Telephone
For more details on this topic, see Telephone magneto.Many early manual telephones had a hand cranked "magneto" generator to produce a (relatively) high voltage alternating signal to ring the bells of other telephones on the same (party) line and to alert the operator. These were usually on long rural lines served by small manual exchanges, which were not "common battery". The telephone instrument was "local battery", containing two large "No. 6" zinc-carbon dry cells.
Read more about this topic: Magneto
Famous quotes containing the word telephone:
“It’s a hard feeling when everyone’s in a hurry to talk to somebody else, but not to talk to you. Sometimes you get a feeling of need to talk to somebody. Somebody who wants to listen to you other than “Why didn’t you get me the right number?””
—Heather Lamb, U.S. telephone operator. As quoted in Working, book 2, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“It is possible that the telephone has been responsible for more business inefficiency than any other agency except laudanum.... In the old days when you wanted to get in touch with a man you wrote a note, sprinkled it with sand, and gave it to a man on horseback. It probably was delivered within half an hour, depending on how big a lunch the horse had had. But in these busy days of rush-rush-rush, it is sometimes a week before you can catch your man on the telephone.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)