Original cellphones (was: Cellphones at Clifftop)

[Lyle Lofgren]

><< David Sanderson dav...@greennet.net >>
>
>
><< Cell phones don't work around old-time music; thought everyone knew
>that.... >>
>
>
>Unless they are the old "dry-cell" ones that you crank...
>
Wow! I hadn't thought of that. Now I can tell my grandchildren, who
go around with a cell phone in each hand, that I had a cell phone when
I was their age (or, as a recent New Yorker cartoon has it, "when I
was your age, I was fifteen"). I think the telephone company didn't
change out the wall crank phone at my parent's farm until about 1960.
That severely cut down on community communication, since all the
phones rang for all the numbers on the line. You could tell by the
vigor of the ring if the call was local (from one member of the party
line to another) or had come through "central" and thus might be an
important long-distance call. The local newspaper had a news column
for each township it served, and my aunt (by marriage) wrote that
column for our area. She wrote down everything she heard while
listening in to other people's conversations on the phone, much to my
amusement (I was too young to say anything damaging) and to everyone
else's chagrin.

Also, I first got interested in electricity at about age 6, taking
apart worn out dry cells from the telephone, trying unsuccessfully to
figure out how they worked. Then I took apart an uncle's old Atwater
Kent tube radio, with about 10 knobs on the front, and I couldn't
figure out how that worked either. If I'd kept the dry cells and
radio intact, I could sell them as antiques now.

Lyle

[David Sanderson]

Lyle Lofgren wrote:
>
> ><< David Sanderson dav...@greennet.net >>
> >
> >
> ><< Cell phones don't work around old-time music; thought everyone knew
> >that.... >>
> >
> >
> >Unless they are the old "dry-cell" ones that you crank...
> >
> Wow! I hadn't thought of that. Now I can tell my grandchildren, who
> go around with a cell phone in each hand, that I had a cell phone when
> I was their age (or, as a recent New Yorker cartoon has it, "when I
> was your age, I was fifteen"). I think the telephone company didn't
> change out the wall crank phone at my parent's farm until about 1960.

Yes, and appropriate technology, too. Didn't need anything but the
batteries, and you could run the wires most anywhere; lots of
neighborhoods got connected by phone wires fastened to the fence posts
along the road with fence staples.

--
David Sanderson
East Waterford, Maine

dav...@greennet.net
http://www.megalink.net/~davids

[Tribe]

Lyle Lofgren wrote:

Wow! I hadn't thought of that.  Now I can tell my grandchildren, who
go around with a cell phone in each hand, that I had a cell phone when
I was their age (or, as a recent New Yorker cartoon has it, "when I
was your age, I was fifteen").  I think the telephone company didn't
change out the wall crank phone at my parent's farm until about 1960.

You'd be surprised to find (or maybe not that surprised, since it is THE phone company that we're talking about), that hidden in some folks residential phone bills, there is still a charge for rental of those old big bulky black phones the phone company used to lease way back in the 60s and 70s.

Tribe