The Telephone we take for granted!

by TerryWalstrom 14 Replies latest jw friends

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  eyeuse2badub

  Was it jw's or Nikola Tesla that predicted wireless communication, i.e. cell phones? I remember some stir among die hard jw's a few years ago that a 1920's Golden Age magazine had mentioned wireless devices would be possible in the future. Of course this was plagiarized from some information that Nikola Tesla had already published!

  WT will take credit for anything positive they can and deny anything negative they can. Sounds like the president of a certain large country located between Mexico and Canada!

  just saying!
• 

  compound complex II

  Hello, Terry.

  When the phone rang at my grandparent's house and Grandpa answered and the call was for Nana, he'd yell, "Mary, you're wanted on the Don Ameche!"
• 

  cofty

  Interesting fact. With the old analogue exchanges if the dial of a public telephone was broken - as they often were - you could dial by tapping the switches that the handset rested on at approx 10 pulses per second.

  The dial worked by simply interrupting the power at that rate - 6 times for a number 6 for example. That lifted the switch in the exchange that number of levels. In the days before mobile phones I called home from Glasgow a few times like that.
• 

  TerryWalstrom

  I often think I was born at EXACTLY the right time to experience a certain level
  of simplicity in life before major innovations in technology transformed society.
  
  Simple was beautiful.
  
  Everywhere I go I see people sitting and NOT talking to each other. They are on their "device."
  As a kid, I spent all day out of doors. If I had had access to a computer or video games I'd have missed out on private thoughts, ideas, concepts slowly formed by contact with the "reality" of childhood.
  
  People don't seem to want to KNOW things themselves anymore.
  They can Google it. Why know it?
  
  People don't read and they've lost all the wisdom of all those writers in past generations. Everything is movie-versions. A very poor substitute--like plastic flowers.
  
  My life experience of BEFORE and AFTER is non-transferable except by my writing it and you taking the time and trouble of reading it.
  
  Okay, so let me use a movie reference:
  
  I feel like the replicant, Roy Batty, at the end of Blade Runner.
  
  I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
  Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
  I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
  Time to die.
  
  
  
• 

  Bungi Bill

  cofty,

  My first job when I left school was as a trainee technician with what is now Telecom New Zealand. (Where I remained for barely 12 months, because some idiot of a local elder made me throw it in - a story for a later telling!)

  The exchange I worked at was of a variant somewhere in between a "crank-handle" (i.e. Magneto) manual exchange and an automatic one. They called it a "Central Battery" exchange, in which you lifted the hand-piece off its "cradle" to alert the exchange operator - with the resulting low resistance loop pulling in your number's Line Relay and illuminating your line's "Call Lamp" on the operator's console. (From that, the generic term used to describe either an earth fault or a short circuit on the line was "PG", for "Permanent Glow").

  Even then (1972), that thing should have been long pensioned off, yet they retained this museum piece right up until the late 1980s.