Rotary dial local battery telephones?
 

I can't find an image now, but I remember seeing local battey telephones, but with rotary dial. No, they wheren't linmen's phones. They where universal telephones (could be used in any kind of landline) or did there where ever automatic telephone exchanges that needed an magneto action in order to make the connection between the subsrciber and the exchange?

Never seen that, but you reminded me of something.

Back in the 90's when I was a kid I collected rotary phones...At one point I saw an antique toy phone kit (no dial) that used a battery (didn't buy it though). After seeing that I decided to try connecting two of my phones together with a 6V lantern battery in series with one of the wires, and discovered that was sufficient for them to work as an intercom (no ringer operation that way though). It was a curiosity at first but after dad got a job out of state leaving us to get the house ready for sale mom got very ill and for a time could barely leave her bed or speak...I rigged up that intercom system again for her with a ~50-100' cord connecting the phones...I forget how she got me to pick up (probably by smacking something that would make noise) but it worked, and she was grateful. And for a while, if she needed me to do or get something for her she would use that.

I'm guessing, but I think the old magneto hand-cranked wall telephones were almost completely replaced by dial phones in the late 1940s, after World War II. I'm not sure, however, when all U. S. telephone exchanges became automatic, but when this did happen, it meant the end of the old hand-cranked wall telephones. One of the last towns in the United States to finally do away forever with hand-cranked wall phones was a rural area called Upton, Kentucky, in the 1960s. I read an article years ago in a 1960s-era issue of Popular Electronics magazine about this change. The article was titled "The Day The Dial Tone Came to Upton", and it showed at least one picture of a resident making a final call on a 1905-era hand-cranked wall phone; this, of course, was just before Upton's telephone service was upgraded to automatic dialing. I still remember the last line in the text of the article. "After all," the sentence began, "you can't say to a dial tone, 'Central, give me number nine.'"

Upton, Kentucky had finally entered the modern age with its new automatic phone system, and I'm sure its residents never looked back afterward. I live in northeastern Ohio near Cleveland, and have absolutely no idea when the suburb I grew up in, or for that matter the village I live in today, switched from hand-cranked magneto phones to automatic dialing and the dial tone; my best guess, however, would be shortly after World War II.

I don't remember hand-cranked wall phones, of course (I'm 62 years old), but I do remember the first phone my folks had in our house. It was a black Western Electric dial phone which was actually wired into the wall; the plate over the junction box in our kitchen had a large rubber grommet through which the telephone cord passed. We didn't get modular phone jacks untill the 1960s, but that's another story.

The final magneto exchange was located in Bryant Pond, Maine. The TV show Real People did a segment on the Bryant Pond exchange in 1980. It remained a manual exchange until October of 1983.

You can add a dial to a local battery phone, keeping the original voice circuit intact with no modifications, but it requires a separate interface to isolate the phone from the phone line.

Found something at page 31 here: https://www.ericsson.com/assets/loca...4_1934_188.pdf

I did that with old phones too, when I was a kid. I bought these giant rayovac electric fence batteries at a surplus store, like lantern batteries on steroids. Cool story.

In my days with AT&T we kept getting repeat calls to a residence, the residential gateway was down ( bad ) every time. I finally figured out the customers grand kids were cranking a old wall phone with a crank generator and blowing the gateway via the VOIP phone port every time. Internal wire removed from phone... Problem solved.
Ahhh when technologies collide.

I have a phone acquisition problem. I have several -- payphones, crank wall phone, various more modern dial and touch-tone versions. Candlestick on the way, too. I also have a washing-machine sized switchboard. Curiously, no landline though. So I'm thinking about wiring them all up in the cave, and feeding it with a cell phone adapter. Could be fun...

Also have 'a few' ISDN desktop videoconference systems -- NCR/AT&T Vistium units, that are a double-board set that lives inside a PC, and is fed by 2B+D ISDN lines. Not sure I can simulate that, though...