have to know everybody else's business (sort of like now; these people's children and grandchildren are called LIBERALS now and they want to know all your business and finger-wag in your face anything they don't like...)

Anyway, that was back in the day when there was only ONE PHONE in the house, and it was on the north bedroom wall, which was closest to the road right-of-way where they laid the phone line and had the junction box, and was the shortest cable path to the house. Grandma didn't use that bedroom much because it got too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, because being on the north side it didn't get any south wind... This was back in the days before there was such a thing as "central air and heat" and in fact there WAS NO air conditioning in the house, still isn't, until I installed a couple window units in specific rooms... Grandma liked the heat as she got older (old folks are ALWAYS cold it seems) and she'd sit around in a housecoat or nightgown in 100 degree weather with just a couple open windows for ventilation. Of course my bedroom was home to the most powerful window unit I could get, and it ran pretty much 24/7 for about 4/5 of the year here... (much to Grandma's chagrin-- we had a (ahem) "discussion" one day about her habit of going in there and turning the temp knob up most of the way to "minimum cooling" when I was out in the field roasting my @ss off... LOL) Anyway, I liked it as cold as I could get it (which wasn't much in an uninsulated farm house) but Grandma thought it was too cold and didn't come in my room to bother me much because of it... LOL Didn't frost the windows over but it DID keep dew trickling off of them every morning all summer...

Anyway, the north bedroom was un-air conditioned, so talking on the phone in summer, you just sat on the edge of the bed by the window and roasted... at least it kept the conversations short! Unfortunately, the north bedroom was also UNHEATED... Grandma had a few old Dearborn butane heaters in the house... The main one was in the living room, right in front of her chair and beside the TV... her bed was under the attic staircase by the south windows (for summertime cooling). There was a little one in the bathroom, and another one that rarely got lit in the east dining room/parlor and adjoining east bedroom, right by the door between the two. That one rarely got lit. Grandma had a door between that room (which opened onto the back porch, which was the "front door" (even though it was the back door, the front door actually never got used). She kept the kitchen door (accordion door) closed all winter, so the east rooms were usually just above freezing in cold weather, the kitchen and living room and Grandma's bedroom were heated, and the north bedroom was also closed off with a door and allowed to get freezing cold, which was nasty for two reasons-- 1) you had to go through that bedroom to get to the bathroom (Grandma's house was like a big circle-- no hallway, every room opened onto every other room with a door which was usually closed) and 2) you had to sit in a freezing cold room to talk on the phone during the winter. The bathroom was heated by the dinky little mini-Dearborn butane heater... Now I'm not talking about the modern "pilot light" or "electric start" type LP heaters; these were a gas tap coming up out of the floor, and a gas throttle valve on one end behind a little door on the end of the burner. To light the heater, you turned on the gas tap behind the heater on the floor (which she always turned off when the heater was off to preclude gas leaks) and then you opened the throttle valve behind the little door on the side of the heater til you heard gas sissing, then you grabbed a match out of the box on top of the heater and struck it and stuck it in between the front grates, through one of the holes in the fire brick, or else you stuck it in above the gas throttle valve just above the burner bar, until the gas lit with a "whoomp!" that ran from one end of the bar to the other... then you opened the valve or reduced it to get the amount of heat you wanted... from little bitty blue "bumps" of flame coming out the top of the burner bar, all the way up to where they started to turn yellow (then you turned it back JUST A BIT til the yellow flame tips disappeared and were burning pure blue, meaning the flames had the correct amount of oxygen). The flames went up fire bricks with spikes inside them and criss-crossed ceramic fronts, which soaked up the heat and the bricks got red hot and radiated out into the room, and the hot air vented out the top of the bricks and came out louvers on the front of the heater near the top, as well as heating a sheet of steel inside which heated air coming in from louvers in the back and venting out the sides... When we'd go to Shiner to feed cows or were otherwise gone for the day, Grandma always shut the heaters off in the house-- so when we came home, it was about 35-40 degrees in the house... you'd fire those baby's up BIG TIME... for awhile; they'd about roast you out of the house if you kept them on too high too long, despite the house having ZERO insulation... Course with the north bedroom unheated, phone calls were conducted in the cold-- only heat was whatever leaked through the walls, so in cold weather it was about 40-50 degrees in there, and if you left the door open behind you while you were on the phone, you'd catch an earful from Grandma about it when the cold air came pouring into her room... LOL It was also a [email protected] cold walk from the bathroom (which was kept nice and warm by the same style (only smaller) heater, lit and shut off in the same way-- with a gas tap, throttling valve, and a box of matches) back through that north bedroom to the rest of the house...

Anyway, I found this situation rather backwards by the mid-80's when I was in high school and living with my Grandmother... but there was only THAT ONE PHONE in the house, mounted on the wall, and it was HARD WIRED to the phone wire going out the wall and down into the ground... SO I did some research on phone wiring, and bought a phone jack wiring kit from Wally World or the lumberyard or hardware store or something... with the crimp-on phone jack connectors and that weird crimping tool and a spool of wire and some junction boxes and stuff with the female phone jack sockets on them... and with that and a staple gun and a few extra rolls of flat 4-strand phone wire, I wired up "extensions" into the rest of the house... I couldn't run it through the walls, so I just stapled it to the crown molding along the ceiling. Grandma like to had a fit, because I was running "ugly wires" all over her old farmhouse... Grandma was very bad about not answering the phone-- she couldn't hear it from the kitchen, and even sitting in her chair with the door closed and the TV on she could barely hear the loud bell ringing (yep, no tone, an ELECTRIC BELL like an alarm clock, for you kids that never experienced the OLD phones like this!) Plus, by the time she put down whatever she was snacking on or reading and turned the TV volume down with the knob (Yep, there was a time when TV's DID NOT HAVE REMOTE CONTROLS-- they had KNOBS and if you wanted to turn the TV off or on or change the channel or turn the sound up or down, you GOT UP AND TURNED THE KNOB!) Anyway, by the time she did all that, usually the phone had rang a half-dozen times or more and whoever was calling gave up and hung up...

SO, I ran one phone wire around the crown molding and across the ceiling and down the wall and put a phone jack RIGHT BY HER CHAIR on the end table... then I got a couple cheap push-button phones from Wally World... I also ran a phone wire around the door frame and into my bedroom on the west side of the house, and put a cheap phone in there too. I had to take the phone off the wall and open it up and connect the phone wires to the screws inside the phone with the existing wires coming from the outside phone wire, but I got it all working. Grandma quickly grew to like not having to get out of her chair to answer the phone, or being able to step out of the kitchen and around the corner to her chair to answer the phone when she was cooking, and I liked not freezing my @ss off or frying in the summertime sitting in hot room with no A/C to talk on the phone...

Course those cheapy push-button phones from Wally World only lasted a year or two and they'd crap out, so we'd get another... At one point I got one from Western Auto in town, was the neatest phone-- no "base" to put the handset in; the handset was about a half inch thick with round buttons on the face of it, and a TOGGLE SWITCH on the side... the mouthpiece was articulated with 3 flexible segments on the end to curve around closer to your mouth. What was neat about that was, I could put it by my chair or by the bed or by the couch and didn't have to worry about the phone handset falling out of the base, making a busy signal as the phone was "off the hook". You turned the toggle switch on to talk, dialed, and made your call, and slid the toggle switch over to "hang up". If someone called, you toggled the switch on to answer and toggled it off to hang up. SWEET!

Unfortunately that phone broke a few years later and I nursed it along with duct tape for awhile til it quit working, and I could never find another one as good (or quite like it) as it again...

The phone company FINALLY came out in the mid-late 90's and removed the old rotary phone-- they installed some new equipment and a new push-button phone in its place. They had changed the phone system and the new system was incompatible and incapable of operating with the old rotary dial phones anymore... You can get "faux rotaries" but it's basically just a touch-tone phone with a rotary input... "Touch Tone" (where every number button makes a different pitch "tone" to signal the phone system what you're dialing) replaced the older analog rotary dial system (where the TRUE old rotary phones, like Grandma's, when you dialed it you heard a number of "clicks" corresponding to the number you just dialed... the number of clicks signaled the phone company equipment what number you were dialing). For a long time, they overlapped... I guess by the mid-90's they finally did away with the old rotary "clicky" analog system and went full digital with touch-tone only, which is why they came and took out the old phone...

Thanks for the trip down memory lane... haven't thought about this stuff in YEARS... Showed an old rotary dial phone to Keira one time in an antique store-- that one was actually an old WWII era Japanese phone, but it worked the same as ours... and I showed her a pay phone-- she was flabbergasted... taught her how to work it, and explained how pay phones (phone booths) worked back before cell phones were invented... She exclaimed, "I've seen one of those!" when we were watching "The Rockford Files" on Hulu... LOL Most kids nowdays have NO IDEA how the world we grew up in worked...

One day we'll discuss "PONG!" LOL

Later! OL J R


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

Teslan said:


> I would still have a wired landline if not for Centurylink not able or not wanting to fix the line so we could actually hear something on it. So ported the number to an At and t cell/home phone system. Would have cancelled it altogether, but since my son 11 doesn't have a cell phone we wanted something for him to call on if an emergency. Works when the power is out also.


We still actually have the land line, but it's "emergency use only". We only have the one wire under the house coming up through the floor by where the computer table was (and the router/Wifi and printer and stuff is now-- remember the old tower computers with their own desk?? LOL Seems ages ago but not really that long... now I'm "old fashioned" for using the laptop... Betty and Keira do everything on the phone or tablet pretty much!)

The land line is hooked up to the router-- we have good internet access over the phone line..., but we keep an old cheapy touch-tone phone under the table, and showed Keira how to unplug the phone wire from the router and plug it into the old land-line phone, so she can call 9-1-1 in an emergency... It doesn't actually have a phone "talking account" but they told us it WILL work for 911 emergency calls, even though our "account" is "data only" or "internet access only" ... the rest of the time it's strictly for data... I got rid of the stupid land-line talky accounts (long distance and local) because the stupid taxes are just too high, and we use the cell phones exclusively anyway...

Later! OL J R


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