Mechanical dial telephones (was: Auctioneer and scanning etc)

Urbin <urbin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:slrnh8abk5.b9c.urbin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

We have friends whose 11 year old son was totally flabbergasted by his
grandma still having a phone with a dial disk. He had no clue how to
use it and kept punching his finger into the whole in the disk,
wondering why nothing happened.

I guess I'm part of the last generation of still using those phones
before touch tone dialling was introduced here (a long time after it
was common practice in the US, I know :)

The inventor of the dial phone (actually, the switch used at the central
office) was an undertaker who created it to prevent his business from being
usurped by his competitor, who's wife was the town's switchboard operator.

http://affordablephones.net/HistoryTelephone.htm

The dial phone was invented in the 1880s by Almond Brown Stroger, who
was a Kansas City, MO undertaker and was convinced that the Bell
Telephone operator was sending calls for his funeral home to the
operator's brother-in-law... Stroger invented the dial telephone and
installed automatic exchanges in the US and Europe. In 1924, the Bell
Telephone System decided that using operators was NOT the way to go,
and they licensed Stroger's technology. The step by step switch used
to receive the dial pulses is/was called a Stroger Switch, after its
inventor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch

Had you walked into a telephone exchange prior to the introduction of
electronic equipment, you would have found it a noisy place full of the
chattering of these mechanical wonders.
.

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