Saving a piece of history

eugene13 said:
I've heard that you can use a phone generator to make worms come up out of the ground. :)
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You can also make a person jump two feet, by handing it to them, and say crank it. At least the ones from the Army field phones were just right that you cannot hold it easy to crank, without wrapping your hands around the terminals.
 
Great for setting off blasting caps! Willie Mays would advise against it, I'm sure. Party pooper.
 
LOL you have to have been around in the early 60s, he did a tv commercial about the dangers of blasting caps left abandoned at construction sites and sometimes found by kids with tragic results
The ad might be on Youtube, I think I saw it a few years ago
Yeah it's still there- "Willie Mays blasting caps spot"
I seem to remember Eddie Murphy did a spoof of it too
A great time for tv back then- I miss the early morning agricultural highlights on Saturday before the cartoons
 
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I had one of those when I was a kid. I haven't a clue what happened to it. I also had an old furnace high voltage transformer which I used to make a jacob's ladder with some old coat hangers.
 
I remember watching Willy Mays play on TV, must have been close to his last years but he sure was nice to watch.
 
FWIW, there's also a shipboard telephone, the "sound powered phone", that only involves two hand sets and a two conductor wire run between them. I have a couple still, they were handy for tracing conduit runs where the conduit is one conductor and the wire in question was the other..

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RWoerz, Bought back memories of the party line seeing that picture. Learning the different rings for the different people on the circuit. Having to ring the operator for anything not local. Wasn't that many years ago either.
 
NortonDommi said:
RWoerz, Bought back memories of the party line seeing that picture. Learning the different rings for the different people on the circuit. Having to ring the operator for anything not local. Wasn't that many years ago either.
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This one rang my bell on small town telephones in the 1950s. The town was small, but everything in that area of the state was small. I lived at the county seat. Pop was the Administrator of the local hospital, such as it was. By being a "wheel" in town, he had a private line. We didn't have to answer individual rings. If the phone rang, it was for us.

When you called out, you put the reciever to your ear and waited for the operator's "number pu-lea-az". Before I started school, my "bestest friend in the whole world" could be rung by asking for him by name. When I started school and started to understand numbers, it was "249J". I was "131W". The switchboard was the type where a call was made with a cable that was plugged into a jack.

About that time, I went to a birthday party(?) and when the host dropped me off at home earlier than planned, my parents were not there. I talked to the operator for about a half hour until she had found where my parents were and sent them home. I don't remember what the conversation was, just that I was scared and talking to the operator made me feel not so alone.

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