Number PULEAZE! Part Six:

Automatic Washer - The world's coolest Washing Machines, Dryers and Dishwashers

Help Support :

#57 Bell Intercom

When our house was built in '65 Bell came out and ran MASSIVE amounts of bundled wire.  12-15 pair and it was a continuous loop throughout the house.  They put a loop adjacent to every power outlet as well as by each exterior door.  I'm sure it was with the intention of setting up an intercom. Great in theory but when they were hooking up the phone outlets they  found that someone someplace nailed through the bundle and many of the pairs were shorted out.  They did find a workable pair and years later found a second pair to light the dials in the trimline phones. We always had a slight hum on the line must have been a ground issue.
 
Bell Home Interphone

My Aunt Doris had that in their Long Beach, MS house that they lived in from 1961 through mid 1963. I always thought it was a neat idea. The next house in Jackson they had two outside lines, plus intercom. That required a 1a2 system, like in an office.

Matt, it's too bad they hadn't ran the cabling through conduit to keep nails from being put through it.
 
The Interphone ad

reminded me of what we used to do back around the 1970's. If we picked up one house phone and dialed a 3 number code (something like 3-1-1 but I forget what it was) and immediately put the receiver back on the hook, all the phones would ring with a different ring than usual. When the ringing stopped you knew someone picked up so you could pick up and talk to that person. It was a convenient way to call between the house and the garage for example.
 
That Ericofon--about 20 years ago I toured the Telecom museum in Stockholm. Very interesting museum. TBH Ericsson had roughly the same capabilities over the years as AT&T (they just didn't actually operate the networks---in most countries that was nationalized to the Post Office (PTT---Post Telephone Telegraph). US and Canada were similar in that they were privatized (there are a few municipal phone companies; SaskTel is provincially owned) but nowhere else was there the dual (private, either AT&T or independent) system that prevailed in North America.

It's why so many of our systems work here in the US the way they do---that structure caused things to become "fixed" over the years. For a lot of concepts, the rest of the world "way of doing things" is/was perfectly valid within their paradigm, but switching paradigms breaks things!
 

Latest posts

Back
Top