I served in the Peace Corps in a small town (maybe 20,000 people) in Kazakhstan in the mid 1990s. One of the locals took me to the local telephone exchange - a building about half the size of a football field filled with bank after bank of analog switches. It made a tremendous racket. I heard that soon after I left, they replaced the whole thing with a single PC.
Sounds like it was an exchange based on Strowger switch's. On nights it was possible to British Telecom engineers to "follow" a call physically across their part of London as it worked through each switch stack. As to a single PC, it may have had a bit more than that, but nothing more than a filing cabinet size box that the PC connected to.
I've seen similar miniaturization. From the old "stepwise" mechanical switches filling a large house (what looks like a house from the outside) to a DMS-100 in a building that would fit inside a single car garage. And then a "softswitch" that fit in 7U (23" telco rack) that could handle everything in the entire CO building. (Alcatel 600e + Lucent 5ESS) [not counting multiplexers to fan out to 10,000 to 100,000 POTS lines.] These days, with everything being IP (VoIP/SIP), a Raspberry Pi can do it - aka. the single PC.
with a single pc the problem would be how to attach all the lines. it could probably route as many simultaneous calls though - but what's more likely is that more such boxes were placed around the city instead of the single building.
One of the rights of passage for the newbies was to go to electrical central and get the batteries for the sound powered phones for routine maintenance.
Thanks for telling the truth about this subject. I once used our H.A.M. Radio to talk to my Parents back home in SC. We were near Lebanon. The Radiomen were great on our Ship. USS Independence. 1981-85.
This was likely through the ship's MARS station. Most MARS ops were 'hams' - licensed amateur radio operators. In the Navy, MARS was a collateral duty - I was an aviation electronics technician (AT) on EA6B jets, but in my off time I would often operate the MARS station (USS Enterprise, USS Lincoln) - and when ashore (at NAS Whidbey Island, WA), would operate at the base MARS station handling traffic, including the well known (and popular) ship to shore phone patches. A MARS guy could be a pretty popular when he can get the call through....!
When I was in 73-76 USS Midway CV-41, my GQ station was a phone talker. The headset had some tricks. All three parts (two ears and mouthpiece) were the same -- you could listen to the mouthpiece and speak into the ears. The mouthpiece had a pushbutton switch which normally disconnected it, otherwise it would pick up all the local sounds for everyone on the circuit to hear. Fun: the mouthpiece pushbutton had a rotating cap which did absolutely nothing. But it was easy to convince the new guys it was a volume control.
Volume control, LOL! Good one... For people's information, the sound-powered phone talker at 5:20 has the chest-mounted mouthpiece folded down out of his face. You can see the back of it next to the sleepy guy on the red phone. The mouthpieces are on articulated arms that make them pleasantly adjustable, and allow you to keep them (and yourself) out of trouble. They were still in use 10 years ago for station-to-station communication during UNREP, and sound-powered phones in general still form a vital emergency backup on modern civilian ships. Volume and clarity depend almost entirely on the phone talker themselves, plus a little on your receiver.
On the museum ship I work on now (USS Hornet) the kids are absolutely enthralled by the rotary phones attached to the wall. I have to show them how to use it. Quite fun.
When I was deployed on a carrier in '91 we had one option for calling home that was available to everyone while at sea. There was a phone in the library for calling off-ship that cost $10 per minute with a minimum of 3 minutes.
Nah, you just had to know someone who had access to a POTS line to barter with. My buddy let me use the phone late at night in exchange for food/candy. Always have something to trade.
When I worked as a ski lift operator in the early 1980s the phone from the bottom to the top was a Navy surplus sound phone. We also had a regular telephone to call other places on the mountain.
Sound powered telephones are still used to this day even on new ski lifts at least here in France. To call you have to rotate the wheel at the back of the handset but it's not really a crank, just a wheel that you grab with your entire hand.
@@psirvent8 the beeper was a separate system, electrical. 1 beep to talk, 2 beeps clear to start? reply 2 beeps okay to start. Don’t remember what 3 beeps meant. 4 beeps, have a problem going to be a while.
I did that radio call - land line combo in 1982, though not on a warship. I was in the middle of the northwest Pacific on the Glomar Challenger as part of the Deep Sea Drilling Project. We radioed the off-shift doctor in San Diego who made a collect call to my wife in Houston. It worked, but such that very few people tried it more than once
>Glomar Challenger Searching.... Wow. I guess you were one of the last to sail on her, before she retired in 83. And she collected midatlantic deep core samples to gather data for plate techtonics for 15 years. Very cool.
@@kurtu5 On my cruise we collected the first Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary samples from the deep Pacific, among other things. Found melt spherules and the infamous Iridium anomaly
At about 1:38 in the video, there are racks of grey equipment to your left. Blow that up to full-screen and you'll discover that it's Lorain power equipment. I worked for Lorain Products and its successor companies for 28 years starting in 1983. That equipment looks like current production for that era, so I think your phone system power plant is from the 1980's. Look at the nameplates on the units with a voltmeter and an ammeter on them. The model numbers ought to start with either RHM (most likely) or RL. The RHM chargers were phase-controlled SCR bridges and thus available in 3-phase only. This seems likely with your 3-phase, 440V power system. There were 3-phase RL chargers as well that used two single-phase ferroresonant converters in a Scott-T configuration, but I find that less likely for your installation. It wouldn't be all that hard to get that power plant running again. Replace the big fruit juice can electrolytic capacitors and the chargers will likely run. Those things were tough as nails. That's why the customers loved them so. Even 40 years later, there are a lot of RHM and RL chargers still in service, so Emerson Network Power (the present successor company) ought to be able to provide suitable capacitors. Tell them that Will from engineering sent you. The old hands will know who you mean even to this day.
I repair old power supplies, and we got a few in yesterday which have the same vintage look. Transistors from 1980/1982, design we estimated was from the mid-1970s. Capacitors were astoundingly okay, a single carbon film resistor had drifted low causing a diode to overcurrent. Replace both of those, and it's off for another 40 years of service! Some of the stuff back then was incredibly robust. But then again, we now have transistors smaller than your pinky fingernail that outperform in every metric a 1980s transistor that is larger than your thumb. There's a reason we've moved on. Don't get me started on power factor and efficiency!
@@phillyphakename1255 One thing a tiny transistor does not do better than a big transistor is power dissipation :) It's more difficult to get the heat off a TO-92 than a TO-3 :)
@@Pentium100MHz true, if you are using it as a load, but for everything else... But for everything else? A Rds on of 4.6 milliohms? With a resistance that low, you don't have to dissipate much heat so you don't need much surface area.
@@phillyphakename1255 Linear regulator, Class AB audio amplifier can create a lot of heat. If used just as a switch, then yeah, most of the time it should be fine. For something like 10A I would probably want something bigger than a TO-92 with its ~200C/W thermal resistance though.
as an old IC man, i can assure everyone that sound actually powers a sound powered phone, and if you dont believe that, maybe its PFM! that wall mounted type G needs a serious cleaning, the dial isnt supposed to take all week to return.
Sound power telephones were one of the first things we used in my apprenticeship . Good to learn connecting and wiring techniques with no external power . They are amazingly good and useful for any situation .
Interesting that they made them work in a battleship. The power from a dynamic microphone has to be very low, so the volume at the other end also has to be pretty quiet. On the other hand, there probably would be a lot of noise inside the room, so it had to be hard to use those phones. Of course, better than nothing.
Sound powers, the circuit, Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, & the rotor dial "PULSE" system used "Stepper" drum relays. Updated to transistors , early 80's by AT&T, contract.
my father was aboard the USS Jason AR8, his rating was IC3. He brought a bunch of the older sound powered phones home with him as they were being scrapped. We used them between the house and garage. Pizo electrice crystal that generates the power. They were neat to play with.
Dad worked on the manufacturing side for IT&T. I believe at least 2 of us did science fair projection in the 60's on how rotary dial phones worked. We would also occasionally go to the office with Dad, and saw switching equipment being built. Same process as building a replacement wiring harness for a car but scaled up. Large sheets of plywood, fitted with pegs and people, following a diagram with various colored wires
An older friend of mine worked for NOAA in the 1970s and his ship frequently docked in Valparaiso Chile, and there was one bar in Valparaiso owned by a German guy which was the sailors haunt. He actually met an aging former U-boat captain there in the 70s. But what made this bar the one all the sailors went to is that the bar owner had a policy of allowing foreign sailors (who were mainly Americans and Canadians) to get a free 5 minute long distance call, which was very expensive in those days, but by doing this it caused All these foreign sailors to hang out here and buy beer and food from him. He also would keep your cash in the bar’s safe and give you a receipt so if your ship was stopped in Valpo for several days you could have your cash there and not worry about losing all of it in a robbery. These days cell phones and credit cards make these services kind of obsolete
RN sound power phones had a shutter system on individual phones , the growler was enough power to release a luminous tag behind a glass on the case so you could easily identify the unit with the call . It reset when the handset was used .
I was stationed on board the USS Stennis during OEF. For the first part of the deployment the "pay phones" worked intermittently. Some of that had to do with OPSEC, some of it had to do with the equipment on board. Later in the deployment the phones were working almost 24/7. MWR in conjunction with the NEX started passing out 15 minute phone cards for free at about the middle of deployment. AT&T also passed out 10 minute phone cards. There were stacks of them in the First Class Mess. I still have a few unused cards in my desk drawer.
I was a 31C in the Army 1984-1989. We operated the AM radio teletype sets and usually the short wave FM crypto sets. I was sitting on top of a ridge about 10 kilometers southeast of Pannmunjon above Bangmok-ri as a relay station when we caught the MARS station in Pusan. I called my mom in Colorado Springs from a mountain top on a radio and it didn't cost me a dime. That was technologically amazing at the time.
When I visited in April (2023) I tried some of those rotary phones and most of the telephone instruments themselves needed repair as does the one you demonstrate. I was able to make another phone ring, but we couldn't have a conversation. After the phone itself works you still need to make cross connects and switch assignments. That PBX should be capable of interfacing with outside lines when tied up.
The old HAM radio system was called MARS. Or "Military Affiliate Radio Stations". And it was quite a cool system, as it let those of us stationed overseas make calls home for free. Many times in the 1980s I took advantage of that as calling from Japan or Panama was incredibly expensive.
I was going to hope in a video about shipboard phones you were going to mention the ability for ham radio to patch into the public switch telephone network, my friend's dad used that a few times to call for a ride home from school
It was a pleasure for me to see again one of what you called "the coke machine" . The red box for radiotelephone communications between ships in a squadron. I was part of the Hughes Aircraft Co. group that developed that system to replace older telephone crossbar switches. I also had to demonstrate for VIPs that two different signals, one plain and the other meant for encryption before being transmitted could not be detected even on adjacent channels. Crosstalk was one of the problems with the systems that ours replaced on Navy warships of all kinds.
Even nowadays, whenever in sight of land, the crew of modern ships take any opportunity they can get to go on deck and stand at the rail, holding their phones up, in hopes of getting enough signal to call home. Some people spend a small fortune on SIM cards and roaming plans. Modern cargo ships are very rarely in sight of land.
Its funny. I like long for content. So when Drachinifel recommended your channel a few years back, I would just give it a try. The funny thing, I like your short form content. I watch you far more than I thought I would. You are really good at what you do. Cheers.
WOW... It's "Bell System At The Bottom Of The Sea" (for real)! That's how I have All my "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" episodes titled on my computer! I knew Admiral Nelson has a Western Electric 5-line Touch -Tone "2565" on the desk in his cabin (aboard the Seaview) , but I didn't know it was Really done! It used to drive me crazy as a kid when I'd be watching "Voyage -Sea" AND there'd be all these "Bell System"/"Western Electric" business, and house telephones installed all over the Seaview. Admiral Nelson even had a model 554 (Wall Phone) mounted over his head on the wall of his bunk. I would be tugging at my dad's pants -leg while laying on the floor watching TV while my dad was sitting on the couch reading his paper. Dad!...Dad! Look, ya see... there's a "Telephone" on his desk! How can that be? There aren't any telephone poles on the bottom of the Ocean. How's he supposed to make a phone call? It used to amuse my dad (a Bell System employee) that kids associate things around them. (Phones ONLY exist in houses and buildings). Well it's cool to see that they're still at it today. I like it (phones on ships), but I would have expected they use "Dick Tracy" watches today. I'm glad some things don't change. Jeff
There are a lot of ways to create and restore success for the ship, it is to have complete amenities designed for its purpose, be it leisure, get-away, or vacation plans that has everything. Congratulations.
My first voyage on a merchant ship introduced me to the Sound Powered Telephone. It was on a 66000 dwt tanker and used for communication between the bridge and the engine room. It was very difficult to have an easy conversation when standing next to a 10 cylinder B&W diesel engine, with only a very poor open sided booth to muffle the noise. No engine control rooms in those days. At least the later ships upon which I served had engine control rooms and proper telephone systems, with phones also in our cabins.
We had these in the ADM Flour mill in Enid, Oklahoma, which was built in 1928. When i worked there in about 2001, they still worked great. It had a button nearby which honked a system of claxon horns through the plant. Everyone had their own "honk". Mine was 2 long. It more or less followed Morse code. The lower you were, the more compex the honk.
I wonder if that was for price, reliability or the fact that its a flour mill, lots of powder and as such minimizing energized spark sources is important. Because it seems like the current made by a sound phone would be so low there is minimal chance of an arc at any time.
Some of my shipmates discovered that when the Enterprise was tied up in Subic Bay, and there were circuits available, they could make free calls home on the Autovon system right from the phone on the desk in our work center.
When I was on active duty on Stone County my GQ and sea detail station was as a phone talker on the bridge. However one stand as a phone talker occurred when I was on the bridge on a reserve training cruise on a Fletcher DD. As you mention sound power circuits are essentially party lines. We were on a firing run on San Nicholas Island near San Diego. I had CIC on my phone circuit. The CO looked at me and in a loud voice said get the CIC watch officer on the phone. I spoke into the phone saying the Captain wanted the CIC watch officer on the phone. I was told that he was on the phone, and I told the Captain that he was on the phone. I then heard the CO ask the the CIC watch officer why he had not told the bridge that a fishing boat was illegally moored in the bay over which we were scheduled to fire some 5-inch rounds toward the island. Because of this incursion the firing run was cancelled. I don't know what might have happened to the CIC watch officer.
FWIW: I was in the US Coast Guard, and spent my first year and a half or so assigned to a USCG Cutter. I hever used the headset-style sound powered phones, but used the telephone-style type {similar to the _"growler"_ shown here} occasionally when communiating throughout the Cutter. It seems like our _growlers_ actually rang a bell, but it was so long ago -- 1986 to late 1987 -- I no longer remember for sure.
I'm always intrigued by mass. We think of a ship and we think of the whole, weapons, engines… But then I always think of chairs, tables- & Now I wonder how much 800 telephones masses! Everything cuts into the reserve buoyancy, and this isn't really the sort of thing that can calculate for with any degree of fine-tuned accuracy I would think. Just food for thought.
Super interesting, thank you! I appreciate when curators and others with a crazy amount of knowledge walk us through all the details. Gives us an insight into the passion required to keep these kinds of museums going.
Sound-powered phones really are powered by the sound of the voices on either end. They simply have very high-output dynamic microphones and very sensitive receivers (earphones) so that the output of the microphone can drive the receiver on the other end directly, with no amplification or other power.
The most interesting way I ever called back home was in 2003 when I was deployed to the Baghdad Airport (BIAP). One of my signal teams telephone "customers" was the FBI. Yes THE FBI! They set up two satellite phone for our battalion to use 24/7 at NO CHARGE! Thanks! The first time I called home my Mother thought I had somehow snuck back to the states! No Mom, I am still at BIAP! It took a couple of minutes to convince her!
Have a set of sound power phones at work. I both love and hate them. Sometimes it's a crystal clear and sometimes it's so garbled it's easier to send a runner. Probably don't help they're age, and heavy use. I believe they're war bult probably '43 or '44.
i don't know if they had power meters in the 1930's, but modern ships use an electrical strain gauge attached to the shaft, paired with an RMP reading. torque from the strain gained multiplied by rotation rate and a conversion constant equals power
Yeah, you're off brother. I served between 1988 and 1992. We had no pay phone for hooking up to shore lines. You had to go to the top of the pier and stand in line to use the pay phones there. In 2003, however, when I went back to visit the ship for her decommissioning, there was a pay phone installed right by the mess decks, like you said. But that was obviously installed sometime between 1993 and 2003. Also, we did not need Ham Radio operators. We had Sattelite phone capability. It was called the "MARS" system. I have no idea what MARS stood for, but that is what it was called. Occasionally, they would open it up and give people 10 minutes to make a phone call, if you wanted to go stand in line to do it. New Jersey was still in commission when I was in. Iowa and Wisconsin were in Norfolk with us. If we had/did not have these things, they had/did not have these things.
I was a sailor on uss Carl Vinson even I never understood how sound powered phones worked. And being an AO in the mag it was the only way to call ordinance control and operate elevators while down there.
I can't speak about the entire phone system on a Navy ship however, my Dad served aboard USS Shannon (DD-737/DM-25/MMD-25) during World War II and he often told me that the sound powered phones were manufactured by Western Electric, the manufacturing unit of the Bell System. Considering how big Western Electric was and how involved it was in defense I would not be surprised that Western Electric made all of the phone equipment for Navy ships.
given the quality of their civilian phones used by Ma Bell, I imagine they were some tough SOBs. Those old WE phones that people had in homes were very well constructed.
This reminds me of when i was deployed to iraq my wife was deployed to Afghanistan. There was no real way to call each other at that time. I could call home but couldn't call Afghanistan. The only way we could contact each other was a system called the blue force tracker. i could zoom out and click on her companys TOC and leave a message. Went 13 months without being able to talk to each other. Except over the Blue force tracker. My company Commander let me use the company sat phone the last 2 months of deployment she could call me.
It would have been SO COOL if the ship had it's original WWII phone system in place! Still, this equipment is still neat in it's own right. The sound powered phones are way cool. Yes, they're sound powered, but they're also electrically powered- by electricity generated from sound. ;)
I grew up in Kitsap county WA where the USS turner Joy is a museum. And as a kid when I saw “sound powered phone” I assumed it was somehow powered by Puget Sound which was the only body of saltwater I saw until I was an adult
You’re probably a bit busy right now with the dry dock and all, but do you know what system was used before the 80s era PBX? I can’t imagine a manual switchboard would be a good idea. Did they use some sort of crossbar or step by step?
So, does the sound vibration of your voice generate electricity and send your voice to the other end, or is is more akin to two cans and a length of string?
The voice generates an electrical signal that travels through copper wires. Some of the shipboard circuits will have electrical amplifiers that can strengthen the signal if the stations are far apart, but are not necessary for functionality.
5:00 looking at that switch to the right of the phone connection, I have to wonder who is the last no rate blue jacket with a can of never dull was that polished the brass. The bright work's looking kind of sad there Mr. curator!
So a sound powered phone is basically like one of those phone things on a playground where you speak into the cone on one end and you hear it on the other end?
999 was chosen explicitly to be the longest return, to avoid false dialing. In New Zealand, phone dials were numbered the opposite way, and as a result the emergency number there is 111
The story I always hear is that most countries numbers start with 9 because it’s very unlikely that the wind will knock the wires in just the right way 9 times in quick semi rhythmic succession preventing accidental dials. Edit: after reading the Wikipedia article on pulse dialing this is exactly the case for NZ also, it’s just the number one is encoded as nine pulses instead of one pulse like most of the rest of the worlds systems were.
With sound powered phones, does someone have to be listening at the moment you are speaking or is there a way to alert someone that you need to speak with them or?
Ahhh.... the trusty 4 digit aka Dimension 2000. Carriers had two diff ones, ship(7xxx) and Air department (6xxx). Think it was due to trunk capacity of lines as to being two systems (at least the ones i was on were)
I don't know if you intended to say it this way, but when using a sound powered phone you keep the button pushed the whole time (hand sets, not headset talkers)
Very good , sometimes with an extremely long run they might be a little faint but still clear and audible . Ideal if the ship has no power and other people are aboard .
Any chance we know what the number for the captains quarters is? Because we need a “dial XXXX for a good time” sticker with a picture of the battleship
@Ryan S- Have you ever done a show on what ship held the title “ Worlds largest warship” for the longest period of time? Although I don’t think any Iowas ever were in that position it may be an interesting topic. I wonder if it may be Hood due to the treaties that were in place after her completion.
I believe they still use sound powered phones on the ships. Nuc boats/Subs still used them when I was in , it would make zero sense to delete them. They were a powerful DC use item.
4:29 What if a wire is shorted to "ground"? Test if and which wire touching the metal wall will stop communications. I suspect that if both ends of one damaged wire are touching the wall, then the signal will pass. Test it in a video?
Not in that situation as it would be a dead short , but we used to use handsets to identify cores on multi stranded cables , as long as you have two conductors insulated from each other and not too much resistance they work .
You will have a horrible 60 Hz hum which affects the whole circuit. If you ground BOTH ends of the SAME wire, it wouldn't be a short, but would most likely be unuseable.
My goodness, I cant believe how slow the rotary dial rotates back! Even with only 4 digits in a number, the battle could be over before you reach somebody to tell its about to start! 😅
That phone dial is not working properly. A "0" should be 10 pulses per second. Stated differently, it should take exactly 1 second for the dial to return to the rest position when it released while dialing zero. By the mid/late 80's, most of the rotary dials on board my ship had been replaced by standard Touch Tone push-button dial pads. The older step and crossbar switches only supported rotary dial. Once the AT&T Dimension 2000 PBX was installed, the only thing stopping the conversion of sets to TT was time and budgets.
Imagine telling someone in the 90s that we all carry around glass phones that break if you drop them and don’t know any numbers and phone books are gone
In "Red Storm Rising" two Los Angeles Class submarine commanders use a "Gertrude" (sound-powered phone) to speak ship-to-ship. Is this actually possible? And how would they broadcast the soundwaves? It seems like they could patch the phone into a sonar set for sending and receiving if the subs were physically close enough to one another. Has anyone here with service time on board a US sub ever heard of this being done, or is this pure fiction? Thanks for any information!
That rotary dial phone's dial is rotating way to slow. It needs maintenance, cleaning of the worm gear assembly and regreasing. Then it will rotate at the correct speed and then it will send dialing pulses at the proper rate which is required for it to work correctly. You should see if you have any volunteers who would be willing to clean and lubricate the dialing mechanisms on any phones that have this draggy dial problem. It's maybe an hour to service one phone, start to finish.
that "growler" made a cute noise, not a terrible one. i wouldn't even call it a growl. maybe a case of age and wear and it was more angry sounding baxk in tge day.
I was a Storekeeper and frequently received supply requests for Sound Powered Phone batteries. Funny at first, I'd hand them a couple of AA batteries just to get them out of my storeroom. Then it got ridiculous. I'd get 5-10 requests per day. I changed my strategy and would explain to the clueless dolt, that Sound Powered Phone batteries are considered "Countrolled Equippage" and required Dept Head or higher signature approval. A couple of days later, the Captain came over the 1MC. "Attention all hands. This is the Captain speaking. There is no such thing as Sound Powered Phone batteries. That is all." 😂
Ah, the fun things that people sent the more junior crewmen to try to get (in no particular order): 1. Key to the sea chest, 2. Sound - powered phone batteries, 3. Left - handed monkey wrench, 4. Relative bearing grease.
I served in the Peace Corps in a small town (maybe 20,000 people) in Kazakhstan in the mid 1990s. One of the locals took me to the local telephone exchange - a building about half the size of a football field filled with bank after bank of analog switches. It made a tremendous racket. I heard that soon after I left, they replaced the whole thing with a single PC.
Unlikely.
Sounds like it was an exchange based on Strowger switch's. On nights it was possible to British Telecom engineers to "follow" a call physically across their part of London as it worked through each switch stack. As to a single PC, it may have had a bit more than that, but nothing more than a filing cabinet size box that the PC connected to.
I've seen similar miniaturization. From the old "stepwise" mechanical switches filling a large house (what looks like a house from the outside) to a DMS-100 in a building that would fit inside a single car garage. And then a "softswitch" that fit in 7U (23" telco rack) that could handle everything in the entire CO building. (Alcatel 600e + Lucent 5ESS) [not counting multiplexers to fan out to 10,000 to 100,000 POTS lines.] These days, with everything being IP (VoIP/SIP), a Raspberry Pi can do it - aka. the single PC.
with a single pc the problem would be how to attach all the lines.
it could probably route as many simultaneous calls though - but what's more likely is that more such boxes were placed around the city instead of the single building.
Boooooo
One of the rights of passage for the newbies was to go to electrical central and get the batteries for the sound powered phones for routine maintenance.
But what is the federal stock number for the batteries? You have to have that if you want batteries!
@@francissullivan590042
🤣🤣🤣
Thanks for telling the truth about this subject. I once used our H.A.M. Radio to talk to my Parents back home in SC. We were near Lebanon. The Radiomen were great on our Ship. USS Independence. 1981-85.
*73! N1SFM*
if you're really a ham, you know ham doesn't stand for anything
what does H.A.M stand for? lmao
@@josephhacker6508 😏🤔 From K1MMF to N1OVA, N1SFM- I wasn't aware it stood for anything.
This was likely through the ship's MARS station. Most MARS ops were 'hams' - licensed amateur radio operators. In the Navy, MARS was a collateral duty - I was an aviation electronics technician (AT) on EA6B jets, but in my off time I would often operate the MARS station (USS Enterprise, USS Lincoln) - and when ashore (at NAS Whidbey Island, WA), would operate at the base MARS station handling traffic, including the well known (and popular) ship to shore phone patches. A MARS guy could be a pretty popular when he can get the call through....!
When I was in 73-76 USS Midway CV-41, my GQ station was a phone talker. The headset had some tricks. All three parts (two ears and mouthpiece) were the same -- you could listen to the mouthpiece and speak into the ears. The mouthpiece had a pushbutton switch which normally disconnected it, otherwise it would pick up all the local sounds for everyone on the circuit to hear.
Fun: the mouthpiece pushbutton had a rotating cap which did absolutely nothing. But it was easy to convince the new guys it was a volume control.
the standard sp handset is the same, talking into the ear piece was quite common when you had an amplified speaker.
Volume control, LOL! Good one... For people's information, the sound-powered phone talker at 5:20 has the chest-mounted mouthpiece folded down out of his face. You can see the back of it next to the sleepy guy on the red phone. The mouthpieces are on articulated arms that make them pleasantly adjustable, and allow you to keep them (and yourself) out of trouble. They were still in use 10 years ago for station-to-station communication during UNREP, and sound-powered phones in general still form a vital emergency backup on modern civilian ships. Volume and clarity depend almost entirely on the phone talker themselves, plus a little on your receiver.
On the museum ship I work on now (USS Hornet) the kids are absolutely enthralled by the rotary phones attached to the wall. I have to show them how to use it. Quite fun.
When I was deployed on a carrier in '91 we had one option for calling home that was available to everyone while at sea. There was a phone in the library for calling off-ship that cost $10 per minute with a minimum of 3 minutes.
And I thought jail rates were rough, holy molly... and that's was in 90's fiat notes.
Nah, you just had to know someone who had access to a POTS line to barter with. My buddy let me use the phone late at night in exchange for food/candy. Always have something to trade.
As if the military doesn't shaft members enough. I'm sure there is some contractor that is raking in all of that cash.
2010 deployment uss Carl Vinson. We had about 8 phones capable of outbound from at&t. 20$ prepaid cost would last about 20 min.
When I worked as a ski lift operator in the early 1980s the phone from the bottom to the top was a Navy surplus sound phone. We also had a regular telephone to call other places on the mountain.
understandable, I can imagine they wanted at least one link that was always assured to work if something went wrong with the lift.
Sound powered telephones are still used to this day even on new ski lifts at least here in France.
To call you have to rotate the wheel at the back of the handset but it's not really a crank, just a wheel that you grab with your entire hand.
@@psirvent8 ours we had a button that activated a beeper top and bottom, pick up hand set, beep, other end picks up hand set, thing was always live.
@@someonespadreButtons means it must've had a battery for the ringer.
@@psirvent8 the beeper was a separate system, electrical. 1 beep to talk, 2 beeps clear to start? reply 2 beeps okay to start. Don’t remember what 3 beeps meant. 4 beeps, have a problem going to be a while.
I did that radio call - land line combo in 1982, though not on a warship. I was in the middle of the northwest Pacific on the Glomar Challenger as part of the Deep Sea Drilling Project. We radioed the off-shift doctor in San Diego who made a collect call to my wife in Houston. It worked, but such that very few people tried it more than once
>Glomar Challenger
Searching.... Wow. I guess you were one of the last to sail on her, before she retired in 83. And she collected midatlantic deep core samples to gather data for plate techtonics for 15 years. Very cool.
@@kurtu5 On my cruise we collected the first Cretaceous/Tertiary Boundary samples from the deep Pacific, among other things. Found melt spherules and the infamous Iridium anomaly
At about 1:38 in the video, there are racks of grey equipment to your left. Blow that up to full-screen and you'll discover that it's Lorain power equipment. I worked for Lorain Products and its successor companies for 28 years starting in 1983. That equipment looks like current production for that era, so I think your phone system power plant is from the 1980's.
Look at the nameplates on the units with a voltmeter and an ammeter on them. The model numbers ought to start with either RHM (most likely) or RL. The RHM chargers were phase-controlled SCR bridges and thus available in 3-phase only. This seems likely with your 3-phase, 440V power system. There were 3-phase RL chargers as well that used two single-phase ferroresonant converters in a Scott-T configuration, but I find that less likely for your installation.
It wouldn't be all that hard to get that power plant running again. Replace the big fruit juice can electrolytic capacitors and the chargers will likely run. Those things were tough as nails. That's why the customers loved them so. Even 40 years later, there are a lot of RHM and RL chargers still in service, so Emerson Network Power (the present successor company) ought to be able to provide suitable capacitors.
Tell them that Will from engineering sent you. The old hands will know who you mean even to this day.
I repair old power supplies, and we got a few in yesterday which have the same vintage look. Transistors from 1980/1982, design we estimated was from the mid-1970s. Capacitors were astoundingly okay, a single carbon film resistor had drifted low causing a diode to overcurrent. Replace both of those, and it's off for another 40 years of service!
Some of the stuff back then was incredibly robust. But then again, we now have transistors smaller than your pinky fingernail that outperform in every metric a 1980s transistor that is larger than your thumb. There's a reason we've moved on. Don't get me started on power factor and efficiency!
@@phillyphakename1255 One thing a tiny transistor does not do better than a big transistor is power dissipation :) It's more difficult to get the heat off a TO-92 than a TO-3 :)
@@Pentium100MHz true, if you are using it as a load, but for everything else...
But for everything else? A Rds on of 4.6 milliohms? With a resistance that low, you don't have to dissipate much heat so you don't need much surface area.
@@phillyphakename1255 Linear regulator, Class AB audio amplifier can create a lot of heat. If used just as a switch, then yeah, most of the time it should be fine. For something like 10A I would probably want something bigger than a TO-92 with its ~200C/W thermal resistance though.
@@Pentium100MHz ah, fair enough. My job doesn't use any linear power amplifiers, didn't think about that.
as an old IC man, i can assure everyone that sound actually powers a sound powered phone, and if you dont believe that, maybe its PFM! that wall mounted type G needs a serious cleaning, the dial isnt supposed to take all week to return.
What is PFM?
@@cleverusername9369Pure Fucking Magic.
Thanks, Lefty!
"Pure Fun Magic"
@@j_taylorlol. I bet the f stands for a different adjective in the navy’s terms lol😂😂😂
Are sound powered phones harder to hear than normal ones (that I assume are amplified)
Sound power telephones were one of the first things we used in my apprenticeship . Good to learn connecting and wiring techniques with no external power . They are amazingly good and useful for any situation .
Interesting that they made them work in a battleship. The power from a dynamic microphone has to be very low, so the volume at the other end also has to be pretty quiet. On the other hand, there probably would be a lot of noise inside the room, so it had to be hard to use those phones. Of course, better than nothing.
Sound powers, the circuit, Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, & the rotor dial "PULSE" system used "Stepper" drum relays. Updated to transistors , early 80's by AT&T, contract.
my father was aboard the USS Jason AR8, his rating was IC3. He brought a bunch of the older sound powered phones home with him as they were being scrapped. We used them between the house and garage. Pizo electrice crystal that generates the power. They were neat to play with.
Dad worked on the manufacturing side for IT&T. I believe at least 2 of us did science fair projection in the 60's on how rotary dial phones worked. We would also occasionally go to the office with Dad, and saw switching equipment being built. Same process as building a replacement wiring harness for a car but scaled up. Large sheets of plywood, fitted with pegs and people, following a diagram with various colored wires
An older friend of mine worked for NOAA in the 1970s and his ship frequently docked in Valparaiso Chile, and there was one bar in Valparaiso owned by a German guy which was the sailors haunt. He actually met an aging former U-boat captain there in the 70s. But what made this bar the one all the sailors went to is that the bar owner had a policy of allowing foreign sailors (who were mainly Americans and Canadians) to get a free 5 minute long distance call, which was very expensive in those days, but by doing this it caused All these foreign sailors to hang out here and buy beer and food from him.
He also would keep your cash in the bar’s safe and give you a receipt so if your ship was stopped in Valpo for several days you could have your cash there and not worry about losing all of it in a robbery.
These days cell phones and credit cards make these services kind of obsolete
RN sound power phones had a shutter system on individual phones , the growler was enough power to release a luminous tag behind a glass on the case so you could easily identify the unit with the call . It reset when the handset was used .
I was stationed on board the USS Stennis during OEF.
For the first part of the deployment the "pay phones" worked intermittently. Some of that had to do with OPSEC, some of it had to do with the equipment on board. Later in the deployment the phones were working almost 24/7. MWR in conjunction with the NEX started passing out 15 minute phone cards for free at about the middle of deployment. AT&T also passed out 10 minute phone cards. There were stacks of them in the First Class Mess. I still have a few unused cards in my desk drawer.
I was a 31C in the Army 1984-1989. We operated the AM radio teletype sets and usually the short wave FM crypto sets. I was sitting on top of a ridge about 10 kilometers southeast of Pannmunjon above Bangmok-ri as a relay station when we caught the MARS station in Pusan. I called my mom in Colorado Springs from a mountain top on a radio and it didn't cost me a dime. That was technologically amazing at the time.
Cool I'm glad you centered the episode around families and the sacrifice of our service members. Everyone really should give their family a call
Great holiday video! My dad was a HAM radio hobbyist active in the 1960s. His phone patch gear was always busy during the holidays.
When I visited in April (2023) I tried some of those rotary phones and most of the telephone instruments themselves needed repair as does the one you demonstrate. I was able to make another phone ring, but we couldn't have a conversation. After the phone itself works you still need to make cross connects and switch assignments. That PBX should be capable of interfacing with outside lines when tied up.
The old HAM radio system was called MARS. Or "Military Affiliate Radio Stations". And it was quite a cool system, as it let those of us stationed overseas make calls home for free. Many times in the 1980s I took advantage of that as calling from Japan or Panama was incredibly expensive.
I was going to hope in a video about shipboard phones you were going to mention the ability for ham radio to patch into the public switch telephone network, my friend's dad used that a few times to call for a ride home from school
Thanks Ryan for your dedication to the systems. Very nice
Thanks, I am presently at work in The NYC Transit Telephone Department. Enjoyed this video 😊📞☎️☎️
It was a pleasure for me to see again one of what you called "the coke machine" . The red box for radiotelephone communications between ships in a squadron. I was part of the Hughes Aircraft Co. group that developed that system to replace older telephone crossbar switches. I also had to demonstrate for VIPs that two different signals, one plain and the other meant for encryption before being transmitted could not be detected even on adjacent channels. Crosstalk was one of the problems with the systems that ours replaced on Navy warships of all kinds.
Even nowadays, whenever in sight of land, the crew of modern ships take any opportunity they can get to go on deck and stand at the rail, holding their phones up, in hopes of getting enough signal to call home. Some people spend a small fortune on SIM cards and roaming plans. Modern cargo ships are very rarely in sight of land.
Its funny. I like long for content. So when Drachinifel recommended your channel a few years back, I would just give it a try. The funny thing, I like your short form content. I watch you far more than I thought I would.
You are really good at what you do. Cheers.
WOW... It's "Bell System At The Bottom Of The Sea" (for real)! That's how I have All my "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" episodes titled on my computer! I knew Admiral Nelson has a Western Electric 5-line Touch -Tone "2565" on the desk in his cabin (aboard the Seaview) , but I didn't know it was Really done! It used to drive me crazy as a kid when I'd be watching "Voyage -Sea" AND there'd be all these "Bell System"/"Western Electric" business, and house telephones installed all over the Seaview. Admiral Nelson even had a model 554 (Wall Phone) mounted over his head on the wall of his bunk. I would be tugging at my dad's pants -leg while laying on the floor watching TV while my dad was sitting on the couch reading his paper. Dad!...Dad! Look, ya see... there's a "Telephone" on his desk! How can that be? There aren't any telephone poles on the bottom of the Ocean. How's he supposed to make a phone call? It used to amuse my dad (a Bell System employee) that kids associate things around them. (Phones ONLY exist in houses and buildings). Well it's cool to see that they're still at it today. I like it (phones on ships), but I would have expected they use "Dick Tracy" watches today. I'm glad some things don't change. Jeff
There are a lot of ways to create and restore success for the ship, it is to have complete amenities designed for its purpose, be it leisure, get-away, or vacation plans that has everything. Congratulations.
My first voyage on a merchant ship introduced me to the Sound Powered Telephone. It was on a 66000 dwt tanker and used for communication between the bridge and the engine room. It was very difficult to have an easy conversation when standing next to a 10 cylinder B&W diesel engine, with only a very poor open sided booth to muffle the noise. No engine control rooms in those days. At least the later ships upon which I served had engine control rooms and proper telephone systems, with phones also in our cabins.
We had these in the ADM Flour mill in Enid, Oklahoma, which was built in 1928. When i worked there in about 2001, they still worked great. It had a button nearby which honked a system of claxon horns through the plant. Everyone had their own "honk". Mine was 2 long. It more or less followed Morse code. The lower you were, the more compex the honk.
I wonder if that was for price, reliability or the fact that its a flour mill, lots of powder and as such minimizing energized spark sources is important. Because it seems like the current made by a sound phone would be so low there is minimal chance of an arc at any time.
Yeah, we used to send new crew members to get sound power phone batteries, and a B.T. punch from the boiler room :).
Some of my shipmates discovered that when the Enterprise was tied up in Subic Bay, and there were circuits available, they could make free calls home on the Autovon system right from the phone on the desk in our work center.
When I was on active duty on Stone County my GQ and sea detail station was as a phone talker on the bridge. However one stand as a phone talker occurred when I was on the bridge on a reserve training cruise on a Fletcher DD. As you mention sound power circuits are essentially party lines. We were on a firing run on San Nicholas Island near San Diego. I had CIC on my phone circuit. The CO looked at me and in a loud voice said get the CIC watch officer on the phone. I spoke into the phone saying the Captain wanted the CIC watch officer on the phone. I was told that he was on the phone, and I told the Captain that he was on the phone. I then heard the CO ask the the CIC watch officer why he had not told the bridge that a fishing boat was illegally moored in the bay over which we were scheduled to fire some 5-inch rounds toward the island. Because of this incursion the firing run was cancelled. I don't know what might have happened to the CIC watch officer.
Fascinating. The comms systems always were of great interest to me.
USS Saipan in the mid 90s
Used the sound powered phones all the time. You learn real quick to enunciate and pronounce your words clearly!
FWIW: I was in the US Coast Guard, and spent my first year and a half or so assigned to a USCG Cutter.
I hever used the headset-style sound powered phones, but used the telephone-style type {similar to the _"growler"_ shown here} occasionally when communiating throughout the Cutter.
It seems like our _growlers_ actually rang a bell, but it was so long ago -- 1986 to late 1987 -- I no longer remember for sure.
THANKS RYAN,, THERE ARE SO MANY PHONES MY SON MAX 8 YR.S OLD SAYS WHO WAS ONLY TO USE THESE PHONES ALL NAVY STAFF OR JUST A CERTAIN RANK .. THANKS ,.
I'm always intrigued by mass. We think of a ship and we think of the whole, weapons, engines… But then I always think of chairs, tables- & Now I wonder how much 800 telephones masses! Everything cuts into the reserve buoyancy, and this isn't really the sort of thing that can calculate for with any degree of fine-tuned accuracy I would think. Just food for thought.
I was really hoping we’d be able to hear how the sound powered phones sound on the other end. Are they loud, quiet, scratchy, etc.?
A couple of other comments addressed this. Quality is excellent and volume is satisfactory
For the longest time, I had the ring tone on my cell phone set as the sound emitted by a growler... gets your attention really quick!
Super interesting, thank you! I appreciate when curators and others with a crazy amount of knowledge walk us through all the details. Gives us an insight into the passion required to keep these kinds of museums going.
1:57 I would be very interested to read those labels. Looks like somebody had quite a bit to say on the one directly above the receiver cradle
Sound-powered phones really are powered by the sound of the voices on either end. They simply have very high-output dynamic microphones and very sensitive receivers (earphones) so that the output of the microphone can drive the receiver on the other end directly, with no amplification or other power.
The most interesting way I ever called back home was in 2003 when I was deployed to the Baghdad Airport (BIAP). One of my signal teams telephone "customers" was the FBI. Yes THE FBI! They set up two satellite phone for our battalion to use 24/7 at NO CHARGE! Thanks! The first time I called home my Mother thought I had somehow snuck back to the states! No Mom, I am still at BIAP! It took a couple of minutes to convince her!
Thank you! Loved this!! Hearing the growler too! GOD Bless you,!
Have a set of sound power phones at work. I both love and hate them. Sometimes it's a crystal clear and sometimes it's so garbled it's easier to send a runner. Probably don't help they're age, and heavy use. I believe they're war bult probably '43 or '44.
How do they know how much horsepower the ship is making in trials? Thanks so much BNJ staff for all these videos they are truly great.
i don't know if they had power meters in the 1930's, but modern ships use an electrical strain gauge attached to the shaft, paired with an RMP reading. torque from the strain gained multiplied by rotation rate and a conversion constant equals power
I would think the shaft has a dynamometer 🤷♂️.
Yeah, you're off brother.
I served between 1988 and 1992. We had no pay phone for hooking up to shore lines. You had to go to the top of the pier and stand in line to use the pay phones there. In 2003, however, when I went back to visit the ship for her decommissioning, there was a pay phone installed right by the mess decks, like you said. But that was obviously installed sometime between 1993 and 2003.
Also, we did not need Ham Radio operators. We had Sattelite phone capability. It was called the "MARS" system. I have no idea what MARS stood for, but that is what it was called. Occasionally, they would open it up and give people 10 minutes to make a phone call, if you wanted to go stand in line to do it.
New Jersey was still in commission when I was in. Iowa and Wisconsin were in Norfolk with us. If we had/did not have these things, they had/did not have these things.
I was a sailor on uss Carl Vinson even I never understood how sound powered phones worked. And being an AO in the mag it was the only way to call ordinance control and operate elevators while down there.
The feed mill that my father worked at in the 60s an 70s he said had voice powered phones. This was in north Texas.
I can't speak about the entire phone system on a Navy ship however, my Dad served aboard USS Shannon (DD-737/DM-25/MMD-25) during World War II and he often told me that the sound powered phones were manufactured by Western Electric, the manufacturing unit of the Bell System. Considering how big Western Electric was and how involved it was in defense I would not be surprised that Western Electric made all of the phone equipment for Navy ships.
given the quality of their civilian phones used by Ma Bell, I imagine they were some tough SOBs. Those old WE phones that people had in homes were very well constructed.
Very interesting topic. Thank you for uploading.
Interesting! Not sure I'd ever heard the squawk!
This reminds me of when i was deployed to iraq my wife was deployed to Afghanistan. There was no real way to call each other at that time. I could call home but couldn't call Afghanistan. The only way we could contact each other was a system called the blue force tracker. i could zoom out and click on her companys TOC and leave a message. Went 13 months without being able to talk to each other. Except over the Blue force tracker. My company Commander let me use the company sat phone the last 2 months of deployment she could call me.
It would have been SO COOL if the ship had it's original WWII phone system in place! Still, this equipment is still neat in it's own right. The sound powered phones are way cool. Yes, they're sound powered, but they're also electrically powered- by electricity generated from sound. ;)
Thank you for educating me through your amazingly detailed video! ⭐
Thank you for sharing the sound of the growler. My OCD needed to hear it. hahah
I grew up in Kitsap county WA where the USS turner Joy is a museum. And as a kid when I saw “sound powered phone” I assumed it was somehow powered by Puget Sound which was the only body of saltwater I saw until I was an adult
Don't forget about hand held radios. Lots of radio communications going on, unless radio silence.
I love these details! Thanks!
You’re probably a bit busy right now with the dry dock and all, but do you know what system was used before the 80s era PBX? I can’t imagine a manual switchboard would be a good idea. Did they use some sort of crossbar or step by step?
So, does the sound vibration of your voice generate electricity and send your voice to the other end, or is is more akin to two cans and a length of string?
The voice generates an electrical signal that travels through copper wires. Some of the shipboard circuits will have electrical amplifiers that can strengthen the signal if the stations are far apart, but are not necessary for functionality.
5:00 looking at that switch to the right of the phone connection, I have to wonder who is the last no rate blue jacket with a can of never dull was that polished the brass. The bright work's looking kind of sad there Mr. curator!
Interesting thing about sound powered headsets: you can talk into the earpiece and listen through the mouth piece. Try it sometime!
So a sound powered phone is basically like one of those phone things on a playground where you speak into the cone on one end and you hear it on the other end?
I grew up with rotary dial phones. They were a lot quicker to return . Imagine being in dire straights and dialling 999 (UK).
999 was chosen explicitly to be the longest return, to avoid false dialing. In New Zealand, phone dials were numbered the opposite way, and as a result the emergency number there is 111
The story I always hear is that most countries numbers start with 9 because it’s very unlikely that the wind will knock the wires in just the right way 9 times in quick semi rhythmic succession preventing accidental dials.
Edit: after reading the Wikipedia article on pulse dialing this is exactly the case for NZ also, it’s just the number one is encoded as nine pulses instead of one pulse like most of the rest of the worlds systems were.
Unless theirs was purposely slowed down which I doubt I'd say the grease on the dials escapement thickened
With sound powered phones, does someone have to be listening at the moment you are speaking or is there a way to alert someone that you need to speak with them or?
Ahhh.... the trusty 4 digit aka Dimension 2000. Carriers had two diff ones, ship(7xxx) and Air department (6xxx). Think it was due to trunk capacity of lines as to being two systems (at least the ones i was on were)
I don't know if you intended to say it this way, but when using a sound powered phone you keep the button pushed the whole time (hand sets, not headset talkers)
I'm sure it would be difficult to replicate in a video, but how is the call quality & volume with the sound powered phones?
Used sound powered headphones for many a sonar watch. Quality and volume were excellent.
@@spaceghostohio7989ditto. Just gotta be sure to have a supply on hand of the carbon mic buttons.
Very good , sometimes with an extremely long run they might be a little faint but still clear and audible . Ideal if the ship has no power and other people are aboard .
Any chance we know what the number for the captains quarters is? Because we need a “dial XXXX for a good time” sticker with a picture of the battleship
Can the ship's service phones make a ship wide announcement with a dial code? Similar to how a store or school can make announcements.
1980 on the USS Nassau we had button phones not dial. Those look like earlier tech.
The growler noise got my parrot Rocco's attention
Have you ever heard about the TV police series Schimanski from the German TV?
@Ryan S- Have you ever done a show on what ship held the title “ Worlds largest warship” for the longest period of time? Although I don’t think any Iowas ever were in that position it may be an interesting topic. I wonder if it may be Hood due to the treaties that were in place after her completion.
You know how to Google?
Very interesting. Subbed
I believe they still use sound powered phones on the ships. Nuc boats/Subs still used them when I was in , it would make zero sense to delete them. They were a powerful DC use item.
So, if your voice makes a voice phone work, what makes a ham radio work?
4:29 What if a wire is shorted to "ground"? Test if and which wire touching the metal wall will stop communications. I suspect that if both ends of one damaged wire are touching the wall, then the signal will pass. Test it in a video?
a single ground will degrade the circuit, but it will still be useable. 2 grounds equals a short, and then she's dead.
Not in that situation as it would be a dead short , but we used to use handsets to identify cores on multi stranded cables , as long as you have two conductors insulated from each other and not too much resistance they work .
You will have a horrible 60 Hz hum which affects the whole circuit. If you ground BOTH ends of the SAME wire, it wouldn't be a short, but would most likely be unuseable.
7:04 *"N1SFM it's going to use the patch."* let's other people on the repeater frequency know that you're going to be making a telephone call.
My goodness, I cant believe how slow the rotary dial rotates back! Even with only 4 digits in a number, the battle could be over before you reach somebody to tell its about to start! 😅
Um… I think that particular phone set might have needed a little maintenance…😊
That phone dial is not working properly. A "0" should be 10 pulses per second. Stated differently, it should take exactly 1 second for the dial to return to the rest position when it released while dialing zero. By the mid/late 80's, most of the rotary dials on board my ship had been replaced by standard Touch Tone push-button dial pads.
The older step and crossbar switches only supported rotary dial. Once the AT&T Dimension 2000 PBX was installed, the only thing stopping the conversion of sets to TT was time and budgets.
Imagine telling someone in the 90s that we all carry around glass phones that break if you drop them and don’t know any numbers and phone books are gone
I mean to be fair imagine telling them that those phones can access the near sum of human knowledge.
In "Red Storm Rising" two Los Angeles Class submarine commanders use a "Gertrude" (sound-powered phone) to speak ship-to-ship. Is this actually possible? And how would they broadcast the soundwaves? It seems like they could patch the phone into a sonar set for sending and receiving if the subs were physically close enough to one another.
Has anyone here with service time on board a US sub ever heard of this being done, or is this pure fiction? Thanks for any information!
That rotary dial phone's dial is rotating way to slow. It needs maintenance, cleaning of the worm gear assembly and regreasing. Then it will rotate at the correct speed and then it will send dialing pulses at the proper rate which is required for it to work correctly.
You should see if you have any volunteers who would be willing to clean and lubricate the dialing mechanisms on any phones that have this draggy dial problem.
It's maybe an hour to service one phone, start to finish.
that "growler" made a cute noise, not a terrible one. i wouldn't even call it a growl. maybe a case of age and wear and it was more angry sounding baxk in tge day.
Ryan, I have to know. Why do you wear an empty non-certified carabiner on your belt loop?
The nice thing about being an IC… you control the movies and call home for free.
7660 is the last 4 digits of my cell phone!
What powers a sound powered phone?? hmm.. guess will have to watch the video to find out.
Excuse my French but I love this kind of shit!
That first phone you showed needs servicing, the dial shouldn't move the slow.
I was a Storekeeper and frequently received supply requests for Sound Powered Phone batteries. Funny at first, I'd hand them a couple of AA batteries just to get them out of my storeroom. Then it got ridiculous. I'd get 5-10 requests per day. I changed my strategy and would explain to the clueless dolt, that Sound Powered Phone batteries are considered "Countrolled Equippage" and required Dept Head or higher signature approval.
A couple of days later, the Captain came over the 1MC. "Attention all hands. This is the Captain speaking. There is no such thing as Sound Powered Phone batteries. That is all." 😂
Ah, the fun things that people sent the more junior crewmen to try to get (in no particular order):
1. Key to the sea chest,
2. Sound - powered phone batteries,
3. Left - handed monkey wrench,
4. Relative bearing grease.
So sound powered means piezo-electric, then?
6:25 😂 sounds like a ruptured duck
Cool :)
That dial is slow and needs a drop of oil. I have a dial phone made in November 1944. I had to oil it about five years ago.
the joke of the day was when a new guy got onboard the ship and we send for a bucket of steam and some sound powered telephone batteries.