Senate Considers Banning Dial Phones (1930)

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Senate_Considers_Banning_Dial_Phones.htm

by rmason • 7 years ago

109 51 7 years ago

dmix• 7 years ago

The last paragraph makes it sound like old people struggling with the UX of new technology.

the dial phone "could not be more awkward than it is. One has to use both hands to dial; he must be in a position where there is good light, day or night, in order to see the number; and if he happens to turn the dial not quite far enough, then he gets a wrong connection."

I’m guessing with the previous version you just picked it up and had an operator to route the calls?

ronilan• 7 years ago

Correct.

Senators are required, since the installation of dial phones in the Capitol, to perform the duties of telephone operators

And also seems that it was more than UX that bothered them...

squiggleblaz• 7 years ago

But since they weren't performing the duties of telephone operators - a machine was - this was just an expression of the problem, namely they didn't like the ui. Previously, they communicated to a human being the identification of the person they want to connect to, and a human being connected the wires.

Now, they connected to a machine and told the machine an identification standing for the person they wanted to connect to, and the machine connects them. There was no substantial difference to the responsibilities of the senators, except that they no needed to know an additional way of identifying a person.

If they had spoken into a computer and said the name of the person who they wanted to talk to, and the computer routed the call, they would have been doing the duties of telephone operators exactly as much as they were when they were twisting a disc with their finger.

But they would not have objected to the ux and they would not have said they were "required ... to perform the duties of telephone operators".

It is important to understand what a person is saying when trying to interpret their meaning. Give as full force to their words as possible, without turning them into a fool or an idiot who says things that are patently untrue.

ben5092• 7 years ago

You could, in fact, dial them one-handed. A rotary phone uses pulse dialing; as the rotor turns it opens the circuit briefly, if you dial 5 it sends 5 pulses. So you can do the same by pushing the switch repeatedly and pausing in between each number as though the rotor was spinning back.

Same trick works on touch tone phones since the networks still support pulse dialing.

toast0• 7 years ago

Some of the networks don't support pulse dialing anymore. Many of the Analog Telephone Adapters people use to access voip accounts don't either.

tlb• 7 years ago

You needed really fast fingers for this. The minimum is about 8 Hz. I could do it as a teenager, but I don’t think 70yo senators are going to like it.

sjcsjc• 7 years ago

I recall a friend of mine (when we were teenagers in the 80s) whose parents had a physical lock on their phone to prevent the dial turning (to prevent their kids running up phone bills I assume). Unlike his parents, my friend was aware of the "trick" you describe.

bemmu• 7 years ago

Once as a kid I managed to misdial the emergency number (112) by just randomly pressing the switch, unaware of the trick and with no intention of calling anywhere.

I wonder if the emergency worker believed me when I apologized for accidentally calling him.

wlll2• 7 years ago

This was something that worked on pay phones (in the UK at least) to get free calls. I think it was around the 70s/80s? I can't remember the exact mechanism, but something like the coin unlocked the dial, so if you didn't need the dial you could make the call without a coin.

leoc2• 7 years ago

Sure. Switchboards were actual plugboards (often using the 1/4" jack, which was invented for this application). The operator would plug her headset into the user's socket to talk to him or her, then unplug the headset and (for a local call, or an internal call on a private exchange) connect the caller's socket to the callee's using cables.

This is one of the odd things about the fad for rotary-shaming today's teenagers: the rotary-dial system hasn't even been around all that long. Bell produced how-to-dial-your-new-rotary-phone films in the mid-'thirties and the mid-'fifties https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/introducing-the-dial-te... https://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2012/5/30/AT&T-Ar... , to say nothing of the rest of the world. There are undoubtedly still some people who are so old that they still aren't comfortable with rotary dialing. (In fact, I read someone on Twitter claiming to know some old English women who don't know how to dial a telephone, as they always used to get their husbands to do it for them. I'm guessing they may be pretty posh old ladies, as the early-twentieth-century public-school set had a reputation for being technophobic.)

grawprog• 7 years ago

some old English women who don't know how to dial a telephone, as they always used to get their husbands to do it for them.

My grandma was Scottish but she was like that. She eventually learned but, when I was a kid she'd always have me or my sister or cousins dial for her because my grandpa had always done it for her. I'm pretty sure she always knew how, I think she just didn't want to or like doing it. She'd always make this big act about how it was too hard to figure out though, would make attempts at dialling, dial the wrong number a bunch then tell us to do it but it always seemed like she was just doing it on purpose.

gmueckl2• 7 years ago

The rotary dials are a pretty horrible user interface: You have to turn the dial all the way to the stop and release it there. If you don't do that properly, you dial a wrong number. You need to know that you have to let the dial return to its original position before you can dial the next number. If you don't, you dial a wrong number. There is no feedback regarding the digits you already dialed. If you're trying to dial a long number and forget which digit you're at in the process, you have to hang up and restart. I remember that I struggled with all of these things as a child. The whole thing was a brilliant invention in its time, but I'm glad that it's obsolete.

leoc2• 7 years ago

Hm, number input is slow but once one is used to it it should be reliable. The problem of forgetting where you are (or being unsure if you dialed a wrong digit) is probably mostly down to the lack of any display of the digits dialed, which isn't inherently a problem of the dial interface, and indeed earlier touch-tone phones also lacked a display. That said, the slow dial speed, and maybe the slightly higher mental effort of dialing a digit, probably do increase the chance of losing your place, or feeling as if you have.

lscotte• 7 years ago

In practice it's really not that hard. We had a rotary phone until I was a teenager and never had any of these issues.

Also note that 10 digit dialing for all numbers is a fairly recent thing. We had 7 and 5 digit dialing - less to remember where you are in dialing.

rietta• 7 years ago

That’s why dial tone was such an improvement. It’s amazingly recent too. One of my teacher’s mother was on the team at Bell Labs that invented it.

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

It was deliberately slow to deal with limitations of the tech at the time and also the finger stop tells you when you have finished and can let go.

gruez• 7 years ago

You have to turn the dial all the way to the stop and release it there. If you don't do that properly, you dial a wrong number.

I fail to understand why it's hard. You stick your finger in hole of the number that you want to dial. Then you rotate it clockwise until it hits the stopper[1] and release. None of the steps require any precise movement.

You need to know that you have to let the dial return to its original position before you can dial the next number. If you don't, you dial a wrong number.

Might be confusing for the first time user, but it's not a hard thing to remember. As a whole, the instructions for operating it are relatively straightforward, on par with operating door locks and combination safes.

There is no feedback regarding the digits you already dialed. If you're trying to dial a long number and forget which digit you're at in the process, you have to hang up and restart.

That's hardly exclusive to the rotary dial. I still do it with touch tone phones (usually the "dumb" ones without fancy LCD displays) and password inputs (since the characters are masked).

[1] The piece of metal above the "0": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rotarydial.JPG

pmontra• 7 years ago

The last paragraph makes it sound like old people struggling with the UX of new technology.

With the insight of some extra 90 years we know that the dial is a horrible UX. Actually, we're getting back to voice, by telling to the phone who we want to talk to. But they had very little choice back then.

balfirevic2• 7 years ago

One has to use both hands to dial

I don't understand why would you need to use both hands to dial. Were those old dial phones different than what we imagine today when we picture a dial phone?

mikequinlan• 7 years ago

You have to lift the handset off the hook and hold it in one hand and use the other hand to dial, meaning dialing required using both hands.

This picture shows an example https://www.alamy.com/man-uses-old-rotary-phone-image2272405...

bluejekyll2• 7 years ago

I’m intrigued by the distinction between manual and dial. I am assuming manual in this context means: pick up phone, ask the operator to connect you—which doesn’t sound manual at all.

jonny_eh3• 7 years ago

Manual for the phone company, not the end-user.

chrisseaton• 7 years ago

When you dial a connection is made automatically. When you use an operator they're having to manually make that connection (literally manually using a wire in their hand back then.)

bluejekyll2• 7 years ago

Yes. I’ve seen the pictures. Still, I wouldn’t call that manual. “Operator assisted” seems like a better name.

jonny_eh3• 7 years ago

It reads like they went ahead with a compromise where they got phones that worked in both "manual" and "dial" mode. When were those replaced with dial-only?

ben5092• 7 years ago

Wikipedia has an interesting history of manual switchboards[1]; they broadly died out in about the '60s with some still used in rural areas into the '90s.

And while the switchboards were automated, I don't think even today our phone systems are "dial only." Certainly through the '90s I recall dialing an operator for international and reverse charge calls and I think operators still serve customers with disabilities. That's not even counting all the customer support positions that are mostly redirecting calls.

The funny thing is you'd think the web would have ended it, but more sites are adding chat boxes, or they want your phone number to set up an account...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator

bdamm• 7 years ago

Yeah but sites wanting a phone # is more to do with its utility as an identifier than anything. And for the sales guys to talk with you.

jonny_eh3• 7 years ago

Oh I see, I guess they just told the senators that they could dial 0 to speak to an operator, problem solved!

flomo• 7 years ago

Someone with a landline should dial "0" for the operator and see if it still works. (Assuming it does, they will charge you.)

tomohawk• 7 years ago

They still have elevator operators for the elevators at the US Capitol building.

If you watch old movies, you can see the pre-dial telephones in operation as the operators set up calls. It would take a while. One convenience is that you could have the operators call you back when they had reached the other party.

vpilcx• 7 years ago

That was actually the entire comedic premise of an I Love Lucy episode. The gang is in Italy and wants to call back to the states so they have to wait for a long distance operator to call them back with an open line.

They, unfortunately, are on a higher floor with no elevator. So every time they have to talk on the phone they have to get 3+ flights of stairs.

perl4ever• 7 years ago

"They still have elevator operators for the elevators at the US Capitol building."

Some years ago, I was shown how to operate a (enclosed) freight elevator by someone who apparently thought I was kind of dumb not to know how they worked. I don't know how common the setup was, nor how old or typical it was, but among the features it lacked that modern passenger elevators have - it didn't travel to and stop at a floor automatically; you had to start and stop it with a control at the right spot; it didn't open and close the doors automatically; you had to pull on a strap, and close guards separately, and I'm not sure I even recall any locking mechanism.

wlll2• 7 years ago

I used to work in an old mill (NW UK) converted to industrial units and we got to the top floor using an old lever operated lift. The lever had three positions, up, down, and stop. The door was a couple of sets of sliding gratings.

I seem to recall that there was a locking system but I can't quite recall what it was. It was either that here was some sort of piece of metal that stuck out from the lift shaft and only allowed the doors to be opened at certain positions in the shaft, or that the lift wouldn't operate without the doors being closed, or some combination of both.

ramigb• 7 years ago

I was born in 84, My city had the manual phone mixed with the dial phone until early 90s, so I remember as a kid my grandmother picking the phone and asking the operator -whom I knew since it was a small city- to connect her to someone ...

russfink• 7 years ago

Resulting alternative reality: "Hoy hoy, Watson, come here at once. I wish to dictate a text message."

profmonocle• 7 years ago

There's another fascinating anachronism in there:

The Congressional Record would not be mailable, he said, "if it contained in print what Senators think of the dial telephone system."

"Not being mailable" is probably a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws

The idea of being unable to send "obscene" mail, even private correspondence, is hard to imagine compared to our modern understanding of free speech.

voxic11• 7 years ago

Is it? Obscenity is still not protected by the first amendment in the United States.

analog31• 7 years ago

Amusingly, there are modern analogues. Word processors were harder for many people to use than typewriters, at first, and those were harder to use than secretaries. Operating a personal computer was harder than assigning a task to the computing department.

We got over those things because those technologies eventually made most of us more efficient. I do my own programming and typing.

But there are still people who have other people do those things. The thing that probably got the Senators to use dial phones was the realization that they didn't want the operator listening to their conversations. Today they probably all have burner phones. But I doubt that Senators do their own typing, and they probably still use a secretary to make official phone calls for them.

Senate Considers Banning Dial Phones (1930)

Related Stories