The Telephone

TheTelephone

My mother wrote about their first telephone in rural Grayson Country, Kentucky:

One of our conveniences was the telephone.  We were on a party line with eight other phones.  These were all our close neighbors.  It was the older kind of phone, a box hung on the wall, about eighteen inches high and eight inches wide.  This was handy to have to get messages to our neighbors, when it was in working order.

We learned that we had better service in damp weather than in dry.  We also learned a valuable lesson on what to do when we weren’t hearing or being heard by the other party.  The phone came back to life when we poured a teakettle of water around the ground wire, which was on the outside of the house and fastened to an iron rod in the ground.

The telephone was also used to pass the time away on dull days.  Whenever the phone rang someone’s number, a lot of times we would listen in.  In this way we knew all the news around the neighborhood.  On those phones, anyone who got a call on their line, every other phone on the same line would ring.  Each phone had a different number and our number was eight.  The Exchange had a rule not to get any calls after 8:00 P.M. unless it was a real necessity.  So, if we heard the phone ring after “ringing time” we were sure someone had an emergency.

Our line was connected to the Short Creek Exchange.  Their line was connected to the Caneyville Exchange, which was then connected to Leitchfield Exchange.  By the time we went through all those exchanges, most of the time we couldn’t make ourselves heard by the person we were calling.  This meant almost yelling into the phone and was very frustrating.

Our closest neighbor, up the hill and about a quarter mile away, was in the Leitchfield Exchange.  So, many times if someone on our party line needed to call someone in the Leitchfield Exchange,  they would call our phone and ask one of us to please run up the hill and make the call for them through the Leitchfield Exchange and deliver a message for them.   We hoped that everyone had watered their ground wire.  Carrier pigeons would have been more reliable.