Quote:
Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007
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?
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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.