when i was a kid you could pick up the landline and hit the call button and join whatever conversation was already happening. though i’m reading salems lot right now, and they mention picking up the phone and hearing a conversation from those i know are not in the same home. how did this work???
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I dunno about the specific book, but in some places there were “party lines” where a single line would service multiple houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)
It was called a party line. One line would have fed 5 families. Each family would have had a distinctive ring but you could listen to other conversations by picking up the phone when it wasn’t your ring.
When I was a kid, we were on a party line. My family and two other families shared the same phone line. So sometimes you could pick up the phone and the neighbors would be talking with someone and you had to wait until they were done before you could get a dial tone. There were three different rings for the three different households.
Back in ancient times (this is technology we are talking about, the replacement technology started to become popular about 20 years ago and have not entirely replaced the ancient technology yet) when phone lines were analog, the phone system had a legitimate problem with *overhearing*.
It’s basically when the electrical signals “leak over” into another wire pair because of a fault in the cable that is significant enough to cause overhearing, but not significant enough to make the phone exchange system detect a fault.
It was also ridiculous common with indiction-overhearing from parallel high voltage cables, causing a low-key 50Hz (or 60Hz, depending on where in the world you live) humming on the line.
There are also some cheaper solutions where a whole house of flats could share a single phone wire pair so that you, basically, had the possibility of listening in on your neighbours conversations simply because you picked up the receiver while another call was ongoing; it basically became the same thing as if you picked up another phone in your own home, you could listen in on a conversation just because it was already there…
Imagine running over to you neighbors to say, hey i want to get on AOL.. hang up.. please
Slightly related historical fact but early cell phones were analog and broadcast in the clear. With the right kind of scanner you could pick them up and hear the conversations.
Random phone calls are SO boring though.
My parent’s first phone line was a party line with a house two doors away. Harry, the other part of the party line, had two late teens daughters who spent every evening on the phone to their boyfriends so we couldn’t use our phone between 6 and 10 most days.
We finished paying off our party line about the time we got our first cell phone. The phone company would upgrade the line to single party, but you had to pay like $10/month for 20 years or something to pay back the cost of it.
Used to get this with some wireless home phones. They only produced so many frequencies for each model so sometimes neighbours ended up with their handsets picking up the signal from next door.
Otherwise as others have mentioned, could be a party line shared across a couple houses.
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