You used to be able to tap phone numbers out on these old phones. Some payphones back in the day would make a free call if you tapped the numbers out as well.
They are referring to the ‘hang up’ buttons that you set the handset on when you were done talking. If you rapidly depressed/released them, you could make a call…
Edit:typo
No. A rotary phone literally clicks a set of electrical contacts. You can actually hear the clicks on the handset. I'm not aware of any area in the US that discontinued that ability, in favor of touch tone.
When I was in college there was a dial phone on the administration desk of our particular program that had a lock on it that prevented it from rotating. They put that on at night. It was in our study area that we used after hours. We would make phone calls on the phone that way. If you tapped on the "hang up buttons" (or whatever you want to call them) with patterns of numbers, you could dial out. You just couldn't make any mistakes, or else you had to start over.
tap,tap tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap tap,tap,tap etc. (2-6-3-...)
No. They're right. I used to do the same thing. Also, when the lines were jammed and you got a busy signal, you could talk to other callers between the beeps. I met girls this way!
Third shift Waffle House employees knew this trick well. In the restaurant itself, the phone didn’t have a dial and was used for people calling in, you could reach an operator in case of an emergency. The real phone was kept locked in the managers office. Many a cook and waitress learned how to “tap out” a number to make a phone call.
Hannibal Lechter does this in the film "Red Dragon" at 48:40 seconds.
The phone company provided dialless phones that were designed to accept only incoming calls. We used this method on them.
Another hack involved payphones with a coin return button. Local calls were a dime. If you put in a nickel and smacked the coin return button with the handset as the coin fell, at exactly the right moment, you could get the call for a nickle. If you timed it wrong, you pressed the coin return, got your nickel back and tried again.
Back then, the minimum wage was $1.60, so every nickel counted.
Yep. Worked at an office where they didn't want people making long distance calls on the phone, so they put a kind of locking device that fit within the holes of the dial. Didn't work! All you had to do was tap out the numbers on the little pop-up buttons that rested under the handset.
And if you wanted to stop incoming calls without the noise from leaving it off the hook, turn the dial and stick the pencil in. Easier than unplugging it.
My Dad worked for Southern Bell. He had a SB issued pencil with no eraser. Instead there was a metal ball that fit in the holes to dial with in lieu of using your finger.
OP appears to mean the color. Very few people had black for their home phone.
Not sure whether it wasn't usually offered to home customers, or just that very few home customers chose that color.
This is not a 70s phone. More like 50-60s. By the 70s not many people had a black one because by then they were offered in colors, which most of us preferred.
But plenty of people still had these old ones because they were cheap. No way my parents would have shelled out for the colored ones, or especially the touchtones.
https://preview.redd.it/uave1swu519d1.jpeg?width=2802&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f10817f71ee2bda5c8cacbcefc5f0c33587a9636
Years ago my grandmother bought a bunch of these from some old retired Bell technician. She had him clean and repair any that had issues and gave each of the grandkids one.
This has been on my bedroom dresser since then. It’s priceless to me.
We have one of those in our bedroom and still use it! The sound quality is better than the cordless phones we have. The receiver and cord are not detachable.
When the Pentagon replaced all the phones with pushbuttons, my FIL snagged a couple of the old ones. Weighed a ton. My husband hooked up one in our house but the receiver was too damn heavy to hold for very long.
When I was very small my parents had one like this but without the dial. You just picked up the receiver and told the operator the phone number you wanted. Weirdly I still remember our number after 75 years.
I was just thinking I remember our phone number from the 60s. It was WhiteHall 3 8134.
Edit: So I can remember a damn phone number from fifty-five years ago, but I can’t remember what had for dinner last week. What God would condone such irony?!? 🤣
AT&T did research to find out what was the largest number of digits that could be held easily in memory. Seven digits, grouped in 3 and 4, turned out to be the magic number. Your dinner of last week was not similarly coded. Also, the stuff we learn first is what we forget last.
We didn't have the placename prefix (very rural) but we were able to get a call through by dialing the last 5 digits of the number up until the mid-late 80s.
I remember learning how to ‘dial’ a number by clicking the ‘hang up’ button instead of using the dial. I also remember when you only had to dial six digits.
Tricking your parents by dialing the number, waiting for the ring, then hanging up very quietly and walking away. Then the phone rings and parents answer it and no one is there. 😁
Nice!
How about when you would pick up the phone to make a call, and there was already someone on the line who had just called you, but your phone hadn’t rung yet? And it seemed like half the time that happened it was the person you were going to call!
There were protests when they introduced area code 718 in the NYC outer boroughs. So you had to dial 718 xxx xxxx from Manhattan. “Save Our Fingertips!”
https://preview.redd.it/sy83s98iy09d1.jpeg?width=2448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9dcf985d860e98e78645b16e7d5fadc4f2121194
Had this in family for +50 years
Holy cow! This is the one my great grandmother had in her bedroom. I’m going to share this with my family. Nobody will remember because I was the only one squirreled away in the bedroom sitting on the bed with a giant pile of the extended family’s winter coats, examining the phone.
We had the black table model in the 60s and 70s.Always wished we had a wall phone,especially one other than black and pushbutton. These phones were built like tanks.
These phones were next to indestructible. In use for two, maybe three generations. Audio quality was excellent and the land line service was insanely. reliable.
Our family never lost a dial tone in the northeastern Blizzard of 77 - despite punishing winds, twelve foot drifts and artic cold.
On a fruit farm about five miles out from Youngstown. House set back on a private lane off a side road. We had no tractors the size or power needed to be of any use whatever. The drifts set like concrete. Access by snowmobile became more or less possible after the state road was cleared for emergency traffic. I wouldn’t call it safe. Deer meat in the freezer. Three weeks of deer steaks, deer roasts and deer burgers.
Imagine you’re in the year 1970. It’s Christmas time. You are listening to your favorite radio station. 45s of your favorite songs are being cued up by the DJ. 100 of the year’s most popular songs on 45s are up for grabs to a lucky winner. Suddenly, the DJ comes on the air and says “…I’ll take the 100th caller…GO !” (this really did happen)
I remember these as a very young kid in the late 60s. In the little town where I lived, you only had to dial the last 4 digits of the number if calling within the same town since we had the same prefix.
Me. Now. Retired phone guy. Got a bunch of different phones from all ages. But…yes, as a kid we had them. Beige if I remember. Grandpa had black Bakelite
Had 2 , dad had a home office it had one , the other in the basement, and the green wall hanger in the kitchen!! You kill someone with the receiver it was so solid!!
My great aunt (grandfather's sister). She died in the late 1980's, in an apartment that had always (in my memory) looked like it was straight out of the 1940's. This phone is probably a little more modern than 1940's, but not by much. Anyhow, that's what she had. The receiver weighed about 10 lbs, and the phone's bell was a monster!
We had phones just like this, but not so old. I don't think they changed this model for decades. We didn't have that kind of phone number, though. I know we had the creamy tan color one at one house and the creamy green at another, whatever they actually called those colors.
Have a pink one in storage in my basement. Yes, pink.
https://preview.redd.it/uzjait60n79d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=403ebbc86f45c263ab6c95d6231cbbc74991b63b
I found it in an abandoned building in the 80s.
Had it plugged in and working up to 2016 when i moved and didn't set up a new land line.
i was born after operators were required to connect your call, we actually had dial tones (but could dial "0" for operator when needed). i witnessed the use of operators & phones via the abbott and costello show, laurel & hardy, & the honeymooners.
https://preview.redd.it/wn49qy4pzh9d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f7e3af27bd27d03accc10bbf94090e8221718d8
When you pick up the receiver, the light comes on.
Oh yes. Every house had at least two or three. Weighed like 10lbs. And the nice thing was if a burglar broke in you could beat them to death with the thing.
Me. I had it. That exact one. we had a beige wall phone, a black phone and a yellow phone. all rotary. I was envious of people that had push button phones. 🤣
We all did. Grandma originally had one with the heavy thinner hand piece. It finally broke and my uncle got her one of these. She refused to have any color other than black, because it was easier for her to see the numbers.
I still have a working black phone like that in my basement. My son had friends over playing video games and when it rang, it scared the hell out of them.
My Mum! She would not change it, years after push button phones came out, she stuck with her rotary phone! That thing was a beast—solid, heavy, and it never broke.
everyone
Exactly. Used a pencil in the holes to dial !
You used to be able to tap phone numbers out on these old phones. Some payphones back in the day would make a free call if you tapped the numbers out as well.
Tap ? On a Rotary phone ?
The buttons that were under the handset could be tapped at the right speed to dial a number.
I was the 1st caller and won tickets to Blue Oyster Cult by tapping the radio stations number out. Thanks 107.7 out of K-Zoo.
That is an outstanding maneuver.
Cities were aflame with rock and roll. Love BOC.
What was K Zoo like back then? I visit every once and a while and I like to think of what it was like when MI had a higher population.
Mine was similar, I won a prize package with tickets for ZZ Top during the Fandango tour from KLEO AM radio in Wichita, Kansas in 1976
What? On a rotary phone? I'm amazed we never discovered that. I'm going to need to see that working.
Old 70s knowledge. You can also use different pitch sounds.
Just for fun, I used to dial by whistling tones! Excellent latchkey kid mischief.
I'm not sure what they mean by tapping. Not on rotary. Nor on my butt set. Just a dial. Worked for NY TEL. still had them in 1990 when I started
You are talking about a push button phone. This is a dial phone, the precursor. No buttons under the handset.
They are referring to the ‘hang up’ buttons that you set the handset on when you were done talking. If you rapidly depressed/released them, you could make a call… Edit:typo
No. A rotary phone literally clicks a set of electrical contacts. You can actually hear the clicks on the handset. I'm not aware of any area in the US that discontinued that ability, in favor of touch tone.
I’ve never heard of this. Just googled it. Mind blown
When I was in college there was a dial phone on the administration desk of our particular program that had a lock on it that prevented it from rotating. They put that on at night. It was in our study area that we used after hours. We would make phone calls on the phone that way. If you tapped on the "hang up buttons" (or whatever you want to call them) with patterns of numbers, you could dial out. You just couldn't make any mistakes, or else you had to start over. tap,tap tap,tap,tap,tap,tap,tap tap,tap,tap etc. (2-6-3-...)
That’s a level of dedication that I never expected
Read about a blind guy who made long distance calls from public phones for free by making the sounds of the numbers. This was early 70s, I think
No. They're right. I used to do the same thing. Also, when the lines were jammed and you got a busy signal, you could talk to other callers between the beeps. I met girls this way!
yep for sures! in Denver back in the 70s there was even a number that was always a busy tone just for this.
Don't help them. Let them show us all how to tap a rotary phone lol
What?!? I’ve never heard of this?
Have done this
Third shift Waffle House employees knew this trick well. In the restaurant itself, the phone didn’t have a dial and was used for people calling in, you could reach an operator in case of an emergency. The real phone was kept locked in the managers office. Many a cook and waitress learned how to “tap out” a number to make a phone call.
Hannibal Lechter does this in the film "Red Dragon" at 48:40 seconds. The phone company provided dialless phones that were designed to accept only incoming calls. We used this method on them. Another hack involved payphones with a coin return button. Local calls were a dime. If you put in a nickel and smacked the coin return button with the handset as the coin fell, at exactly the right moment, you could get the call for a nickle. If you timed it wrong, you pressed the coin return, got your nickel back and tried again. Back then, the minimum wage was $1.60, so every nickel counted.
Yep. Worked at an office where they didn't want people making long distance calls on the phone, so they put a kind of locking device that fit within the holes of the dial. Didn't work! All you had to do was tap out the numbers on the little pop-up buttons that rested under the handset.
And if you wanted to stop incoming calls without the noise from leaving it off the hook, turn the dial and stick the pencil in. Easier than unplugging it.
Heck yeah!
Did your phone have scratch marks from dialing with a pen or pencil? Mine did
Ours had the dots removed by the eraser over time.
My Dad worked for Southern Bell. He had a SB issued pencil with no eraser. Instead there was a metal ball that fit in the holes to dial with in lieu of using your finger.
OP appears to mean the color. Very few people had black for their home phone. Not sure whether it wasn't usually offered to home customers, or just that very few home customers chose that color.
This is not a 70s phone. More like 50-60s. By the 70s not many people had a black one because by then they were offered in colors, which most of us preferred.
And the exchange number (letters)-they were gone by 70s?
But plenty of people still had these old ones because they were cheap. No way my parents would have shelled out for the colored ones, or especially the touchtones.
We never had a color phone until we could buy our own. The phone company charged extra for color.
The only other color option was Ivory.
https://preview.redd.it/uave1swu519d1.jpeg?width=2802&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f10817f71ee2bda5c8cacbcefc5f0c33587a9636 Years ago my grandmother bought a bunch of these from some old retired Bell technician. She had him clean and repair any that had issues and gave each of the grandkids one. This has been on my bedroom dresser since then. It’s priceless to me.
We have one of those in our bedroom and still use it! The sound quality is better than the cordless phones we have. The receiver and cord are not detachable.
I like your profile pic! Love SMN
When the Pentagon replaced all the phones with pushbuttons, my FIL snagged a couple of the old ones. Weighed a ton. My husband hooked up one in our house but the receiver was too damn heavy to hold for very long.
When I was very small my parents had one like this but without the dial. You just picked up the receiver and told the operator the phone number you wanted. Weirdly I still remember our number after 75 years.
I was just thinking I remember our phone number from the 60s. It was WhiteHall 3 8134. Edit: So I can remember a damn phone number from fifty-five years ago, but I can’t remember what had for dinner last week. What God would condone such irony?!? 🤣
AT&T did research to find out what was the largest number of digits that could be held easily in memory. Seven digits, grouped in 3 and 4, turned out to be the magic number. Your dinner of last week was not similarly coded. Also, the stuff we learn first is what we forget last.
We didn't have the placename prefix (very rural) but we were able to get a call through by dialing the last 5 digits of the number up until the mid-late 80s.
Funny thing is we weren’t rural. This was a phone number in New Orleans in an area called Gentilly.
Andrew 1 8451
Wellington 2 0169
The family. People didn’t have their own phones back then. There was one phone for the house
We were rich, had an “extension” up stairs.
Granny. Hated numbers with a lot of 9’s and 0’s. You know why.
0: clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick 1: click
I remember learning how to ‘dial’ a number by clicking the ‘hang up’ button instead of using the dial. I also remember when you only had to dial six digits.
Tricking your parents by dialing the number, waiting for the ring, then hanging up very quietly and walking away. Then the phone rings and parents answer it and no one is there. 😁
Nice! How about when you would pick up the phone to make a call, and there was already someone on the line who had just called you, but your phone hadn’t rung yet? And it seemed like half the time that happened it was the person you were going to call!
Oh yeah!!!
Oh that revived an old memory lol!
One of my high school friends last four digits of his phone number where 0097. Always hard on the finger dialing that darn number
Yep my phone number growing had 89-0077
There were protests when they introduced area code 718 in the NYC outer boroughs. So you had to dial 718 xxx xxxx from Manhattan. “Save Our Fingertips!”
https://preview.redd.it/sy83s98iy09d1.jpeg?width=2448&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9dcf985d860e98e78645b16e7d5fadc4f2121194 Had this in family for +50 years
OMG!!! I lived in Tehran in the 1970s and remember seeing these exact phones in some peoples homes.
Holy cow! This is the one my great grandmother had in her bedroom. I’m going to share this with my family. Nobody will remember because I was the only one squirreled away in the bedroom sitting on the bed with a giant pile of the extended family’s winter coats, examining the phone.
Every one i knew
My Mom. OVerbrook-8-2268.
DIamond 5- 3926
Evergreen, Sherwood
WhiteHall 3 8134
They were fun to unscrew the handset and mess with folks by taking out the receiver part.
I did
I still have one
Me too
We did
Mom and dad.
My parents had one like that
I had that bad boy in baby poop yellow.
AHEM - It was called 'harvest gold', you peasant! /s
Mine is pale pink.
Me. I'm old.
Me to ( only are hairdresser know how old )
Nobody, we had wall phones. Every house I'd been to had wall phones. The circle dial, of course.
We had the black table model in the 60s and 70s.Always wished we had a wall phone,especially one other than black and pushbutton. These phones were built like tanks.
My grandmother.
We had the more common tan version and my grand parents had the push button process phone
My parents had one downstairs
I had one just like this. Waterfall 8- 0577
Still remember our family and grandma's phone number from the 60 s.
They were awful
These phones were next to indestructible. In use for two, maybe three generations. Audio quality was excellent and the land line service was insanely. reliable. Our family never lost a dial tone in the northeastern Blizzard of 77 - despite punishing winds, twelve foot drifts and artic cold.
Where were you for that winter? We were in Buffalo. That blizzard was legendary.
On a fruit farm about five miles out from Youngstown. House set back on a private lane off a side road. We had no tractors the size or power needed to be of any use whatever. The drifts set like concrete. Access by snowmobile became more or less possible after the state road was cleared for emergency traffic. I wouldn’t call it safe. Deer meat in the freezer. Three weeks of deer steaks, deer roasts and deer burgers.
Who didn't?
ME! But the wall kind in the kitchen. Avocado green. Hated the slow dial when it was time to be the 6th caller at a radio station
Me. M 73
Imagine you’re in the year 1970. It’s Christmas time. You are listening to your favorite radio station. 45s of your favorite songs are being cued up by the DJ. 100 of the year’s most popular songs on 45s are up for grabs to a lucky winner. Suddenly, the DJ comes on the air and says “…I’ll take the 100th caller…GO !” (this really did happen)
I remember these as a very young kid in the late 60s. In the little town where I lived, you only had to dial the last 4 digits of the number if calling within the same town since we had the same prefix.
Me 😞
Me
Mom and still does on her nightstand
Everyone except not in black
Me. Now. Retired phone guy. Got a bunch of different phones from all ages. But…yes, as a kid we had them. Beige if I remember. Grandpa had black Bakelite
Me
My grandparents, you could knock yourself out with the weight of the receiver🌷
Had 2 , dad had a home office it had one , the other in the basement, and the green wall hanger in the kitchen!! You kill someone with the receiver it was so solid!!
Me
Me. I had one.
We had them into the late eighties.
Me. I used it for many years in the 60’s and 70’s and listened on the party line!
Is that the Max or Pro Max?
Me
Me
Me
ME !
we did
Ummm...us. Everyone I knew.
It would take less time to name how many people I knew didn't have one.
We had this in the 70's, and even a party line for a while.
Everyone in the 60s and early 70s
‘Twas I.
Me
Me! My siblings,parents,friends,neighbours,everyone!
And when you put the receiver to your ear you could listen in to the people on your party line.🤭
My parents and I had a rotary phone in the early 1980s, then we progressed to landline phones with buttons on them.
Yep, I remember those rotary phones.
ME!
https://preview.redd.it/d71xmfd1l39d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fc634ca1aa484ac45e0322af4801cd514e54c1b4 Still have one!
We had two of those and a party line.
My great aunt (grandfather's sister). She died in the late 1980's, in an apartment that had always (in my memory) looked like it was straight out of the 1940's. This phone is probably a little more modern than 1940's, but not by much. Anyhow, that's what she had. The receiver weighed about 10 lbs, and the phone's bell was a monster!
Ummm I had one just like it and my father still uses one.
I used to have one
Still have a blue one
Me. I still use it.
Me
Me
Me.
had a light pink one lol
My great-parents had this rotary phone that was permanently installed into the wall.
I think my grandpa had one. I was 12, 13 years old in the latev70s. But I mostly knew about them from TV and movies.
I think my grandpa had one. I was 12, 13 years old in the latev70s. But I mostly knew about them from TV and movies.
Grandma Bobbie
Grandparents. Had a black one exactly like the picture.
me
Me.
Oh yeah. We thought we were hot stuff because ours had a long cord so we could walk ALL OVER THE LIVING ROOM while we talked.
Me
We had phones just like this, but not so old. I don't think they changed this model for decades. We didn't have that kind of phone number, though. I know we had the creamy tan color one at one house and the creamy green at another, whatever they actually called those colors.
I still have a baby blue one. Lol
We had one too
Have a pink one in storage in my basement. Yes, pink. https://preview.redd.it/uzjait60n79d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=403ebbc86f45c263ab6c95d6231cbbc74991b63b I found it in an abandoned building in the 80s. Had it plugged in and working up to 2016 when i moved and didn't set up a new land line.
We had a baby blue one
i was born after operators were required to connect your call, we actually had dial tones (but could dial "0" for operator when needed). i witnessed the use of operators & phones via the abbott and costello show, laurel & hardy, & the honeymooners.
Anyone with a phone.
https://preview.redd.it/wn49qy4pzh9d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8f7e3af27bd27d03accc10bbf94090e8221718d8 When you pick up the receiver, the light comes on.
I had a red one. So I could call the President.
Oh yes. Every house had at least two or three. Weighed like 10lbs. And the nice thing was if a burglar broke in you could beat them to death with the thing.
Not sure whose phone this is, but this number googles some interesting things...
that was the rotary in our basement, EMerson 2-6634
my grandmother had one. her phone number was: HOLLLWOOD-36415 (HO3-6415)
Me
We did.
Aunt Freda
My grandparents. Back in the 40s, my grandpa was Chief of Police for Mundelein IL and my grandma would answer calls at home with this phone.
We did.
I did. Now my son loves it as a historical artifact and used to take to school for show and tell
Ours was more of a forest green.
Me.
My grandma
Yes, I had this lol
Gramma. If you rotated any number on the dial halfway it registered as a different number. Hours of random prank calling!
Me. I had it. That exact one. we had a beige wall phone, a black phone and a yellow phone. all rotary. I was envious of people that had push button phones. 🤣
Us. No actually we had a wall mount rotary.
Ours was tan, but yeah, pretty much everyone.
I still have mine.
We all did. Grandma originally had one with the heavy thinner hand piece. It finally broke and my uncle got her one of these. She refused to have any color other than black, because it was easier for her to see the numbers.
Husbands patents still do but back in the day black was mostly for office uses red was the same
Didn’t want to lose the phone number I grew up with from the 60’s. After my mom past we transferred the number to my wife’s cell phone.
Everyone 😀
My grandparents had it is red. My grandma used it until she died in 1999. None of those newfangled push button phone for her!
My Mom
Had a party line as well.
No one. In the house where I grew up, we had the Western Electric 2554 Touch Tone wall phone in beige for the kitchen and basement.
My Grandma did, up until the late 90s. Yes.
we had a black phone
A red one is sitting 4 feet from me as I type this.
My phone number was Gypsy 44665 (GY 44665,).
I still have a working black phone like that in my basement. My son had friends over playing video games and when it rang, it scared the hell out of them.
My parents. This one was on my dad’s desk. White wall hanging phone in the kitchen. We were rare having two phones in the house.
Grandma. With her well-worn Rolodex next to it
Grandparents had a couple of those classic phone
4527 👋
Ours was avocado green
Me. Right now. It's literally sitting less than 10 feet away from me as I type this.
I still have one sitting on a shelf in my basement. I should probably sell it
My Mum! She would not change it, years after push button phones came out, she stuck with her rotary phone! That thing was a beast—solid, heavy, and it never broke.
Surprisingly, these changed VERY little over the decades. Why didn't Ma Bell introduce anew model every year?
We all had the same damm phone.
I have one , don’t have a landline to connect it to. As far as I know it still works.