Party Line Telephone Service - Tell Me Why

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Rock Hudson and Doris Day were party line neighbors in NYC (Pillow Talk)in 1959 and the Ricardos were on a party line in "I Love Lucy". I doubt that party lines were gone by 1930 in NYC. TV and Hollywood wouldn't have used them as story lines almost thirty years later........
 
There were party lines that offered privacy though too. You'd things like a polarity switch that cut off the other party while the line was in use by reversing the polarity on the line.

I've heard stories from Ireland in the days of crossbar switching in the 50s, 60s and 70s. My aunt was telling me that there was an exchange in the small village she lived in and occasionally the switch would go wrong resulting in crossed lines with the system bleeding audio between circuits. Sometimes they could speak to each other, sometimes they were just able to hear an on going call. Being a very small town, it meant that you could usually identify the other people's voices.

It didn't happen very often but it did happen if a crossbar frame jammed in a a particular way. Being little remote units they wouldn't have had someone on site all the time.

This would have likely been a tiny Ericsson ARK crossbar remote switch with at most 150 lines.

Apparently that's why everyone was always a bit careful of what they said on the phone.

If you'd had a crossed line on a big switch in a city, it was far less likely you would know the person as it could have been switching 15,000+ lines. These little rural systems were barely bigger than an office PABX and small towns are full of gossips.
 
Lines crossed

About 10 years ago I got a call like that. I could hear two other conversations going on but they couldn't seem to hear me. I didn't recognize the voices.

Another time I got a call and when I picked up, I heard a ringing tone as if I was calling someone else and waiting on them to answer. When they picked up, it was someone speaking fast in what sounded like Chinese. When they stopped I just said "hello?" and they said something else and the call disconnected.

I believe both of those instances were when we were still on plain old telephone line service, before we switched to Comcast VoIP.

I don't remember if we had caller ID back then or not, it would have been interesting to see what it read in both cases.
 
The only thing that could possibly cause that is you were going through a 'space and time' switching system. Some designs (not exclusively earlier) of digital switch had an analogue layer of crosspoint switching (usually using reed relays, not crossbars). They used that so avoid having to have dedicated digital line cards for every line. Other designs just went pure digital.

AFAIK the AT&T / Bell 5ESS took the space-time approach, certainly in older versions.
In Europe very old versions of Ericsson AXE did until the early 1980s, while systems like Alcatel E10 were pure TDM since the 1970s.

It's possible that the crosspoint layer of switching caused a crossed line.

Still a pretty cool 'accident' to hear. Probably one of the last little bits of analogue equipment in the network!

At this stage, even the POTS systems are not very likely to be using the same technology behind the scenes. The local switches may still be the same gear, but by now, a lot of the major switches even at local level are VoIP soft-switches just running on generic server hardware. They often refer to them as things like IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) but it's basically just VoIP done at a 'carrier-grade' level of quality and integrated into older systems. They're no different to what you'd see in any data centre. The local switches however might be retained a while to generate the dial tones and provide an edge layer for digitalising voice signals, just like they always did until copper service finally dies out completely.

As amazing as the new technology is, it's a bit sad to see the telephone network become nothing but an application on internet protocols. Sort of the end of a whole century of technology.
 
my aunt in Long Island, NY had a party line for years until she sold her house in 1987...she always called Mom after midnight, supposedly the rates were lower, and less chance anyone needing the phone....

also while visiting a friends winter home in Rutland, Vermont in 1990....mainly this was used in the winter season near Killington Mountain Ski Resort....was still surprised a party line was in use....

I guess many times it was a matter of cost, and of having a phone service, but not really needing it exclusively

I don't recall any special ring tone....never got to use one much, so don't know all the ins and out of having one...

someone could pick up and hear your conversation, or you theirs...but was also told, if you picked up while someone was using the line, you didn't hear anything, not even a dial tone, meaning someone was using the line.....

I also thought there was an indicator light on the phone, if flashing while ringing, it was for you, a steady light meant the phone was in use by someone else...

heck, I was glad we got touch-tone service in the late 70's.....the 7 digit number dialing was bad enough, then tack on the area code....at one point they added the Dial 1 first....and pray you didn't get a busy signal....lol...hang up, and start over!

just stuff kids today will never understand, where we were, and to what we have advanced into...
 
In a lot of cases, they just added new registers to crossbars which allowed touch tone signalling. They weren't necessarily digital switches.

AFAIK touch tone / DTMF was possible since the 60s.
 
My local CO has Siemens EWSD switches. Back when we still had POTS, call drops etc were very rare but once or twice a few random things happened. One time I was talking to someone who was on POTS out of the same CO and the call just went to dead air. I hung up and dialed the number again and it instantly reconnected the call because they never hung up. The DMS100 out of the CO at work never had any such blips in service however the 5ESS at my grandmas CO had a bad line card that I would receive in circulation every once in awhile that produced a horrible screeching dial tone.
 
As far as I've ever experienced , the two party lines had normal rings and would only ring in the house being called.. The multi party lines was where each house had a distinct ring pattern.. My sister out in the sticks was on one with about 4 others and had their pattern..It became sort of second nature to only "hear" your own ring so she said.
 
I know our landline was on an Ericsson AXE 10 or AXE 810 and I don't remember a single glitch ever. Those systems are absolutely bullet proof. I think that switch was in service in various generations since about 1980. It's still there albeit probably morphed somewhat into VoIP / Ericsson IMS.

AXE directly replaced and integrated with older crossbar stuff from Ericsson - ARF, ARM and ARK. I don't think they were ever used in the US, but there was a very large ARM used as Canada's international gateway for years.

The other PSTN switch that used here was Alcatel E10 which went through all sorts of generations. I know it was used here in Ireland because it was one of the earliest switches to have very flexible remotes which were ideal for the low density you get in rural Ireland.

There can be lots of reasons for a dropped call though, it might not even be the switch that was the problem. There are other pieces of equipment - it could have lost the link to a concentrator or something due to a faulty optical circuit.

A whole load of old widely used digital circuit switches have actually ended up as Nokia legacy products due to acquisitions:

Nokia DX200 (Their own switching system)
Siemens ESWD (Developed by Siemens, Bosch and DeTeWe and last owned by Siemens)
Alcatel E10 (CIT-Alcatel - the first generations of which were live in the French network in 1972 and the last generations of it are modern enough to natively support VoIP)
Lucent 5ESS (Originally Bell Labs / Western Electric)
 
AFAIK, frequency ringing was mainly a Strowger / Automatic Electric thing. WE switches mainly did selective ringing by using different combinations of tip/ring/ground for the ring voltage. The AE system could do selective ringing on an 8-party line, which the WE system couldn't do.

I remember us being on a party line in north Alabama when I was very young, 1960-61 It was a frequency ringing system, but there were only two parties on the line. When the other party was called, if you were near the phone, you could hear the ringer hum. In 1962, the other party switched to a private line service. For several years afterward, we were the only party on the line, which my dad like because we in effect had a private line at the cost of a party line. Around 1965 Southern Bell started eliminating in-town party lines, and they made everyone who still had one switch to a private line.

As far as the rural exchanges go, there was a company called Kellogg (not the cereal company) which sold tons of manual switchboards and phones to rural co-ops and private telephone companies. At one time, this was a booming business for them. If you looked in on a co-op exchange in the U.S. anytime between about 1900 and 1950, it probably had Kellogg switching equipment.
 
I was a telephone operator from 1976-78 in the Santa Rosa, Calif. toll office for the 707 area code. This was the same office and switchboard that serviced our 5 party line from 1963 until 1971. When I worked there we still had a few toll stations further north that had multiple party lines like my family had, and we still manually rang thru the party line calls for these numbers from the switchboard, uxing the ring key on the board, there was nothing automated about it at all.

We did get used to listening for our ring, but it was still annoying to have 4 other customers rings in our home round the clock, and we never really got used to that, it was a PITA that we just had to accept in order to have a telephone in the house.

Conversely, when I had a two party line in Petaluma, Calif. from 1971-72, only the customer on the party line that was receiving a call could hear their ring in their home. I never heard the phone ring in my home for the other party line customer.

Eddie
 
Record some of the last generation of PSTN. It's something that we'll be looking back at in 10 years with huge nostalgia.
 
On our 5 party line we didn’t have a dial tone, because we couldn’t dial. When you lifted the receiver, you got the sound of a phone ringing, the operator would answer by saying “Operator”, and the caller would identify their number, and the number they wished to call and the operator made the connection from the switchboard, and manually completed the billing information on mark sense cards, like IBM cards. The numbers were filled in with a pencil. Also the time on and off for the calls were recorded by superimposing the face of a clock on the ticket when the call answered and when the caller hung up, with a machine called a Calculiograpgh, just like we did when I was an operator for all operator assisted calls.

Eddie
 
Way back at the dawn of automatic phone services, a lot of switches didn't provide a dial tone at all. You just picked up and dialled. However, as things got bigger and busier they started to have to share equipment a lot more between growing numbers of customers and you couldn't guarantee that you'd pick up a phone and just be able to dial, so dial tones were introduced to give people an indication that the system was ready to receive digits.

If you go back to electromechanical switching days, you picked up the phone and got silence and clicks as line finder systems went hunting for an available slot on equipment - which could have been directly into a stepping switch, or a register which received digits into what was effectively an analogue, relay based computer in crossbars and other 'common control' switches. Then when a free stepper switch or a register was found, you got a dial tone.

A step-by-step switch (Strowger) typically move as each digit is dialled. There's no intelligence and you're literally controlling the mechanism with your dial. You were literally navigating through a switch with each digit you dialled.

Crossbars received the digits in a register, which was originally relay-based logic and later may have been computerised, that then passed the digits to a 'marker' which figured out the route through the switching matrix and setup a path. So they were actually using intelligence and logic, even if it was often 100% analog. They were basically analog computers. Amazing pieces of technology when you consider how reliable they were given the technical limitations of relay logic. Some of the basic concepts from that stuff have ended up carrying through to modern microprocessors too.

Panel and Rotary type were also common control, albeit it done quite differently.

Marker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marker_(telecommunications)

On digital switches it would be very, very unusual not go get a dial tone immediately when you pick up the phone. So, in reality dial tones probably haven't been needed for a very long time.

If you were going through to an operator service on an old system, you'd have picked up the phone and either got silence and then the operator, or a ringing tone and then the operator.
 
Party line

On our party line system only the phone being called rang. When you picked up the phone to dial out if you heard talking you where suppose to gentle replace the receiver and try again a few minutes later. If it was still the same party talking after a while you would get frustrated and pick it up and hang it up frequently and loudly to let them know somebody wanted the line. If somebody picked it up and listened to your call you could tell because the call quality suffered. If you needed to call home in an emergency you could call the operator and they would listen in and ask the two parties to hang up so a call could use the line. Of course they would pick up in a few minutes to listen in to see what the emergency was! Louie Bromfield's "Malabar Farm" is in my area and he had a party line. When famous people from Hollywood would call everybody listened in and he would have to ask the other people on the line to hang up so he could hear his party. He was also known to cuss a lot but being a gentleman would tell people he was getting angry and was about to cuss so if they didn't want to hear it they better get off the line.
 
The millennials have really missed out on something.  They have no sense of or feeling about the analog world. 

 

Just within the past couple of weeks I activated a rotary phone on my AT&T fiber service and it worked fine, but one thing I noticed was a real throwback to the crossbar days:  after dialing the first digit, I heard a brief dial tone.  I've read that this used to be an indicator that five digit dialing was an option.  I never knew this when we were on a crossbar switch or I would have taken advantage of it.  Odd that fiber service, which runs through the U-verse gateway, would provide this archaic indicator.  There must be an explanation.

 

I am loving the stories and tech talk here! 

 

Much as some of us here have our horror stories about working for The Phone Company, it was an amazing operation to be a part of, and I have nothing but respect for the Bell System. 
 
I specifically remember our phone book pointedly stating it is a crime to falsify an emergency so you can break through the party line to make a phone call, and probably shouldn't listen in on, either...

Mr. Ed did on one episode, in which Wilbur scolded him for, whereas I had a cousin who knew just about everything about the party line that you all do and are discussing here... (as did the gal who used to live across the street)

-- Dave
 
Ralph, what did you do to “activate” your rotary phone with U-verse? Mine doesn’t work and I assumed it was hopeless.

Like jeb’s, our family’s party line didn’t have a special ring and we didn’t know when the other party was getting a call. The other family, an older couple, were not heavy phone users and I don’t recall the party line as being a big annoyance, but my folks did get a private line as soon as South Central Bell made them available in our new neighborhood, about 1971 I think. It required a new phone number, with the 524 exchange rather than the 588 exchange we’d had up to then. The next year’s Yellow Pages accidentally listed our new number as being that of a large Catholic Church, and that made things rather too lively, so we had to change numbers again, this time to the then-new 693 exchange. So, three different exchanges in as many years, for one house.

As Jamie said, in Tennessee you could call anywhere in your home county as a local call, I believe.
 
John, I have U-verse TV and internet service along with a land line.  TV/internet and land line service are provided by two different divisions of AT&T, and I get two bills (dumb and wasteful on AT&T's part).  I was expecting that the land line would be provided over copper, but the day that both the land line and the U-verse were installed, I was advised that the land line would be running on fiber and as a result, it relied on the U-verse fiber gateway box, which is in our basement and runs off of our 120 volt electrical service.  I was bummed, but for now I'm leaving things as they are.

 

I think my post further up mistakenly gave the impression that if you subscribe to U-verse over fiber, you can hook up a phone, but that's not the case (except with VOIP, I guess).  You need to have a separate land line service.  Per the installer, the land line's fiber delivers dial tone from the switched network just like copper, but it relies on the gateway for its connection.  From the gateway, it's plain old category 5 wiring to standard RJ11 jacks inside the house.  I'm in the process of adding onto it for more extensions, but it's been cold in our unheated basement so for now it's on hold, so to speak.

 
 
Over fiber you can still get traditional POTS or you can get Uverse VoIP. Since you say you have a separate bill and can use a rotary phone, you probably have POTS over that fiber, which is exactly the same as a copper POTS line except for the fact that it's coming in over the fiber and being terminated to copper in the basement. (and doesn't have a whole CO's worth of batteries backing it up in case of power failure). 

 

The Uverse VoIP service doesn't support pulse dialing IIRC. 

 

The DMS100 here at work made that brief moment of dial tone after the first pulse digit dialed, probably the same switch your CO uses. I don't think it has any meaning today as this area has been 10 digit dialing for the last decade. 
 
Yes, I think our CO has been upgraded from the 1A switch it had been on since the early '80s.  DMS100 or 5E would have been the likely replacement.  POTS over fiber is what I'm on for the land line.

 

This all started when a friend of mine with U-verse VOIP lost her land line and required a technician visit.  She pays extra for inside wiring coverage.  She went out to an antiques co-op and bought a rotary phone because she wanted to make sure her cordless phone system wasn't the problem.  I scolded her, since I have more spare rotary sets than I know what to do with. 

 

The technician told her that a rotary phone wouldn't work on her service.  Thinking U-verse was U-verse regardless of copper or fiber, I hooked up my 1950 WECo model 500 and gave her a call, which completed successfully.   I haven't checked with her to see if her rotary phone does or doesn't work.  I've heard reports of yes and no from people with VOIP, but it sounds like it depends on the carrier.
 
There were maybe a dozen or so 1A switches that were in service in Chicago up until just after 2010-11 and they got replaced with Siemens EWSD switches. I would venture a guess and say yours could have too, though I'm still gonna guess yours was replaced with a DMS100 and was done a bit earlier on than 2010 since Nortel had already filed for bankruptcy by then. 

 

My home CO was built in 1977 so most likely was a 1A office and they replaced all that with Siemens by the late 90s. For some reason Ameritech liked Siemens, and even SBC/AT&T after them. 
 
Back in the 80s and 90s and up until maybe the early 2000s we used to have a 'routing tone' here. It would crop up where the older generations of digital switches used database look ups or back in the 80s where it was waiting for a mechanical switch to catch up.

So you'd dial and it would go bebebebebebebe ... Ring Ring

The old crossbars here gone since the 1990s used to accept touch tone but they played a 'tick tick tick tick tick tick' signal that sounded literally like a clock ticking while they were routing the call. It wasn't just the sound of the actual relays, it was meant to mean please wait and that's why it sounded like a ticking clock.

The link below must have been recorded in the early 2000s or even 1990s. It's an Alcatel E10 digital switch here in Ireland telling you to wait while it pulled routing information from a database - possibly calling a mobile phone or special rate number. I assume they can do the lookup much faster nowadays as I haven't heard that tone in years.

http://www.telephonetribute.com/audio/irish_callingcell.wav

Unconditional Call Forward is Active tone:

http://www.telephonetribute.com/audio/irish_forwardingactive.wav

Voicemail messages waiting :

http://www.telephonetribute.com/audio/irish_messagewaiting.wav
 
Great Thread

My first school that I taught in was in a rural town in the middle of Illinois. The phone system was called: the Inland Phone Company. If you wanted to talk with someone in town, you dialed the number and after 3 min. the phone went dead. If you wanted to talk more, you had to keep dialing the number every 3 min.

When I was in high school in 1967 I lived in Pontiac, Il. My girlfriend was an operator for the local General Telephone Company. I was going to go to the prom with another girl from a different town and had to call her to get the info. about time, date etc. In order to call Meadows, Illinois, you called the operator and the call was put through. It went like this: Her phone number was 4 red. I called the operator in Pontiac, she called the operator in Gridley, Illinois and then she put the call through to Meadows. "I would like to call Meadows, Illinois, 4 red." I then heard, "Gridley, what number Pontiac?" " Meadows 4 red." " Ringing Meadows, 4 red, thank you Pontiac."
Meadows answered. "Meadows, what number Gridley.- 4 red." "Thank you Gridley." Meadows then rang her number 4 Red. That took 10 min. to complete that call.
At school on Mon. during lunch, my girlfriend asked me what I did on Sat. night. I made up some lie. She said, "I was the operator who put your call through to Meadows last week, and by the way, who is Rose?" OOPS, busted.
 
Another part of party line calling.

My aunt and uncle lived on a farm south of Graymont, Il. which was 12 miles from Pontiac, west. The time was 1964. My mom called there and didn't know their number. the call went something like this. "I would like to call Wesley Black in Graymont. The operator put the call through to Graymont. Pontiac called Graymont. "What number Pontiac?" "Wesley Black." the operator told Graymont. Graymont said. "Please wait a second, the potatoes are boiling over on the stove.!" lol (The switchboard was in her house.) She also said, "Wes and Arlene (my aunt) aren't home now, they had to go to Flanagan for some groceries and won't be home until around 4." My mom could hear all of this and thanked the operator in Graymont. "What is Wes and Arlene's number?" my mom asked her. The operator in Graymont knew everyone's business and wasn't afraid to listen in. "Donna, is that you?" My mom was rather surprised at this. "Yes it is." "Their number is 3 long and 1 short." "I have heard your voice before." she said. "Oh really?" "Yes, You are Gordon's (my dad) wife aren't you?" "Yes, I am." "Tell him hi for me, we were in high school together and my name is June .....
Oh my, how times have changed. If you read the above story about Meadows and Gridley. Garymont and Flanagan are all about 15 miles apart from one another. No wonder everyone knew you business.
Thanks for listening now. Gary
 
UK 'party line' service

Just for information......

I have no idea whether 'multi-party' lines were ever used over here for very rural areas in the manual board era, but for Strowger and crossbar switched exchanges the system here worked as follows...

One pair of wires - two subscribers.... Speech transmission was over the pair of wires as normal, both parties having access to the pair, and consequently being able to hear each other's conversations...

Exchange calling and ringing was between one wire ('leg') of the line and Earth....
Both telephone instruments on the line had a pushbutton on it, which would earth one leg of the line, activating that subscriber's equipment, and returning dial tone. loop disconnect dialling and/or DTMF signalling then took place over the copper pair....

Incoming ringing current was sent 'one leg to Earth'. A frequent fault report would be 'no ringing in dry weather' due to the increased resistance of the earth spike. Subscribers were frequently told to 'go outside and water the earth spike'!!

Needless to say, special jumpering at the exchange ensured that when either subscriber was using the line, the other's would return 'busy tone' to any attempted incoming call.....

During the early 1980s there was a big 'push' to update and extend the line plant, and most Shared-Service ('party line') lines were brought up to individual line status.

User 'iej' mentions the '1+1' carrier system, which allowed simultaneous use of one line by two subscribers, which was useful, but not very widesperad.... I think I only ever encountered about half-a-dozen of them before I left...

Hope this interests and/or amuses

All Best

DT
 

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