Dialing A Rotary Phone
| Field | Making Telephone calls |
| Went Obsolete | In the late 1980s-1990s, when rotary phones started disappearing from homes and businesses.The telcos issued them into the late 1980s, even though TouchTone? was unveiled in the 1960s |
| Made Obsolete By | ATT's Touch-Tone system |
| Knowledge Assumed | The ability to read numbers and twirl a dial |
| When useful | When faced with a very old payphone or visiting grandma |
Rotary Phone
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 hang-up 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. This was a common way to circumvent a lock placed on the dial's '1' to thwart outgoing calls.
One remnant from these days is that people still mostly say “dial a number” instead of punch in or type in a number. The word dial is obviously connected with the round rotary dial mechanism.
Even modern electronic phones have a switch to choose “pulse or tone” dialing for places where TouchTone dialing is not available, or still costs more (phone tariffs are based on “delivering a service” regardless of the cost or savings of the service. Despite charging more for TouchTone dialing, it actually saves the phone company money since it takes less time to collect the digits to complete the number).
TouchTone dialing uses <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling>DTMF</a> (dual tone multi frequency): one frequency for the column, another for the row. People with perfect pitch can tell what is being dialed by hearing the tones.
