A mystery EXchange name

EXcalibur? EXcelsior? Only the operator knows for sure.

This Bell Telephone advertisement appears in the always rewarding and seemingly inexhaustible June 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics. From the same issue: Alkalize with Alka-Seltzer, "MONEY MAKING FORMULAS," and "Radios, it is."

Other EXchange name posts
Telephone exchange names
TElephone EXchange NAmes in classical music
TElephone EXchange NAmes in poetry
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 3)

And if you're switching over from the sans-dial telephone: How to dial a telephone

Streaming music, 1910

[New York Times, May 31, 1910.]

In Wilmington, Delaware, a century ago, the Tel-musici Company was streaming recorded music by telephone:

From a central station at the telephone company’s building the music is transmitted over the regular telephone wires and “voiced” at the subscriber’s end through the customary horn.

The try-out in Wilmington has shown that there is an ever-growing demand for music among telephone subscribers. The music room at the exchange is a large chamber, around the sides of which is a switchboard. The room is equipped with a great number of phonographs and all of the phonograph records are on file.

When a subscriber wants music he calls the exchange and asks for this room. He tells the girl in charge what selection he wishes to hear, making his choice from a catalogue which is supplied by the company. Then the subscriber affixes the horn to the telephone receiver, the music operator puts the desired record on a phonograph which is plugged into the subscriber’s line, and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the music the connection is automatically cut off.

Arrangements may be made for an evening’s entertainment this way, the programme being made up in advance and submitted to the company by telephone, with orders to begin at a given time. Should two or more subscribers simultaneously want the same piece this can be done simply by connecting both lines to the same phonograph.

In Wilmington the company asks music subscribers to guaranteee $18 a year, the charge for records being from 3 cents for the regular records to 7 for those by the great operatic stars.

From “Music By Telephone. Experiment Has Proved Successful In Wilmington — May Be Tried Here,” New York Times, May 31, 1910.

For more information on the Tel-musici Company (unidentified by name in the Times article): “Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines,” Telephony: The American Telephone Journal, 18.25 (1909). Here are two photographs from Telephony, a partial view of the Wilmington Music Room (with phonographs lining the wall) and a home installation.


[Click for larger views.]

Elaine, could that be our Beckwith piano?

Telephone exchange names

[Hello, Boing Boing readers!]

Hearing Mike Hammer's telephone number reminds me:

If you'd like to replace the dull first two digits of your telephone number with an authentic and evocative exchange name, Robert Crowe at the Telephone EXchange Name Project has reproduced a 1955 Bell Telephone Company list of approved names. Says the TENP: "If you do not have a historically accurate exchange name to use for your current telephone number, you should choose one from this list." I'm set to go with FIrestone 5-, authentic, evocative, also alliterative.

I still remember MUrray Hill 7-7500 from the commercials for Gimbels Custom Reupholstery that ran on New York's WPIX-TV on weekday mornings. Cartoons and the Little Rascals at 7:00 a.m., and they were trying to get people to think about reupholstering furniture?

Recommended Exchange Names (The Telephone EXchange Name Project)
Gimbels (Wikipedia)

Related posts
MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

[The original link to the EXchange Name Project is defunct.]

Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 3)

[From Born Yesterday, dir. George Cukor, 1950.]

"Hello? CHestnut 7180. I'd like to speak to Thomas Jefferson please."

After visiting the Jefferson Memorial, Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday) dials.

Someone on the set didn't know how to spell DEcatur, which was, according to the Telephone EXchange Name Project, a Washington, D.C. exchange name. But there's no sign that CHestnut was in use in D.C. I like it that both the written number and the spoken number are missing a digit.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
More telephone exchange name nostalgia
Telephone exchange names in classical music
Telephone exchange names in poetry
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

TElephone EXchange NAmes in classical music

Sylvan Shulman (violin) and Alan Shulman (cello) founded the Stuyvesant String Quartet in 1938. How did the quartet get its name? Mura Kievman, daughter of Louis Kievman (viola) explains:

Dad told me (as I recollect, I may be wrong) that he created the name "Stuyvesant Quartet" when he was in a NYC phone booth and had to come up with a name NOW. The phone exchange was "STuyvesant" in that phone book [booth?], and hence the name. I also recall (perhaps equally incorrectly) that within the group there was some debate as to who actually came up with the name. This version was my father's recollection.

Telephone exchange names, offering inspiration in moments of need, perhaps apocryphally!

The Stuyvesant String Quartet on CD
The Stuyvesant String Quartet with Benny Goodman, clarinet
The New Friends of Rhythm (Jazzing the classics!)

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
More telephone exchange name nostalgia
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)

Update: Alan Shulman's son Jay Shulman pointed me to two more CDs:

Rey de la Torre: Works for Guitar, with the Stuyvesant String Quartet
The Stuyvesant String Quartet: Hindemith, Villa-Lobos, Porter

(Thanks, Elaine! And thanks, Jay!)

TElephone EXchange NAmes in poetry

Ron Padgett understands the dowdy world:

It was an act of kindness
on the part of the person who placed both numbers
    and letters
on the dial of the phone so we could call WAverly,
ATwater, CAnareggio, BLenheim, and MAdison,
DUnbar, and OCean, little worlds in themselves
we drift into as we dial, and an act of cruelty
to change everything into numbers only, not just
    phone numbers
that get longer and longer, but statistical analysis,
cost averaging, collateral damage, death by peanut,
inflation rates, personal identification numbers,
    access codes,
and the whole raving Raft of the Medusa
that drives out any thought of pleasantness
until you dial 1-800-MATTRES

From "The Absolutely Huge and Incredible Injustice in the World," in How to Be Perfect (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2007)

Related reading
ronpadgett.com
The Raft of the Medusa (Wikipedia)

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
More telephone exchange name nostalgia
Telephone exchange names in classical music
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)

All "dowdy world" posts (Pinboard)

The Anti-Digit Dialing League

[Update: There’s now a post with excerpts from Phones Are for People.]

[Lewis Banci and Milburn Smith, The Ten O’Clock Scholar (1969).]

The Anti-Digit Dialing League was a short-lived movement that arose in 1962 and faded, it would seem, in 1964. Founded in San Francisco, the ADDL opposed “creeping numeralism” and fought a losing battle to preserve the use of telephone exchange names. I came across the group’s name while exploring the 1940 New York City telephone directories earlier this month. Among the ADDL’s members, the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, a co-author of the group’s pamphlet manifesto Phones Are For People (1962). Here is what Hayakawa told Time (July 13, 1962):

“These people are systematically trying to destroy the use of memory. They tell you to ‘write it down,’ not memorize it. Try writing a telephone number down in a dark booth while groping for a pencil, searching in an obsolete phone book and gasping for breath. And all this in the name of efficiency! Engineers have a terrible intellectual weakness. ‘If it fits the machine,’ they say, ‘then it ought to fit people.’ This is something that bothers me very much: absentmindedness about people.”

The same Time article reported that the Bloomington, Indiana chapter of the ADDL had turned to a mild form of sabotage:

Interpreting the area code and seven digits as one huge number, they place calls by saying, “Operator, give me S.I. Hayakawa at four billion, one hundred fifty-five million, eight hundred forty-two thousand, three hundred and one.” Growls Chapter Leader Frederick Litto, “If they want digits, we’ll give them digits.”

I remember when grown-ups used to growl about automation and “computers.” I remember owning a button with the younger statement of those sentiments: “I am a human being: do not fold, spindle, or mutilate.” I salute the ADDL’s affection for exchange names. Sign me up.

[Life, February 8, 1963.]

*

Update: I have obtained a copy of Phones Are for People.

Related reading
Other exchange name posts

[Befuddled at memory frenzies? You can pick an exchange name for your telephone number from a 1955 list of Bell Telephone’s recommended exchange names, available from The Telephone EXchange Name Project.]

Telephone exchange names on screen

[A Chicago "phonebook," from Nightmare Alley (1947).]

Nightmare Alley (dir. Edmund Goulding) gives us Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Mike Mazurki (Moose Malloy from Murder, My Sweet), Tarot card readings, carnival geeks, and the rise and fall of a nightclub mentalist (who performs in a studio recreation of the Chicago Sherman House's Spode Room). There's some great dialogue:

"You've got a heart as big as —"

"Sure, as big as an artichoke. A leaf for everyone."

*

"These great trees in moonlight: they give the whole place a — a cathedral-like atmosphere."

As the Wikipedia article Telephone exchange names notes, Chicago first used a "3L-4N" system (three letters, four numbers). "2L-5D" (two letters, five digits) later became the standard in North America. ROGers Park and STAte were authentic Chicago exchange names, as the Telephone EXchange Name Project confirms. Checking a few of the other 21 exchange names at the TEXNP confirms that they too were Chicago exchanges.

But this page itself is from no phonebook. Or if it, the names (and addresses?) have been altered. Note Mr. Rumstad's first name in the right-hand column.

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MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
Mike Hammer's answering machine

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

An EXchange name sighting

[“HIllside 8661.” From The Blue Dahlia (dir. George Marshall, 1946). Click for a larger view.]

That’s not a pocket notebook — it just sits by the telephone. I believe it’s what used to be called a telephone pad. In a few seconds the bungalow that goes with that telephone pad will fade into the apartment that goes with that number.

As contributors to the Telephone EXchange Name Project attest, HIllside was a genuine exchange name, in Los Angeles (where The Blue Dahlia takes place) and elsewhere.

*

June 6,2021: As I just discovered, that telephone first appeared in these pages in 2016.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Phones Are For People

[Hello, Atlantic readers. Yes, that’s my photograph over there. There’s more on the Anti-Digit Dialing League in this previous post.]

I am now the proud custodian of a copy of the Anti-Digit Dialing League’s pamphlet manifesto Phones Are For People (1962). This pamphlet seems to qualify as scarce: I found one copy for sale online. Thanks, SuburbanBooks.

The pamphlet is ten pages. The cover cartoon — “Hello, 274-435-4946? This is 483-235-5897” — is by Bob Bastian. A listing of the League’s Board of Directors appears on what would be the title page: Hiram Johnson III (1914–1992, attorney, grandson of a California governor-then-senator), Jack Block (1924–2010, professor of psychology at U Cal Berkeley), Bonnie Burgon (“editorial assistant,” associated at one point with ETC: A Review of General Semantics), Robert Carrow (1934–2008, attorney), S.I. Hayakawa (1906–1992, professor of English at San Francisco State, later a senator), Carl V. May (“public relations counselor”), and John D. Schick (“investments”).

Phones Are For People makes its case in Q. and A. format, entertaining possible objections and making clear the reasonableness of the case, as if to say, “We’re not, not — I repeat not — a bunch of crackpots.” It is 1962 after all, and they are Questioning Authority. Here is the group’s origin story:

The Anti-Digit Dialing League started over a cup of coffee in San Francisco when the conversation, quite by accident, drifted to the new Digit Dialing system. Both coffee drinkers had found the new system extremely confusing and difficult to use. They also wondered whether the change was really necessary. As a consequence they inserted a tiny notice in the classified section of a newspaper inquiring whether other people had experienced the same thoughts. They signed the ad, Anti-Digit Dialing League.

The response was incredible. Over thirty-five hundred people responded within ten days in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. As word about ADDL spread throughout the country, people wrote in wanting to start chapters of ADDL in other cities across the country. It quickly became obvious that ADDL was expressing a deep but previously unorganized concern of telephone users that the telephone company had somehow forgotten about them. This is the reason that ADDL started; it was an expression of widespread concern.

Another excerpt:

Q. But isn’t all this fuss simply a tempest in a teapot? Aren’t the people opposing Digit Dialing really just opposing progress? Isn’t the present furor nothing more than an emotional reaction to any kind of change?

A. Most decidedly not! Most people, and certainly the members of ADDL, welcome constructive change. However, the telephone is an extremely important part of everyday life, and major changes in its use will have widespread effects.

And according to this pamphlet, the opposition to digit dialing finds strong support in science. The ADDL points to “numerous psychological experiments” confirming that it is easier to memorize letters and numbers than numbers alone, and easier still to memorize names and numbers. The ADDL points also to a 1955 finding that seventy-five percent of adults could not remember a sequence of seven digits. Why then the move to digit dialing? Not, according to the ADDL, because of a looming shortage of telephone numbers: by its calculations, more than 820 million numbers are available by means of exchange names and numbers. No, the reason for the switch is ease in achieving “internal automation.” Nice try, telephone company. The ADDL isn’t buying:

But automation is an advance only if it frees people and takes them away from what is undignified and better done by machines. Digit Dialing places an added burden upon people by requiring them to fulfill the needs dictated by accounting machines and computers.

I’m surprised and disappointed to see that the humble poetry of exchange names plays only a small part in the ADDL’s argument, mentioned in passing before the emphasis on utility starts up again:

The reasons for preferring such historic exchanges as KLondike or YUkon or BUtterfield or MUrrayhill are not simply sentimental or emotional. Because of their traditional value, such named exchanges are much easier to remember and to use.

So instead of a paean to exchange names, I found “numerous psychological experiments.” I would have joined anyway. The $2.00 membership donation got you a membership card and badge.

If, fifty years later, anyone from the ADDL is out there, I would love to hear from you.

[June 2019: Phones Are for People is copyrighted; I’m not in a position to share scanned copies. There’s a listing for the pamphlet in the WorldCat.]

Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 4)

"ATwater 0-2390, please": Janet Cullen (Lisa Howard) tries to get in touch with her detective husband Andy (John Dall). She's calling from their arty basement apartment. ATwater, I am happy to report, appears in the Bell System's 1955 listing of recommended exchange names.

(Says my daughter: "Your blog is becoming a shrine to the telephone.")

The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950, dir. Felix E. Feist) offers the moviegoer some unusual opportunities:

1. The opportunity to see Lee J. Cobb and John Dall (thrill-killer Brandon Shaw from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope) play brothers.

2. The opportunity to see Jane Wyatt (Margaret Anderson from the television series Father Knows Best) smoke cigarettes and kill someone.

3. The opportunity to tour San Francisco's desolate Fort Point in a long final scene.

Lisa Howard's post-movie life took a remarkable and remarkably sad turn.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names on screen
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)
Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 3)

Telephone exchange names on screen

From Dick Tracy’s Dilemma (dir. John Rawlins, 1947). A killer, Steve “The Claw” Michel (Jack Lambert), has fled after starting to use a pay phone with his Captain Hook-like hook. Dick Tracy (Ralph Byrd) notices scratches, “brand-new,” on the dial. Back at the office, Tracy schools Pat Patton (Lyle Latell). A model pay phone happens to be there, as if by magic:



Tracy: “I’ll tell you what these scratches give us, Pat. What's the first thing you do when you dial a telephone number?”

Pat: “Why, I, uh, look for a nickel.”

Tracy: “Oh, no, no.”

Pat: “Oh — I dial the exchange.”

Tracy: “That's right. You dial the first two letters of the exchange.”

Tracy: “Now these scratches appear only in the first two holes.”



Pat: “I get it, Dick. The exchange the killer was dialing has got to be here.”



Tracy: “Correct. In checking a list of exchanges, you’ll find there’s only one exchange with the combination of these letters: B-A for BAnning. ”

Pat: “But what about these other two scratches?”



Tracy: “That’s even simpler. Since they appear in the first hole, the killer can only have been dialing the number 1 twice.”



Pat: “Then we know the number the killer started to dial was BAnning-1, 1-something-something .”

And Pat gets the thankless job of checking every number in town to find the something-something . As John Milton said, they also serve who only sit and check telephone numbers.

Bell Telephone’s 1955 list of Recommended Exchange Names has four names that go with 2-2 : ACademy, BAldwin, CApital, and CAstle. The Telephone EXchange Name Project has many, many more. But no BAnning.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire

[I’m surprised to see Al Bridge and Jimmy Conlin from the Preston Sturges world in this low-budget movie, though I suppose I shouldn’t be. An actor would have called it working .]

Hours of outage

Our cable and wireless were out for many hours today. The outage was widespread. Instead of switching the box back on (again and again), I called the tech-support number (again and again) to check if the problem had been solved. And each time, before I could hear the recorded report that the outage continued: “Please enter the ten-digit telephone number you are calling in reference to.”

So highfalutin. Better: “Please enter the ten-digit telephone number you’re calling about.”

Does anyone else remember when people on the telephone used to ask, “May I ask what this is in reference to?” And “Whom should I say is calling?”

Related reading
All OCA telephone posts (Pinboard)

[Yes, that should be who.]

MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia

The Telephone Archive has numerous images of exchange-name-bearing number cards (so that's what they're called):

      The Number Card Archive

And Sonja Shield's Brooklyn Ramblings has two posts with photographs of Brooklyn storefronts still displaying exchange names. Hint: Try a Google search for an exchange name dear to you. Searching for GEdney, the Brooklyn exchange name of my childhood (gedney exchange name), brought me to Brooklyn Ramblings:

Mid-Century Telephone Numbers
Operator, get me PEnnsylvania 6-5000

That's a Brooklyn number card above. And as a Brooklyn native, I must note that in the Honeymooners episode "The Baby Sitter," Ralph and Alice Kramden's Brooklyn phone number is BEnsonhurst 0-7741.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Tenuously related post
Ralph Kramden on Christmas

EXchange names on the screen

[From Dial Red 0 (dir. Daniel B. Ullman, 1955). Click for a larger page.]

It makes sense that a movie that opens with a shot of a telephone directory would at some point have a look inside.

Why do columns of directory text fill the screen in old movies? I think such shots provide a low-grade reality effect. It’s not enough to show a character opening a telephone directory; we must see what the character sees. And what the character sees is somehow real: even a fictional telephone directory is in some way a work of non-fiction.

NOrmandy was a real exchange name. In Los Angeles, the exchange may have been NOrmandie. So spelled, that’s a Los Angeles street name.

More telephone EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Angel : Black Widow : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : Hollywood Story : Kiss of Death : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Nocturne : Old Acquaintance : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Slightly Scarlet : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : Till the End of Time : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Telephone exchange names on screen: KLondike

Sean at Blackwing Pages sent this screenshot, from an episode of Modern Marvels — Engineering Disasters. He writes that this telephone appeared in a depiction “of the office of a U.S. Navy radar installation in the ocean (much like an oil platform) that went down in rough seas.”

KLondike (55-) is of course the imaginary exchange name of movies and television. But the Telephone EXchange Name Project notes that in 1955, 55- “was reserved for radio telephone numbers.” That might make this KL a recreation of the real thing.

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Murder, My Sweet : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Thanks, Sean.

Telephone exchange names on screen (no. 2)

[Courtland Trenholm (George Brent) prepares to pay his fare.]

Baby Face (dir. Alfred E. Green, 1933) is a pre-Code film, the story of Lily Powers (Barbara Stanwyck), a young woman whose encounter with a Nietzsche-espousing cobbler inspires her to climb (i.e., sleep) her way to the top. The film is available on a DVD compilation, Forbidden Hollywood, Volume 1.

Miss Powers' phone number is SChuyler 3-2215.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
Telephone exchange names on screen
MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
Mike Hammer's answering machine

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

#

If you're not subscribed to Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day, you're missing delights such as this word:

octothorpe   \AHK-tuh-thorp\   noun
: the symbol #

Example sentence: Barry noticed the pound sign on the telephone and remarked about how much the octothorpe resembled a tic-tac-toe grid.

Did you know? Stories abound about who first called the # sign an "octothorpe" (which can also be spelled “octothorp”). Most of those tales link the name to various telephone workers in the 1960s, and all claim the "octo-" part refers to the eight points on the symbol, but the "thorpe" remains a mystery. One story links it to a telephone company employee who happened to burp while talking about the symbol with co-workers. Another relates it to the athlete Jim Thorpe, and a third claims it derives from an Old English word for “village.” If the plethora of theories leaves your head spinning, you might want to take the advice of the wag who asked (poetically), "Can we simply just say, / Ere it spoils your day, / It's the thorp between seven and nine?"

When my local Walgreens switched to an automated telephone prescription-refill service, some older users (i.e., older than me, much older) were baffled by the instruction to "Press pound" when finished. Walgreens could've baffled users of all ages with the instruction to "Press the octothorpe."

Write five sentences on the telephone

“What? Yeah. Hold on —”

[Uncaps pen. Begins to write.]

The telephone is like having another person right there in your ear. It is a pleasant feeling!

Would you like to have someone in your ear? Would you also like to be in that person’s ear? If so, then you will enjoy the telephone.

“Okay, I’m back. You were saying?”

[Internauts searching for five sentences (that is, their homework) sometimes end up at Orange Crate Art. Write five sentences on the telephone is the latest such search.]

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How to dial a telephone

"You know what it says here? They're gonna take out all our phones and put in them kind with dials on 'em!"

For those transitioning to the New Telephony, it's YouTube to the rescue:

Dial Comes to Town (part one)
Dial Comes to Town (part two)
How to dial a rotary telephone
How to use the dial telephone