It was 62 years ago, on November 18, 1963, that the push button telephone, or touch tone phone, was first introduced.
Before push button phones
Before touch tone phones, all we had was rotary dialing. The way a rotary phone worked was by rapidly hanging up and picking the phone back up again to create pulses. This was electrically speaking, of course. To dial a four, it did a rapid hang up/ pickup sequence four times. For zero, it did it 10 times.
This also meant larger numbers took more time to dial. Dialing zero took 10 times as long as dialing one.
Touch tone replaced that by superimposing two freqencies between 697 and 941 Hz and 1209 and 1633 Hz to create a 4×4 matrix covering each number. You didn’t have to push the button very long at all for the tone to register. The result was you could dial any number pretty quickly.
Touch tone was a revenue bonanza for the Bell System, which had a monopoly on the telephone market in the United States. They could charge extra for touch tone service as opposed to traditional pulse dialing. And since you didn’t own the phones, but rather leased them, they could charge you more for push button telephones, such as the Western Electric 2500, as well.
Modern cellular phones don’t have buttons, but they still use the same tone frequencies that were introduced in 1963.
Fighting the man
In the late 1970s, my parents had a device on their phones to convert them to touch tone. They just leased the cheaper, older Western Electric rotary phones, and Dad bought a device that replaced the cap on the part of the headset you talked into. It had push buttons and a small speaker in it, and it operated on a AAA battery. When you wanted to dial the phone, you used the keypad in the headset to dial touch tone. It was a little less convenient since you had to change the battery from time to time, but the device probably paid for itself in a matter of months.
These anti-consumer practices led to the 1982 breakup of AT&T into eight companies, with AT&T concentrating on long distance service, and seven regional Baby Bells, which offered local calling. Over time, the Baby Bells were permitted to merge with each other and with other telecommunications companies such as Worldcom. Modern-day AT&T traces its ancestry to Southwestern Bell, while modern-day Verizon traces its ancestry to Bell Atlantic. Yes, Southwestern Bell acquired its former parent company.
Modern versions of the Western Electric 2500
The Western Electric 2500 is no longer produced. But an updated version that looks just like it still exists and you can still buy one. That phone is called the Cortelco 250044. It’s not as heavy or as loud as a vintage Western Electric 2500 because it has updated electronics and a cheaper bell inside, but it has the same vintage look. Used Cortelco 250044s are inexpensive on Ebay. If you want a vintage-looking phone to use with a VOIP service at home, this would be a good choice.
Push button phones and modems
The main reason I concerned myself with tone or pulse dialing was because I had a modem. The ATDT Hayes command instructed a modem like the Commodore 1670 to use tone dialing. ATDP instructed it to use pulse dialing. Tone dialing was faster, so that’s what I used, except for one time I was giving a demo in a building that only had pulse. Hayes modems even had a register you could set to speed up the tone dialing. I used the command AT S11=50 to dial numbers 40 percent faster, which could give you a slight edge when you were fighting busy signals.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Here in the UK push button phones were introduced a few years later, only becoming truly commonplace in the 1980s – when I remember my grandparents still having an old rotary dial phone.
We had a public sector telecoms monopoly with British Telecom (BT) which was originally part of the Post Office. BT was privatised in the early 80s ostensibly to create competition, but that never really materialised at scale, so a public telephone monopoly was replaced with a private one.
Of course now we’re at the stage where the whole public switched telephone network is being deactivated.
I remember having a push-button phone that looked just like a 2500, but the buttons activated a spring-driven mechanism which sent the required number of pulses as if it were a rotary telephone.
That sounds familiar, I have a similar memory. I seem to recall it had a slide switch to let you choose between touch tone and pulse dialing. Unfortunately that phone is long gone, I wish I still had it.