Comment by destitude
4 years ago
Is there any more details somewhere on how this worked? I assume they required electricity but where did the electricity come from? Was it using same exact phone they had in cities at the time? Not even sure what connections were required for regular phones at that time either. Any info would be helpful for my curiosity.
The old style phones used a local battery to power the carbon microphone (usually a pair of No.6 dry cells), and a hand-cranked magneto to generate the ring current. It's only relatively recently that city phones used a "Central Battery".
One of the linked stories [1] talks a bit about the dry cell batteries the phones used, and even mentions they sometimes used old car batteries
[1] https://www.inc.com/magazine/19970615/1416.html