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Neat, it's a rotary dialer macro... Modern Mechanix 1936 - ""Key Caller" Speeds Phone Service - MAKING telephone number connections three times faster than can be done with an ordinary dial device is the work accomplished by a recent London invention. The "key caller," as machine is called, consists of an instrument resembling a small typewriter." - Link.
Rotary action:
- Portable Rotary Phone - pre-review - Link.
- HOW TO - Rotary phone Winamp control - Link.
- Use a rotary phone as a cell phone handset - Link.
Neat gadget! It's strange that there wasn't more variety in dialing mechanisms in old phones. It would have been pretty easy to come up with lots of different interesting ways to do it.
I occasionally freak people out by dialing a phone just by tapping the off-hook switch. Even that is becoming harder as hardwired phones become more and more rare.
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I saw something like that at a GPO Telephones exhibition in the late 1970s (in Colchester, England). They had a pulse-dialler that worked by dropping a punched plastic card through a desktop "reader". As the card fell through the slot, it made the gadget dial the number. Users would punch the cards according to the number they wanted to dial. No faster than a dial, of course, but less effort required. Oh, and this was in the days before tone-dial was even available in the UK.
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