I have a friend in a rural area outside the city of Ottawa in Canada who is still on a party line. The joke is on the phone company though... All of the other parties on his line eventually opted for private line service so he is the only person left on the party line! Effectively he has private line service at the reduced price of a party line.
In some areas they still sell rotary dial service which is far cheaper than touchtone service. So if you were to subscribe to that or remain subscribed to that you could actually switch your phone to a touchdown phone without the phone company really caring or knowing even though they could. There's gotta be many other places with party lines still.
On the I Love Lucy show, there was once a story where Lucy had two neighbors that were gossiping on the party line when she (Lucy) wanted to make a call of her own. Frustrated that the call was going on and on, she picked up the line and said during a pause, "okay, I have to go now." Each woman on the party line thought the other person said that and then said goodbye and hung up freeing the line for Lucy. So, as a kid, I tried that on our party line when two people were talking and I wanted to get on the phone . . . they both yelled at me to get off the line! I guess real life doesn't work the same as it does in TV land. 😏
Lucy (the character) is actually pretty talented, despite Ricky not wanting her in the show. She probably did a better job of sounding like the other two than you did as a kid. Plus it relies on both of them responding in just the right way for it to work--they can't notice the misunderstanding. What I find odd is that it wasn't just more the norm not to have long conversations on the phone. I actually had expected this video to be about someone who spent too long on the phone, not someone who ignored that the phone was needed in an emergency.
@@ZipplyZane Point 1 - Also, it didn't work for me because I was not a member of the screen actors guild. ;-) Point 2 - Party lines today would not be as much of a problem with today's kids. They hardly talk on the phone. ;-) ;-)
@@stevengeorges9046 ok so imagine party line being one shared social media or messaging app/account for 4 people. The chaos that would ensue would make for a awesome comedy show🤣
My dad told me that his first phone in rural Kansas was a party line. "Two shorts and a long" was his family's ringtone (Not the right word? Signal?) that the phone was for them. Then when they got an actual phone number, it was only a couple digits long. He still tries to write down numbers down out of habit.
My brother had a party line in the late 80's just 30 miles south of Kansas City. It was sophisticated enough that it would only ring in a specific house.
It is morse code for the letter U. I suppose Party Lines had a maximum number of connections of twenty-five characters: A being 'short long' and Z being 'long long short short'. It is amazing how adept people became at remembering their personal morse code letter.
I lived in a 2-party line, but our phones rang separately. If you were talking on the phone and heard a certain 'click' followed a second or so later by another, you knew it was the other party wanting to make a call. It was common courtesy to end your call when you heard it. If you heard only one click, it meant that the other party was listening to your conversation.
My mom actually had a party line growing up and it stayed on her family's farm until 2000 when they sold it. Of course, what I remember that was similar was opening Netscape just to hear my mom gossiping with a neighbour and them both pausing to ask what that sound was, then promptly screaming at me to get off the line, lol.
I was going to say, my wife's family had party line until at least the late 80s, perhaps beyond. I had never heard of such a thing before meeting her and hearing the stories.
Of course using a modem or fax machine on a party line would be quite impossible because if your neighbor picked up the phone while in use just the "click" on the line could kill the signal.
@@Muhamedim It’s more like Tor. It was your one way of connecting to the Internet and to do so required uninterrupted access to your phone line. But, once you got on, it was kind of like Google before Google
@@cmmartti hmm, maybe Netscape had it's own website that was the default when you first installed it. I remember there being a page that looked like the MSN homepage with a search bar 2/5ths of the way down it and the Netscape logo at the top right-hand corner.
I'm gonna sound old here, but this reminds me of an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where the entire town is unable to use their phones for a whole day because two old ladies decide to start a conversation about why their feet fall asleep. Didn't realize that was *actually* how phones worked back then, hah. Excellent video!
I remember hearing party lines mentioned on TV from time to time when I was a kid, I thought they were a number you could call and just talk to lots of people, like you were at a party. I guess that was potentially possible if everyone on the line decided to join in!
They did exist I don't remember if that's exactly what they were called. It was basically a conference calling type number or other defunct message number and it became popular basically as a chat room for many. Phone freaking is a deep dive of information and that was just one little tidbit that was relevant.
I was amazed in 1984 when I learned that the phone system of the Florida town I had moved to (along the I-4 corridor!) still offered party line service!
Same thing would happen if you used a dialup and someone picked up an extension within your house. Used to happen all the time. You get garbage on the screen...
Don't forget disconnected. We were looking at houses in the 2000s. We were looking at one that was still on a party line I don't know if any other parties were there but yes I was imagining it.
My great uncle was a thrifty guy, and he had a party line up until the 1990s. I think the phone company grandfathered him in because he signed up for the line while they still offered it. I don't know if he was even actually sharing the line with anyone for the last decade or two, but he was getting a cheaper price on his phone service. This was in a suburb of Toronto that had been a somewhat rural area when he was born.
Rural northern Wisconsin, we had a party line until the mid 80s. There were four families on the party line. If you needed to call someone on the party line, you'd have to dial 8 then the number, then hang up and the phone would vibrate while it rang at the neighbors, then you'd pick up the phone and it would click for a few seconds. We were considered lucky because of the four lines, two of them were only used (rarely) in the summer.
we lived in the country, we had a party line until the early 90's, I think it was mostly bc it was cheaper and we weren't rich. We also rented our telephone from the phone company, I remember the technician coming to change the party line to a private line, he went out on the street to the telephone line where there is a cylindrical box attached to the telephone line, he opened it and changed some setting in it.
Likewise! We had ours until the late 80's, early 90's as well. Also I could be incorrect, but I believe almost all phones from about the 1960's to 1983 were rented. There was finally a federal legal point taken on the issue and the practice ended in 1983. I'm not sure if you were allowed to purchase the phone you were rented, or that they just never came back to collect them, but I know a lot of rotary phones in particular still lying around homes are still stamped with a "Property of: " marking.
@@BT-ex7ko oh that reminds me I guess the day we switch from party line to private was also the day we switched from rotary to touch tone, the tech did take our salmon colored rotary phone on that fateful day. BT... wait ... are you Bell Telephone ?!? the call is coming from inside the house !!!! :p
In Canada my parents’ phone was rented from the phone company at least until the mid nineties. So weird, but I guess it’s not terribly different from paying a monthly fee for a mobile phone to a service provider (although at the end of the term, you get to keep the phone).
@@BT-ex7ko Yeah in the US AT&T had a legal monopoly on telephones and had a practice of renting them out, which was struck down in 83 largely because they had failed to really make any innovations. There were similar situations in other countries, but the difference was usually that the telephone infrastructure had been built by the state and it was owned and operated by a nationalized company, in Europe this was generally the norm as telephone and later internet service was seen as a utility until the rise of the EU shared market and it's free market regulation which led to wide sweeping privatization. In both cases the leasing system initially came about as a solution to many people not really being able to afford it, but in Europe you did see more innovation since it was a nationalized company that wasn't solely interested in profit but was meant to provide a service, for example BT experimenting with video calls in the late 80s.
@@fittony Aw! I'll have to ask why we stuck with our rotary's (they were also rented, but we still have them). We had two salmon colored ones too, kinda. They were like a pink tinted beige more or less. I repaired the one last year to have it as a functional decoration piece, but the other had some unique wiring and seemed to be a very strange party line setup I could not figure out, with additional mechanics built in.
In my rural farming area, we still had wood "crank" phones with no dial. The whole neighbourhood is on the same line, upwards of over a dozen houses. To phone each other, each had a special ring you create by turning the crank. "R312" meant turn crank three times,brief pause, then once, then twice. Other houses on the line soon got weary of counting constant rings and just answered the phone everytime it started to ring, both to stop the noise and entertainment through unannounced eavesdropping. These were battery operated phones, so the transmitting phones battery directly powered the earpiece of the receiving phone. Too many receivers engaged at once loaded down the signal and degraded the sound for everyone listening. If you find yourself difficult to be heard by the intended party, you know that others might be on the line. My father was the lineman for the local company, and knows which subscribers did the most listening in, as their phone battery needed replacing most often. The microphone had the characteristic of using power when the handset was off hook even if they didn't talk.
This was such a delightful video! My father grew up with a party line in the Texas panhandle in the 40's and 50's. He said when too many people were on the line, the sound coming through the receiver would get really muted and you'd have to ask/demand that other folks get off the line. You'd hear lots of clicks of receivers being place in their cradles and you could then actually hear the person you're talking to.
That’s accurate! The circuit was shared and so the more load in parallel on the circuit, the less amps per phone to make sound. Also relates to why older phones were stamped with a REN value: Ringer Equivalent Number, which was a way of flattening a lot of electrical math into an integer value for how much load the ringer in that phone would put on Bell’s AC ringtone generator. Newer phones have a REN too, but they don’t generally make the value obvious on packaging. I had a hell of a time confirming the REN for the last few I bought for an analog PBX to make sure we wouldn’t burn out that venue’s PBX’s ring generator.
I remember my father telling of the party line when he was growing up. I forget what the ring pattern was but he said "then you couldn't hear anything and had to yell because everyone picked up anyhow."
As late as the 1990s there were people who loved the party line so much that in the digital age and touch-tone systems we had some rural customers who insisted on keeping their party lines, so our local telco created special software for just those few. That wasn't difficult per se, but it is a riot.
I remember my mom telling me about how her family had a private line when she was growing up (in the 50’s and 60’s), but only because her dad was a State Trooper and needed to be able to be called in an emergency.
When my mom was a child in the early 1960s, my grandparents were on a party line. One day, my grandmother told my mom to call her aunt Inez, and tell her they would be coming soon to pick her up to go to town. My mom pick up the phone to find the neighbor on the line talking. My mom lowered the phone down easy. This went on a couple of times when finally my mom lifted the phone, heard the conversation coming to an end. My mom covered the phone, and said "she's getting off phone" the neighbor said "yes I'm getting off. What are you doing eavesdropping!"😅
When I explained to the kids about dial phones, paying long distance charges, international calling, pay phones, etc...., they were agog. When I got to party lines they genuinely thought I was telling tall tales. The only people i remember having one was some relatives of mine living on a dairy farm and they had several households on the property. That makes a little more sense than sharing a line with strangers but it's still terribly awkward. One weird phone I remember when I was a very little kid was an old lady neighbor who had a phone with neither dial nor numerical keypad. I can't remember specifically but I think this sort of phone you picked up the receiver and it connected a line directly to an operator who you would tell the number you wanted to be connected to and she (back then they were all shes) would manually connect you. Also, back in the 1980s I worked at a hotel with a trunk switchboard system that I had to learn and operate, the sort with the plugs on cords that had to be inserted into the circuit board to make a line connection. It seemed really outdated at the time but I do appreciate the weird experience of operating it.
Well, I'm officially old. My family never had a party line but I certainly do remember when they were fairly common. This video brought back a lot of memories!
In a typical two-party line system, you shared the voice line but only your own phone would ring. Each "line" the phone company provides are a set of two wires from the central office, and both parties have phones hooked to the same pair. But the phone company can select which of the two wires they apply the AC ringer voltage. When the phones are installed by the technician, he can wire them to select which of the wires will power the bell ringer. So at least the ring is private to you, and won't alert the nosey neighbor to pick up at the same time. If you were cheap and had four-party service, the phone company provided coded rings you had to listen for (ours was "two longs" ). You could direct dial long distance, but an operator came on line to ask for your own number to bill it to (had to use the honor system). Finally in the early 80s our family was tired of the neighbors phone calls so we paid for private line.
I was staying at a camp in a rural area for some time last summer, and someone described the internet as a party line, but with wifi. Basically the whole street, with at least two campgrounds, and a bunch of houses, all shares the same internet line, so we had to use huge antennas to get internet, and thankfully one was near me. But if the neighbours were watching netflix, it would take a long time to load my emails, and online banking kept timing out. Basically, it meant the only time I could upload my photos or download things I needed, was during lunchtime when others weren't online, or very late at night when people were asleep. At least with internet, it's a bit harder to spy on people, unless you know what to do. I was on a router with a firewall to have an extra protection.
My mothers family had a party line right up until the early 70s (Rural Canada). Apparently it was a common for women to listen in on their neighbors convorsations, all while trying to be as quiet as possible.
I'm just old enough to have experienced a party line as a kid. Many were the times - all the time, actually - that I picked up and started dialing without check and found myself getting a lecture on phone etiquette from whoever was on the line already. At least our phone only rang when a call was for us, but the rest is all too familiar. When I describe them ot my younger friends, they just look at me in amazement. Oh, you did leave out the much-used (at least in the movies and on TV) of putting a handkerchief or just your plam over the transmitter of your phone so the people you were eavesdropping on wouldn't hear you breathe. That's not meant as a major criticism, just an FYI. I enjoy your videos because they hit on unusual topics like this. Keep up the good work!
My grandparents were on a party line in Canada. So when I was young in the early 80's, they still had it. All the neighbours knew everything because they were listening in. The party line didn't go away until the lines were updated to work with touch phones. The rotary phone was crazy slow. I would sit there with the receiver down and just see how long it took 9 and 0 to spin back, over and over. Yeah kids, that's what was fun then! 🤣
The proliferation of new area codes, splits and overlapping, and mandatory ten digit local dialling really killed off rotary dial phones. Dialling ten digits took too long, and with only old people still with rotary, they would lose track halfway through and end up with a wrong number dialled.
I recall the party line was a recurring gag on the TV show Green Acres, where neighbors would pick up and interrupt the call. Also, the husband had to climb up the telephone poll to make a call because the phone company installer didn't bring enough phone cable to run to their house when he hooked up the line. I thought it was an exaggerated take on a rural thing, which it sort of was since rural areas had party lines for longer. The closest I experienced it was as a kid in a family of 5 trying to share one phone line, with a phone on every floor. Also, when internet was dial-up, negotiating staying online vs. waiting for or placing voice calls.
My grandfather had a party line and a neighbor who was ALWAYS on the phone when he wanted to call in a feed order for his livestock. One day he got fed up with it and went outside to where the lines came into the house, tossed a rope over the top and cinched the rope until the wires crossed. When he released the rope and went back inside the line was miraculously open and he could make his call. He started doing this so often that he left the rope over the wire and before he even picked up the receiver he’d cinch the rope before making any call.
My Dad worked for the telephone company from the 1950's to the 1980's and we had a party line. It's true about picking up the phone and someone else was talking. When I was a kid, I picked up the phone and someone told me to "get off now!" - scared the cr-p right out of me! In the end, my Dad was the last person to still have the party line. The last few years were wonderful! :D
There are still a few rural areas of Ontario that use party lines. It’s not uncommon in cottage country, where access is difficult and cost prohibitive to upgrade the lines. In those remaining area without strong cell coverage it remains a vital service. There are also some remote parts of the province where the lines still operate on pulse tones instead of touch tone.
I remember my grandparents on a farm in Nebraska having a party line into the 1970s. I think my other grandparents in a small town in Nebraska also had one, but it went away sooner, and I think there was only one other house on it.
In Austria they were called "half or quarter connection", usually connecting 2 or 4 subscribers. But a device at the house level blocked out the other phones from listening in when the line was busy, and often all connections had a unique phone number. That same device decoded the ringing impulses and selected the right terminal, blocking the others. Of course, that also meant you could not ask the other users to get off the phone in an emergency.
Around the 2000s we were looking for a house and apparently one of the houses we looked at was still on a party line and I pondered the issues that would be involved with using DialUp the primary method of Internet access at the time.
My great granddad had a party line and whenever he would call my great grandma when they were dating he would holler down the street for all his neighbors to get off the line, and just hear a cacophony of phones hanging up
My grandparents still had a party line in rural Ohio in the 1980s. I remember getting yelled at when I picked up the phone when it was the neighbor's ring, then I hung up on the person and they had to call back again, which confused me even more.
My grandparents and a friend of mine were on one of the last party lines in rule west Texas. They finally got them a new line in 1995. Only because a tractors plow pulled down 1/2 mile of phone line.
My parents still technically had a party line in 2003 when my mom died. They'd had it installed in 1969 when they bought their house. I say "technically" because they were the only party on their line. The service was grandfathered in (along with their rotary phone) as my mother refused to upgrade their service.
Phil, these old videos are so goddamn good. I feel like there's a bit more of you in them, this channeled zaniness I love. When I see the differences in views between your older videos and newer ones, I understand. I just hope those new folks will come around and appreciate this stuff as well.
I was a kid in the 90's, and I remember hearing people mention party lines, but I just thought it was another term for a conference call. This is wild.
My family had a party line when I was a kid. It was the 70's in rural Mississippi, I think private lines were available, but pretty expensive that far out of town. There was a family with two teen girls also on our party line, so you can guess who used it the most. When my dad was expecting an important call, he would pick up and tell the girls he needed the line for the next hour or so. By the time I was a teen in the 80's we had a private line, so he could tell me to hang up face to face.
Up until the mid 70s, our extended family had a working farm in rural Wisconsin. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. The phone there was a 3-way party line and had a difinitive ring for each line. Being from the burbs of a big city, I had no clue about them. I can remember gently easing the receiver off the cradle with my ear near the speaker end, trying to be stealthy and see if anyone was talking. I never got caught, and heard other people's conversations a few times. It felt naughty, but it was so novel to me that it was irresistible. And Pillow Talk is a really cute movie, btw. Full of lots of sexual innuendo. Rather racey!
In the early 1980's, Camp Zama Japan (a military base) had a local phone system that was ancient and prone to odd behavior. Everyone had a private line, but, especially after a good soaking rain, sometimes you could pick up the phone and hear someone else's conversation. Everytime you picked up the phone, it was like a slot machine ... would you get a dial tone? Would you get someone else's conversation? Meanwhile, right outside the gates in Tokyo, everyone was living in the future already ...
Water must've been getting in somewhere and shorting everything together. I've heard of this happening on regular lines where two lines will get semi bonded through water and grass until the line dries out.
public wifi is a party line unless you use today''s sponsor NordVPN lmaooooo you missed the perfect ad transition with this one. loving the strange places your research has taken you so far phil. your work brings a smile to my face and I almost never smile
i like your style dude. i know it might be tempting to do what everyone else does because it’s proven to work but i like the twists you add man, i hope you keep the same touch bro
I DIED with the squaregon joke 😂 Awesome video Phil!!! Also who are we kidding? You are the only human that could make anyone watch a video about porta potty magazines Phil. Any topic you choose… we’re in! Keep on killing it pal!
@@snowkatyoutube1419 She died WITH the squaregon joke, which peeked out here in this video. She is now back where she belongs. On the bright side, she's Phil's number one fan in the second dimension.
Yeah, I’m the pal holding a big #1 fan foam finger and selling Phil merch on his behalf. Top sellers in the second dimension, but you didn’t hear it from me ;-)
I’m 36 and I remember having a party line till I was around 9 years old. My brothers and I would get in trouble for picking up the phone and listening to our neighbors’ conversations. He would say “get off the phone” then tell my dad when he returned home from work.
We had party lines here in northern Manitoba, Canada until the late 80s / early 90s. The telephone was a tool. Not something you socially used to chat with friends on. Times have sure changed.
Our neighbor in Sturbridge Massachusetts had a hand cranked phone that would get you to the party line and a hand pump in the kitchen for water from the indoor well. All of this was an incredible achievement compared to how we used to live. If you asked ANY of them about the good old days or how it used to be, the look they would give you would freeze your blood.
We lived in a large town which had individual lines. Visiting the small-town grandparents forced us to learn and use party-lines, right up into the 80's. Weird to have someone already talking when you pick up the phone.
My favorite video by you!! I loved the social Comme tart paralleling the past to the behaviors of modern technology users. That's fantastic context for modern behavior. That topic specifically - examples of our modern vices by people from the past - is hugely fascinating and would make a great subject for many future videos about the habits of our anxiety-ridden social media - centric society.
In parts of rural Canada, party lines hung on for a long time and at least a few are still around. The last one I remember using was at a friend's cottage in eastern Ontario, around 2011. When I worked at a summer camp near Parry Sound around 2000, we had a private line but party lines were still common enough in the area. We also didn't have 911 service, so emergency calls were operator-assisted Zenith numbers - separate ones for police, fire and ambulance.
As a person not from the US, really enjoy these videos. They are an interesting and engaging look into history and the culture. Love all the old adverts etc. Keep it up!
I am wondering if one of the vestigial characteristics of party line was that some phones would not disconnect even on "private lines" unless BOTH parties hung up a connected call. If I made a call to a friend and he or I hung up but one of us stayed on the line, we could pick up five minutes later and they would still be there ?
There were certainly places where the telephone exchanges operated kinda like that -- except the _caller_ had to hang up to end the call. The _called_ party could hang up and pick up all they wanted, without it disconnecting. Once of these places was southern California -- because the area had independent, non-AT&T local phone companies, who used different equipment from the Bell System. ...Which is also partly, in movies, you often hear a dial tone right away when the other person hangs up. For many of the moviemakers, that's how their own phones often _actually_ worked. 🙂 (Tom Scott made a video about this years ago, using actual telephone switching equipment at a museum: ruclips.net/video/bUIiUXvnkUQ/видео.html )
We had a party line until I was in my teens. We shared our line with 3 homes down the road and my uncle next door. Two of the homes down the road were sister, both in their 60’s. They would get on the phone and talk to each other for hours every day. When I was very young, I didn’t realize they knew who I was. I started making dumb noises on the phone and bothering them. I did that until they complained to my mother. I got an ass whipping for that and stayed off the phone from that day on. BTW, Phone numbers weren’t always 7 digits. Something you might want to research.
Heck, even when they _were_ 7 digits, there were remote rural areas where you didn't have to dial all 7. With a small-enough population, you sometimes had 5- or even 4-digit dialing, since the entire local calling area was on the same exchange. Anyone more distant was a long-distance call, with a 1 in front of the 7-digit number.
My grandmother had one in the 80s and I’d never heard of it before. I searched the house for whoever was on the line when I heard talking on the phone for the first time when I walked by it.
I used to believe that party lines were intentionally designed to connect a group of users, so they could "have a party over the phone" (like a conference call, but more fun and informal). I guess party lines could theoretically be used for this, but I didn't realize they were often the only phone connection a household had. I used to think every home had a private line, and some opted to join an additional party line just for group conversations.
The singer at 4:45 is Billy Murray. It's amazing how prolific that guy was in the early recording industry, he must have recorded thousands of records within the space of a few years.
We definitely had a party line in the late 70's & probably early 80's... I was too young to care, but I remember many tense arguments between my mother and others on our party line.
Love this! My mom grew up with a party line in rural Indiana in the early 60’s. (Today, she’s in her early 60’s). She talks about how you’d have to wait for the proper number of rings to ensure you weren’t answering a call for the farm up the road. I never thought about the issues they could cause. I’ll have to ask my mom if she ever heard any dirt. Great video!
Like yesterday, I remember our party line. Two sharp rings. As kids, we didn't dare answer the phone...it was for 'the big people' to use. If we wanted to say something to a friend, we got on our bikes to go find them. There was a 'Mrs. S--' who was forever listening in, but doing a really bad job of it as her radio was always blaring in the background. My mother would answer the phone and after not ten seconds would say, "Now, 'Mrs. S--' you know this isn't your call, so please hang up the receiver." Another half-minute would go by and Mama would say yet again, "Now, 'Mrs. S--' you know this isn't your call, so please hang up the receiver." Best as I remember, everyone on the party had that trouble with Mrs. S--! Guess that was entertainment, like the video said.
Since the 60's i have never lived anywhere that had a party line telephone. My parents might not have tolerated such a thing as someone listening in on their private conversations. Admittedly, I lived in a big midwest city early on and only moved to a small town after private lines became much easier to get. I knew about the existance of party lines from TV and movies.
You could tell when someone picked up a phone to listen in on you. But there were often times when you weren't sure, and paranoia would kick in. There would be a distinct click sound when another phone was picked up or hung up.
I was born in 1947, and lived with my grandparents in a small town in Iowa until I was 7 years old. They had a two party line, and calls went through an operator. Years later, when the local phone company introduced dial calling, they still had to share a line. I moved to a large city in 1955. I don't recall any time after that when my parents had anything but a single, private line. I wonder how much extra that cost.
My dad owned a rural property in the 80's and they had a party line for the neighborhood. I remember going out there as a kid and experiencing the oddity of hearing someone else's conversation instead of a dialtone.
growing up my uncles cabin still had a party line that covered the whole side of the lake, it stuck around until the area got reliable cell service and everyone just stopped using landlines all together
I like your channel because of the interesting info about various interesting things. It's like going down some Wikipedia rabbit hole, but with like, better sources and info about how the subject affects other things in our society.
Coming from eastern Europe, we had a party line until the early 2000s. This coincided with the dial-up era of the internet. Let's say that our line-partner didn't like me 😬
What a nightmare. Given how our sense of entitlement seems to have grown, I think there would be a lot of fights and even deaths between people who had to share a party line. I do find it really interesting though. The interplay of technology and morality has been with us for a long time.
Yeah it'd be horrible! Imagine someone having a heart attack and dying because they couldn't get through, or someone not being able to report a fire because someone else is tying up the line! Wouldn't have happened back then, people weren't as entitled.
Growing up we had a party line until 1981 or 1982. By that time it was a choice via economics instead of technology. Party lines were simply cheaper with our rural telephone company. We also had to pay extra for touch tone service, which we did not do until we moved to the private line in late 1982.
I had a party line when I was a kid, with my grandparents. It wasn't a big deal, because people didn't use the phone very much anyway. It was a much bigger deal making a long distance call, and saying as much as possible in a few minutes, because it would cost over a dollar a minute. You did not want to get busted for racking up a hundred dollars in LD charges, most parents didn't let that slide without severe punishment.
when I was *very* young I remember talking to my mom (in Portland, OR) from Grandpa & Grandma’s (in Lebanon, OR). mom had a single line phone but G&G still had a party line.
There was (or is?) a 1950s exhibit at the Ohio History Connection that was a recreation of a 1950s home and they had a phone that had a party line recording when you picked it up. It was really cool.
My greatgrandmother and her next door neighbor shared a partyline in South Wales, and would bash on the shared wall (semi detached house) when they wanted to talk to eachother
My current house has been in the family for over 30 years and when I first moved here in the early 90s we had a party line. It wasn't as common by then but yeah, they still existed in rural areas.
When my family moved from Chicago to Atlanta in 1971 I was 12. It was the first time I encountered such. It was really weird to me. It took the south a while to get private lines I recon.
My dad has a very large extended family that all lived on the same rural road. They shared a party line until the 80s. I was rather shocked when he told me about it.
Our state only repealed the "Failure to Yield a Party Line" statute in 2020. The rural area I worked in the 1980's and 90's still had many party lines and I actually have have written summonses for the charge. The issue in those day's was related to people using dial up computer service. If they were doing some download and refusing to shut it down for an emergency call, they got cited.
I have a friend in a rural area outside the city of Ottawa in Canada who is still on a party line. The joke is on the phone company though... All of the other parties on his line eventually opted for private line service so he is the only person left on the party line! Effectively he has private line service at the reduced price of a party line.
In some areas they still sell rotary dial service which is far cheaper than touchtone service. So if you were to subscribe to that or remain subscribed to that you could actually switch your phone to a touchdown phone without the phone company really caring or knowing even though they could. There's gotta be many other places with party lines still.
On the I Love Lucy show, there was once a story where Lucy had two neighbors that were gossiping on the party line when she (Lucy) wanted to make a call of her own. Frustrated that the call was going on and on, she picked up the line and said during a pause, "okay, I have to go now." Each woman on the party line thought the other person said that and then said goodbye and hung up freeing the line for Lucy.
So, as a kid, I tried that on our party line when two people were talking and I wanted to get on the phone . . . they both yelled at me to get off the line! I guess real life doesn't work the same as it does in TV land. 😏
Ha! Go Lucy!
Lucy (the character) is actually pretty talented, despite Ricky not wanting her in the show. She probably did a better job of sounding like the other two than you did as a kid. Plus it relies on both of them responding in just the right way for it to work--they can't notice the misunderstanding.
What I find odd is that it wasn't just more the norm not to have long conversations on the phone. I actually had expected this video to be about someone who spent too long on the phone, not someone who ignored that the phone was needed in an emergency.
@@ZipplyZane Point 1 - Also, it didn't work for me because I was not a member of the screen actors guild. ;-)
Point 2 - Party lines today would not be as much of a problem with today's kids. They hardly talk on the phone. ;-) ;-)
I watched that same _I Love Lucy_ episode.
@@stevengeorges9046 ok so imagine party line being one shared social media or messaging app/account for 4 people. The chaos that would ensue would make for a awesome comedy show🤣
My dad told me that his first phone in rural Kansas was a party line. "Two shorts and a long" was his family's ringtone (Not the right word? Signal?) that the phone was for them. Then when they got an actual phone number, it was only a couple digits long. He still tries to write down numbers down out of habit.
My brother had a party line in the late 80's just 30 miles south of Kansas City. It was sophisticated enough that it would only ring in a specific house.
It is morse code for the letter U. I suppose Party Lines had a maximum number of connections of twenty-five characters: A being 'short long' and Z being 'long long short short'. It is amazing how adept people became at remembering their personal morse code letter.
I lived in a 2-party line, but our phones rang separately. If you were talking on the phone and heard a certain 'click' followed a second or so later by another, you knew it was the other party wanting to make a call. It was common courtesy to end your call when you heard it. If you heard only one click, it meant that the other party was listening to your conversation.
My mom actually had a party line growing up and it stayed on her family's farm until 2000 when they sold it. Of course, what I remember that was similar was opening Netscape just to hear my mom gossiping with a neighbour and them both pausing to ask what that sound was, then promptly screaming at me to get off the line, lol.
I was going to say, my wife's family had party line until at least the late 80s, perhaps beyond. I had never heard of such a thing before meeting her and hearing the stories.
Of course using a modem or fax machine on a party line would be quite impossible because if your neighbor picked up the phone while in use just the "click" on the line could kill the signal.
isn't Netscape a website like a chrome and facebook combined
@@Muhamedim It’s more like Tor. It was your one way of connecting to the Internet and to do so required uninterrupted access to your phone line. But, once you got on, it was kind of like Google before Google
@@cmmartti hmm, maybe Netscape had it's own website that was the default when you first installed it. I remember there being a page that looked like the MSN homepage with a search bar 2/5ths of the way down it and the Netscape logo at the top right-hand corner.
I'm gonna sound old here, but this reminds me of an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where the entire town is unable to use their phones for a whole day because two old ladies decide to start a conversation about why their feet fall asleep. Didn't realize that was *actually* how phones worked back then, hah. Excellent video!
Dang I wish I’d known about this.
Hey, there’s only so many obscure references you can pack into one video!
I remember hearing party lines mentioned on TV from time to time when I was a kid, I thought they were a number you could call and just talk to lots of people, like you were at a party. I guess that was potentially possible if everyone on the line decided to join in!
I think what you thought was a thing too!
@@PhilEdwardsInc it absolutely was! I remember seeing ads for them on tv way back when
I think they called them party lines (the $$$ chat line version that came later) because folks were already familiar with that phrase!
They did exist I don't remember if that's exactly what they were called. It was basically a conference calling type number or other defunct message number and it became popular basically as a chat room for many. Phone freaking is a deep dive of information and that was just one little tidbit that was relevant.
Cute kid thinking!
I was amazed in 1984 when I learned that the phone system of the Florida town I had moved to (along the I-4 corridor!) still offered party line service!
I live in California, and people said that there were still some party lines in the country in the 1980s. It seems unreal.
That video was really hilarious :D. I liked the acting very much, the different personalities were really funny =). As always: Keep it up!
Shut up
Imagine using Dial up Internet internet on a party line. It would be hell.
Same thing would happen if you used a dialup and someone picked up an extension within your house. Used to happen all the time. You get garbage on the screen...
Don't forget disconnected. We were looking at houses in the 2000s. We were looking at one that was still on a party line I don't know if any other parties were there but yes I was imagining it.
When my mum was little her village just had one phone, in a phone box at the end of the road and villagers would schedule times to use it
My great uncle was a thrifty guy, and he had a party line up until the 1990s. I think the phone company grandfathered him in because he signed up for the line while they still offered it. I don't know if he was even actually sharing the line with anyone for the last decade or two, but he was getting a cheaper price on his phone service. This was in a suburb of Toronto that had been a somewhat rural area when he was born.
Rural northern Wisconsin, we had a party line until the mid 80s. There were four families on the party line. If you needed to call someone on the party line, you'd have to dial 8 then the number, then hang up and the phone would vibrate while it rang at the neighbors, then you'd pick up the phone and it would click for a few seconds. We were considered lucky because of the four lines, two of them were only used (rarely) in the summer.
we lived in the country, we had a party line until the early 90's, I think it was mostly bc it was cheaper and we weren't rich. We also rented our telephone from the phone company, I remember the technician coming to change the party line to a private line, he went out on the street to the telephone line where there is a cylindrical box attached to the telephone line, he opened it and changed some setting in it.
Likewise! We had ours until the late 80's, early 90's as well. Also I could be incorrect, but I believe almost all phones from about the 1960's to 1983 were rented. There was finally a federal legal point taken on the issue and the practice ended in 1983. I'm not sure if you were allowed to purchase the phone you were rented, or that they just never came back to collect them, but I know a lot of rotary phones in particular still lying around homes are still stamped with a "Property of: " marking.
@@BT-ex7ko oh that reminds me I guess the day we switch from party line to private was also the day we switched from rotary to touch tone, the tech did take our salmon colored rotary phone on that fateful day.
BT... wait ... are you Bell Telephone ?!? the call is coming from inside the house !!!! :p
In Canada my parents’ phone was rented from the phone company at least until the mid nineties. So weird, but I guess it’s not terribly different from paying a monthly fee for a mobile phone to a service provider (although at the end of the term, you get to keep the phone).
@@BT-ex7ko Yeah in the US AT&T had a legal monopoly on telephones and had a practice of renting them out, which was struck down in 83 largely because they had failed to really make any innovations. There were similar situations in other countries, but the difference was usually that the telephone infrastructure had been built by the state and it was owned and operated by a nationalized company, in Europe this was generally the norm as telephone and later internet service was seen as a utility until the rise of the EU shared market and it's free market regulation which led to wide sweeping privatization. In both cases the leasing system initially came about as a solution to many people not really being able to afford it, but in Europe you did see more innovation since it was a nationalized company that wasn't solely interested in profit but was meant to provide a service, for example BT experimenting with video calls in the late 80s.
@@fittony Aw! I'll have to ask why we stuck with our rotary's (they were also rented, but we still have them). We had two salmon colored ones too, kinda. They were like a pink tinted beige more or less. I repaired the one last year to have it as a functional decoration piece, but the other had some unique wiring and seemed to be a very strange party line setup I could not figure out, with additional mechanics built in.
In my rural farming area, we still had wood "crank" phones with no dial. The whole neighbourhood is on the same line, upwards of over a dozen houses. To phone each other, each had a special ring you create by turning the crank. "R312" meant turn crank three times,brief pause, then once, then twice. Other houses on the line soon got weary of counting constant rings and just answered the phone everytime it started to ring, both to stop the noise and entertainment through unannounced eavesdropping. These were battery operated phones, so the transmitting phones battery directly powered the earpiece of the receiving phone. Too many receivers engaged at once loaded down the signal and degraded the sound for everyone listening. If you find yourself difficult to be heard by the intended party, you know that others might be on the line. My father was the lineman for the local company, and knows which subscribers did the most listening in, as their phone battery needed replacing most often. The microphone had the characteristic of using power when the handset was off hook even if they didn't talk.
This was such a delightful video! My father grew up with a party line in the Texas panhandle in the 40's and 50's. He said when too many people were on the line, the sound coming through the receiver would get really muted and you'd have to ask/demand that other folks get off the line. You'd hear lots of clicks of receivers being place in their cradles and you could then actually hear the person you're talking to.
That’s accurate! The circuit was shared and so the more load in parallel on the circuit, the less amps per phone to make sound. Also relates to why older phones were stamped with a REN value: Ringer Equivalent Number, which was a way of flattening a lot of electrical math into an integer value for how much load the ringer in that phone would put on Bell’s AC ringtone generator. Newer phones have a REN too, but they don’t generally make the value obvious on packaging. I had a hell of a time confirming the REN for the last few I bought for an analog PBX to make sure we wouldn’t burn out that venue’s PBX’s ring generator.
I remember my father telling of the party line when he was growing up. I forget what the ring pattern was but he said "then you couldn't hear anything and had to yell because everyone picked up anyhow."
As late as the 1990s there were people who loved the party line so much that in the digital age and touch-tone systems we had some rural customers who insisted on keeping their party lines, so our local telco created special software for just those few. That wasn't difficult per se, but it is a riot.
No that would've been an interesting engineering exercise. I wonder how it was done.
I remember my mom telling me about how her family had a private line when she was growing up (in the 50’s and 60’s), but only because her dad was a State Trooper and needed to be able to be called in an emergency.
Yea - my moms dad was a doctor, so she didn’t have one, but my dad did for a bit.
When my mom was a child in the early 1960s, my grandparents were on a party line. One day, my grandmother told my mom to call her aunt Inez, and tell her they would be coming soon to pick her up to go to town. My mom pick up the phone to find the neighbor on the line talking. My mom lowered the phone down easy. This went on a couple of times when finally my mom lifted the phone, heard the conversation coming to an end. My mom covered the phone, and said "she's getting off phone" the neighbor said "yes I'm getting off. What are you doing eavesdropping!"😅
When I explained to the kids about dial phones, paying long distance charges, international calling, pay phones, etc...., they were agog. When I got to party lines they genuinely thought I was telling tall tales. The only people i remember having one was some relatives of mine living on a dairy farm and they had several households on the property. That makes a little more sense than sharing a line with strangers but it's still terribly awkward. One weird phone I remember when I was a very little kid was an old lady neighbor who had a phone with neither dial nor numerical keypad. I can't remember specifically but I think this sort of phone you picked up the receiver and it connected a line directly to an operator who you would tell the number you wanted to be connected to and she (back then they were all shes) would manually connect you. Also, back in the 1980s I worked at a hotel with a trunk switchboard system that I had to learn and operate, the sort with the plugs on cords that had to be inserted into the circuit board to make a line connection. It seemed really outdated at the time but I do appreciate the weird experience of operating it.
Well, I'm officially old. My family never had a party line but I certainly do remember when they were fairly common. This video brought back a lot of memories!
My parents had party lines right into the late 60s/early 70s. It's crazy hearing them talk about them, they're not even that old!
In a typical two-party line system, you shared the voice line but only your own phone would ring. Each "line" the phone company provides are a set of two wires from the central office, and both parties have phones hooked to the same pair. But the phone company can select which of the two wires they apply the AC ringer voltage. When the phones are installed by the technician, he can wire them to select which of the wires will power the bell ringer. So at least the ring is private to you, and won't alert the nosey neighbor to pick up at the same time. If you were cheap and had four-party service, the phone company provided coded rings you had to listen for (ours was "two longs" ). You could direct dial long distance, but an operator came on line to ask for your own number to bill it to (had to use the honor system). Finally in the early 80s our family was tired of the neighbors phone calls so we paid for private line.
I was staying at a camp in a rural area for some time last summer, and someone described the internet as a party line, but with wifi. Basically the whole street, with at least two campgrounds, and a bunch of houses, all shares the same internet line, so we had to use huge antennas to get internet, and thankfully one was near me. But if the neighbours were watching netflix, it would take a long time to load my emails, and online banking kept timing out. Basically, it meant the only time I could upload my photos or download things I needed, was during lunchtime when others weren't online, or very late at night when people were asleep. At least with internet, it's a bit harder to spy on people, unless you know what to do. I was on a router with a firewall to have an extra protection.
I am "my first phone number was MU-23319" years old.
And I was occasionally yelled at by Mom, "YOU HANG UP THAT PHONE RIGHT THIS INSTANT!"
My mothers family had a party line right up until the early 70s (Rural Canada). Apparently it was a common for women to listen in on their neighbors convorsations, all while trying to be as quiet as possible.
I'm just old enough to have experienced a party line as a kid. Many were the times - all the time, actually - that I picked up and started dialing without check and found myself getting a lecture on phone etiquette from whoever was on the line already. At least our phone only rang when a call was for us, but the rest is all too familiar. When I describe them ot my younger friends, they just look at me in amazement.
Oh, you did leave out the much-used (at least in the movies and on TV) of putting a handkerchief or just your plam over the transmitter of your phone so the people you were eavesdropping on wouldn't hear you breathe. That's not meant as a major criticism, just an FYI. I enjoy your videos because they hit on unusual topics like this. Keep up the good work!
My grandparents were on a party line in Canada. So when I was young in the early 80's, they still had it. All the neighbours knew everything because they were listening in. The party line didn't go away until the lines were updated to work with touch phones. The rotary phone was crazy slow. I would sit there with the receiver down and just see how long it took 9 and 0 to spin back, over and over. Yeah kids, that's what was fun then! 🤣
The proliferation of new area codes, splits and overlapping, and mandatory ten digit local dialling really killed off rotary dial phones. Dialling ten digits took too long, and with only old people still with rotary, they would lose track halfway through and end up with a wrong number dialled.
I love this channel just for the amazing mix of dry humor, information, and variety all presented with amazing quality. Keep up the great work!
I recall the party line was a recurring gag on the TV show Green Acres, where neighbors would pick up and interrupt the call. Also, the husband had to climb up the telephone poll to make a call because the phone company installer didn't bring enough phone cable to run to their house when he hooked up the line. I thought it was an exaggerated take on a rural thing, which it sort of was since rural areas had party lines for longer.
The closest I experienced it was as a kid in a family of 5 trying to share one phone line, with a phone on every floor. Also, when internet was dial-up, negotiating staying online vs. waiting for or placing voice calls.
My grandfather had a party line and a neighbor who was ALWAYS on the phone when he wanted to call in a feed order for his livestock. One day he got fed up with it and went outside to where the lines came into the house, tossed a rope over the top and cinched the rope until the wires crossed. When he released the rope and went back inside the line was miraculously open and he could make his call. He started doing this so often that he left the rope over the wire and before he even picked up the receiver he’d cinch the rope before making any call.
Genius!
My Dad worked for the telephone company from the 1950's to the 1980's and we had a party line.
It's true about picking up the phone and someone else was talking. When I was a kid, I picked up the phone and someone told me to "get off now!" - scared the cr-p right out of me!
In the end, my Dad was the last person to still have the party line. The last few years were wonderful! :D
There are still a few rural areas of Ontario that use party lines. It’s not uncommon in cottage country, where access is difficult and cost prohibitive to upgrade the lines. In those remaining area without strong cell coverage it remains a vital service. There are also some remote parts of the province where the lines still operate on pulse tones instead of touch tone.
I remember my grandparents on a farm in Nebraska having a party line into the 1970s. I think my other grandparents in a small town in Nebraska also had one, but it went away sooner, and I think there was only one other house on it.
In Austria they were called "half or quarter connection", usually connecting 2 or 4 subscribers. But a device at the house level blocked out the other phones from listening in when the line was busy, and often all connections had a unique phone number. That same device decoded the ringing impulses and selected the right terminal, blocking the others. Of course, that also meant you could not ask the other users to get off the phone in an emergency.
Around the 2000s we were looking for a house and apparently one of the houses we looked at was still on a party line and I pondered the issues that would be involved with using DialUp the primary method of Internet access at the time.
Reading other comments here, I have to wonder if it was still shared with other parties by then.
My great granddad had a party line and whenever he would call my great grandma when they were dating he would holler down the street for all his neighbors to get off the line, and just hear a cacophony of phones hanging up
Ha!!
My cabin is still on a party line. We’re the only ones who are still on it. We call it a party of one
My grandparents still had a party line in rural Ohio in the 1980s. I remember getting yelled at when I picked up the phone when it was the neighbor's ring, then I hung up on the person and they had to call back again, which confused me even more.
Your neighbor sounded rude. So glad they got rid of party lines before I was born.
Another great one Phil! Never even thought about what a “party line” was and now a scratch I didn’t even know I had is itched
My grandparents and a friend of mine were on one of the last party lines in rule west Texas. They finally got them a new line in 1995. Only because a tractors plow pulled down 1/2 mile of phone line.
"Oh, I heard it through the Grapevine...."
My parents still technically had a party line in 2003 when my mom died. They'd had it installed in 1969 when they bought their house. I say "technically" because they were the only party on their line. The service was grandfathered in (along with their rotary phone) as my mother refused to upgrade their service.
Phil, these old videos are so goddamn good. I feel like there's a bit more of you in them, this channeled zaniness I love. When I see the differences in views between your older videos and newer ones, I understand. I just hope those new folks will come around and appreciate this stuff as well.
I was a kid in the 90's, and I remember hearing people mention party lines, but I just thought it was another term for a conference call. This is wild.
My family had a party line when I was a kid. It was the 70's in rural Mississippi, I think private lines were available, but pretty expensive that far out of town. There was a family with two teen girls also on our party line, so you can guess who used it the most. When my dad was expecting an important call, he would pick up and tell the girls he needed the line for the next hour or so. By the time I was a teen in the 80's we had a private line, so he could tell me to hang up face to face.
Up until the mid 70s, our extended family had a working farm in rural Wisconsin. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. The phone there was a 3-way party line and had a difinitive ring for each line. Being from the burbs of a big city, I had no clue about them. I can remember gently easing the receiver off the cradle with my ear near the speaker end, trying to be stealthy and see if anyone was talking. I never got caught, and heard other people's conversations a few times. It felt naughty, but it was so novel to me that it was irresistible.
And Pillow Talk is a really cute movie, btw. Full of lots of sexual innuendo. Rather racey!
I guess that ending scene of her in Manhattan in her pajamas was a big scandal!
@@PhilEdwardsInc
The moral majority of the time was clutching their pearls, I'm sure.
In the early 1980's, Camp Zama Japan (a military base) had a local phone system that was ancient and prone to odd behavior. Everyone had a private line, but, especially after a good soaking rain, sometimes you could pick up the phone and hear someone else's conversation. Everytime you picked up the phone, it was like a slot machine ... would you get a dial tone? Would you get someone else's conversation? Meanwhile, right outside the gates in Tokyo, everyone was living in the future already ...
Water must've been getting in somewhere and shorting everything together. I've heard of this happening on regular lines where two lines will get semi bonded through water and grass until the line dries out.
public wifi is a party line unless you use today''s sponsor NordVPN lmaooooo you missed the perfect ad transition with this one. loving the strange places your research has taken you so far phil. your work brings a smile to my face and I almost never smile
Wow you are so right. Dang it, maybe they’ll sponsor your comment.
i like your style dude. i know it might be tempting to do what everyone else does because it’s proven to work but i like the twists you add man, i hope you keep the same touch bro
I DIED with the squaregon joke 😂 Awesome video Phil!!! Also who are we kidding? You are the only human that could make anyone watch a video about porta potty magazines Phil. Any topic you choose… we’re in!
Keep on killing it pal!
You died? How did you write this ????????????
@@snowkatyoutube1419 She died WITH the squaregon joke, which peeked out here in this video. She is now back where she belongs. On the bright side, she's Phil's number one fan in the second dimension.
Yeah, I’m the pal holding a big #1 fan foam finger and selling Phil merch on his behalf. Top sellers in the second dimension, but you didn’t hear it from me ;-)
I’m 36 and I remember having a party line till I was around 9 years old. My brothers and I would get in trouble for picking up the phone and listening to our neighbors’ conversations. He would say “get off the phone” then tell my dad when he returned home from work.
We had party lines here in northern Manitoba, Canada until the late 80s / early 90s. The telephone was a tool. Not something you socially used to chat with friends on. Times have sure changed.
Our neighbor in Sturbridge Massachusetts had a hand cranked phone that would get you to the party line and a hand pump in the kitchen for water from the indoor well. All of this was an incredible achievement compared to how we used to live. If you asked ANY of them about the good old days or how it used to be, the look they would give you would freeze your blood.
Again, you deserve 1 million subs for the quality of your videos 😀
We lived in a large town which had individual lines. Visiting the small-town grandparents forced us to learn and use party-lines, right up into the 80's. Weird to have someone already talking when you pick up the phone.
My favorite video by you!! I loved the social Comme tart paralleling the past to the behaviors of modern technology users. That's fantastic context for modern behavior. That topic specifically - examples of our modern vices by people from the past - is hugely fascinating and would make a great subject for many future videos about the habits of our anxiety-ridden social media - centric society.
In parts of rural Canada, party lines hung on for a long time and at least a few are still around. The last one I remember using was at a friend's cottage in eastern Ontario, around 2011.
When I worked at a summer camp near Parry Sound around 2000, we had a private line but party lines were still common enough in the area. We also didn't have 911 service, so emergency calls were operator-assisted Zenith numbers - separate ones for police, fire and ambulance.
As a person not from the US, really enjoy these videos. They are an interesting and engaging look into history and the culture. Love all the old adverts etc. Keep it up!
Square-agon 🤣 I had no idea this existed, I barely could deal with sharing a landline with my family so glad no longer a thing 😅
I am wondering if one of the vestigial characteristics of party line was that some phones would not disconnect even on "private lines" unless BOTH parties hung up a connected call. If I made a call to a friend and he or I hung up but one of us stayed on the line, we could pick up five minutes later and they would still be there ?
There were certainly places where the telephone exchanges operated kinda like that -- except the _caller_ had to hang up to end the call. The _called_ party could hang up and pick up all they wanted, without it disconnecting.
Once of these places was southern California -- because the area had independent, non-AT&T local phone companies, who used different equipment from the Bell System. ...Which is also partly, in movies, you often hear a dial tone right away when the other person hangs up. For many of the moviemakers, that's how their own phones often _actually_ worked. 🙂
(Tom Scott made a video about this years ago, using actual telephone switching equipment at a museum: ruclips.net/video/bUIiUXvnkUQ/видео.html )
We had a party line until I was in my teens. We shared our line with 3 homes down the road and my uncle next door. Two of the homes down the road were sister, both in their 60’s. They would get on the phone and talk to each other for hours every day. When I was very young, I didn’t realize they knew who I was. I started making dumb noises on the phone and bothering them. I did that until they complained to my mother. I got an ass whipping for that and stayed off the phone from that day on.
BTW, Phone numbers weren’t always 7 digits. Something you might want to research.
Heck, even when they _were_ 7 digits, there were remote rural areas where you didn't have to dial all 7. With a small-enough population, you sometimes had 5- or even 4-digit dialing, since the entire local calling area was on the same exchange. Anyone more distant was a long-distance call, with a 1 in front of the 7-digit number.
I really enjoy your videos and sense of humor, can't wait for more.
My grandmother had one in the 80s and I’d never heard of it before. I searched the house for whoever was on the line when I heard talking on the phone for the first time when I walked by it.
thanks for the vid Phil! I love every topic you bring up as part of this channel! please keep up the good work 😊
Always a pleasure when a new video drops. Love this one!
Loved that one ! Also your humor and editing style goes very well with the weirdness of the concept !
I used to believe that party lines were intentionally designed to connect a group of users, so they could "have a party over the phone" (like a conference call, but more fun and informal).
I guess party lines could theoretically be used for this, but I didn't realize they were often the only phone connection a household had. I used to think every home had a private line, and some opted to join an additional party line just for group conversations.
This video was a lot more entertaining than previous ones. Excited to watch more
The singer at 4:45 is Billy Murray. It's amazing how prolific that guy was in the early recording industry, he must have recorded thousands of records within the space of a few years.
cant wait for squaregon video
We definitely had a party line in the late 70's & probably early 80's... I was too young to care, but I remember many tense arguments between my mother and others on our party line.
Love this! My mom grew up with a party line in rural Indiana in the early 60’s. (Today, she’s in her early 60’s). She talks about how you’d have to wait for the proper number of rings to ensure you weren’t answering a call for the farm up the road. I never thought about the issues they could cause. I’ll have to ask my mom if she ever heard any dirt. Great video!
I remember my grandmother telling stories of her “accidentally” listening to chisme on her party line!
Like yesterday, I remember our party line. Two sharp rings. As kids, we didn't dare answer the phone...it was for 'the big people' to use. If we wanted to say something to a friend, we got on our bikes to go find them. There was a 'Mrs. S--' who was forever listening in, but doing a really bad job of it as her radio was always blaring in the background. My mother would answer the phone and after not ten seconds would say, "Now, 'Mrs. S--' you know this isn't your call, so please hang up the receiver." Another half-minute would go by and Mama would say yet again, "Now, 'Mrs. S--' you know this isn't your call, so please hang up the receiver." Best as I remember, everyone on the party had that trouble with Mrs. S--! Guess that was entertainment, like the video said.
Haha glad you censored Mrs. S name for her protection- still a considerate neighbor!
Since the 60's i have never lived anywhere that had a party line telephone. My parents might not have tolerated such a thing as someone listening in on their private conversations. Admittedly, I lived in a big midwest city early on and only moved to a small town after private lines became much easier to get.
I knew about the existance of party lines from TV and movies.
You could tell when someone picked up a phone to listen in on you. But there were often times when you weren't sure, and paranoia would kick in. There would be a distinct click sound when another phone was picked up or hung up.
Phil, way to go with this one, I love your comedic tone and how you don't overuse it!
I was born in 1947, and lived with my grandparents in a small town in Iowa until I was 7 years old. They had a two party line, and calls went through an operator. Years later, when the local phone company introduced dial calling, they still had to share a line. I moved to a large city in 1955. I don't recall any time after that when my parents had anything but a single, private line. I wonder how much extra that cost.
It cost thirtypoop moneys.
This was such a clever and well executed way of telling the story. Keep it up man!
Thanks VAM! I changed my bathroom faucet the other day and it made me think about your channel…
@@PhilEdwardsInc Happy at 118k subscribers you are still thinking of VAM!... Phil Edwards to the moon!
My dad owned a rural property in the 80's and they had a party line for the neighborhood. I remember going out there as a kid and experiencing the oddity of hearing someone else's conversation instead of a dialtone.
i loved this video thanks. another interesting thing i learned awhile about old phone numbers is that for a time they started with 2 letters.
growing up my uncles cabin still had a party line that covered the whole side of the lake, it stuck around until the area got reliable cell service and everyone just stopped using landlines all together
Always such strange and interesting topics. Thanks Phil!!!
I like your channel because of the interesting info about various interesting things. It's like going down some Wikipedia rabbit hole, but with like, better sources and info about how the subject affects other things in our society.
Coming from eastern Europe, we had a party line until the early 2000s. This coincided with the dial-up era of the internet. Let's say that our line-partner didn't like me 😬
I remember when they got phones on Little House On The Prairie. Mrs. Olsen was the creep listening in on everyone's calls.
What a nightmare. Given how our sense of entitlement seems to have grown, I think there would be a lot of fights and even deaths between people who had to share a party line.
I do find it really interesting though. The interplay of technology and morality has been with us for a long time.
Yeah it'd be horrible! Imagine someone having a heart attack and dying because they couldn't get through, or someone not being able to report a fire because someone else is tying up the line! Wouldn't have happened back then, people weren't as entitled.
Growing up we had a party line until 1981 or 1982. By that time it was a choice via economics instead of technology. Party lines were simply cheaper with our rural telephone company. We also had to pay extra for touch tone service, which we did not do until we moved to the private line in late 1982.
YES I REMEMBERED PILLOW TALK (1959) WHEN U SAID “PARTY LINE” THANK GOD U PUT IT
As a teenager I was outed by our party line. It was really graphic so the old lady listening in got what she deserved.
I had a party line when I was a kid, with my grandparents. It wasn't a big deal, because people didn't use the phone very much anyway. It was a much bigger deal making a long distance call, and saying as much as possible in a few minutes, because it would cost over a dollar a minute. You did not want to get busted for racking up a hundred dollars in LD charges, most parents didn't let that slide without severe punishment.
when I was *very* young I remember talking to my mom (in Portland, OR) from Grandpa & Grandma’s (in Lebanon, OR). mom had a single line phone but G&G still had a party line.
There was (or is?) a 1950s exhibit at the Ohio History Connection that was a recreation of a 1950s home and they had a phone that had a party line recording when you picked it up. It was really cool.
lol i have a video tomorrow that relates to this very house!!!
My greatgrandmother and her next door neighbor shared a partyline in South Wales, and would bash on the shared wall (semi detached house) when they wanted to talk to eachother
My current house has been in the family for over 30 years and when I first moved here in the early 90s we had a party line. It wasn't as common by then but yeah, they still existed in rural areas.
In the early 80s, my grandparents house in PA had a partyline. It was shared with the neighbor in their duplex.
When my family moved from Chicago to Atlanta in 1971 I was 12. It was the first time I encountered such. It was really weird to me. It took the south a while to get private lines I recon.
I bought the book after watching your last video. Your material reminds me a bit of Technology Connections, and I love every second of it.
That’s awesome. Checked it out yet? They sent me some other ones too I’m psyched to read.
@@PhilEdwardsInc Not yet, but very much on my reading list, once exams are over. :D
My dad has a very large extended family that all lived on the same rural road. They shared a party line until the 80s. I was rather shocked when he told me about it.
Our state only repealed the "Failure to Yield a Party Line" statute in 2020. The rural area I worked in the 1980's and 90's still had many party lines and I actually have have written summonses for the charge. The issue in those day's was related to people using dial up computer service. If they were doing some download and refusing to shut it down for an emergency call, they got cited.