Cranking A Telephone

Early telephones had no “dials.” The only connection was to your local central office, where all the phone lines in a given area met at a switchboard or bank of switchboards. In order to let the switchboard operator know that you wanted to speak to someone, you turned a crank on the side, then picked up the ear piece. This cranking drove a small but powerful AC generator in the telephone which powered a ringer at the switchboard, alerting the operator to connect into your line, which then powered the phone line to allow you to speak to the operator. She (operators were almost universally women) would ask you who you wished to speak to. She would then plug a patch cord from your incoming line to the outgoing line of the line belonging to the desired party and would send a ring voltage down the line to ring the bell on the destination telephone.

It was considered rude to crank the phone while you were on a call, because the listener would hear a loud buzz, not unlike the annoyance of having someone press telephone touch-tone keys while talking on the phone these days.

After 1950, when direct dialing was much more common, the generators from old phones wound up in all sorts of interesting projects. One thing you could do was to put the wires leading from the generator into metal stakes driven into wet grass several feet apart. The electric current through the ground would often drive earthworms to the surface.