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Dialling it in
James May takes an opportunity to reassemble a 1957 Bakelite dial telephone. All 211 pieces, most of them very small indeed. As May calls it, a mind bending Meccano set.
Armed with a circuit diagram May sets about rebuilding the telephone and hope it works. He starts with the receiver and the dial. May does admit to do a bit of cheating where he gives us a component that he finished earlier or else he would been at it for a few days.
I think May is taken in by the ingenuity of the design and in his opinion the dial telephone design is a design classic.
As he puts together the telephone we are given interesting nuggets of information regarding the telephone, facts that I found useful such as why 999 was the emergency number in an era we had pulses travelling through wires in mid air and you needed a big number to send a series of big pulses to wake up the telephone exchange and you also did not want to confuse the exchange if telephone wires in mid air touched each other on a windy day which would sent a pulse thorough.
Even I forgot that by the mid 1980s the dial telephone had almost been banished from domestic households replaced by push button phones.
At the end May tries whether his 1957 phone works, by dialling its number with his smartphone.
Armed with a circuit diagram May sets about rebuilding the telephone and hope it works. He starts with the receiver and the dial. May does admit to do a bit of cheating where he gives us a component that he finished earlier or else he would been at it for a few days.
I think May is taken in by the ingenuity of the design and in his opinion the dial telephone design is a design classic.
As he puts together the telephone we are given interesting nuggets of information regarding the telephone, facts that I found useful such as why 999 was the emergency number in an era we had pulses travelling through wires in mid air and you needed a big number to send a series of big pulses to wake up the telephone exchange and you also did not want to confuse the exchange if telephone wires in mid air touched each other on a windy day which would sent a pulse thorough.
Even I forgot that by the mid 1980s the dial telephone had almost been banished from domestic households replaced by push button phones.
At the end May tries whether his 1957 phone works, by dialling its number with his smartphone.
- Prismark10
- May 1, 2016
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