Dialing a rotary phone

Numbers 9 and 0 shown along with the metallic finger stop.

Before touch tone button phones people had to use rotary phones to dial a number (and before that they used a telephone operator).

Place your finger in the hole that shows the number you want to dial and rotate the dial clockwise until your finger reaches the finger stop and let go. Repeat this process for each digit. Sometimes a pencil is used to dial instead of fingers so as not to break long fingernails.

For a 1, you can quickly tap the hangup posts, or repeat at the correct speed for higher numbers. The manual dexterity needed to accurately tap out anything above a three or four is rare.

• Wikipedia article on rotary dial

Higher numbers take significantly longer to dial than lower integers. As a result, area codes for important cities in the United States such as New York City (212), Los Angeles (213), Chicago (312) were chosen to take the shortest time to dial.

Comments:

Note: You must be logged in to add comments

2008-02-22 02:02:32   Dialing? I remember having to be prepared with the right answer when the operator said "Number please?" —71.168.226.242

2008-02-25 17:52:59   In the movie _In and Out_, a bubbleheaded starlet is faced with a rotary phone, and pokes at it in frustration. It's the first indication I ever saw that there might be people who wouldn't know how to do that! —151.207.246.4

2008-02-29 14:32:07   And a surprising number of toys for toddlers still include a "telephone dial" as one of the plastic activities - no toddler has a clue what it's for, but they happily poke their finger in and turn the dial round and round (Just don't get me started on how long it has been since an ambulance went "nee-naw", as described in playgroups up and down the land ...) —129.67.101.86

2008-03-09 21:54:01   When phones were dialed, there was a certain type of person who, impatient with the length of time it took the dial to rewind, would try to physically drag the dial back faster with their finger. The mechanism had a lot of resistance, and you couldn't influence it that much. It was a tribute to the ruggedness of the standard dial telephone, and the tolerances built into the pulse timing at the central office that these people didn't break their phones, and got the correct numbers.

(The wide tolerances in the pulse timing also helped if you were going to try to dial numbers by rattling the switch hook, as described above) —209.204.181.86

2008-03-05 12:54:42   Did anyone count how many phone numbers in movies start with 555- ??? —145.64.134.224