More than once I've been watching films or TV with younger comrades, and they wonder why the protagonist didn't just whip out his cellular phone to call for help/back-up in a time of crisis. And I have to gently remind them that 1930s Los Angeles didn't have cell phones, and that long distance used to be exorbitantly expensive so we had to play "if your phone rings twice and then hangs up, it's me and call me back because I can't afford to call you" games, and...
Man, I grew up in Flintstones times.
Anyway, there are lots of other nuances about life pre-cell phones that we can learn about, and whom better to teach us than comics books?
The-most-boring-Marvel-hero-ever The Angel is trying to take down the criminal mastermind behind that issue's plot:
Still, it's a good opportunity to play possum and collect information. To wit:
But yes, if you were skilled and attentive, you could at least get a fair guess at what number someone was dialing, by listening/watching for how far the dial traveled each time. Real life example: in my youth most numbers in home town Portage started with 32, while neighboring Kalamazoo mostly have 37 or 38...and since the time for that dial to come back from a 2 was a lot shorter than for a 7 or 8, well, by the second number you could already guess with reasonably accuracy where someone was calling.
Sure, it would take lots of practice and skill to get good enough to accurately identify the full number--and I was never nearly that good--but The Angel was!
So you've gotta go find a phone somewhere!
Still, problem solved, right? Just got to phone the operator, and ask, and...
Well, there's still one way to solve this problem, the way that virtually every comic and movie and TV show relies on:
Tune in next week for my "back in my day we only had three TV channels and you had to physically go to the TV to change stations" rant...
From Marvel Mystery Comics #14 (1940)
And it's because of the longer times to dial higher numbers (or 0) on the rotary phones that the area code system seems so haphazard and random (unlike, say, zip codes, which generally get higher as you go south and/or west). If you had to make a long distance call (hey, remember when you didn't need to dial the area code if the number was within your own code?), the area codes were set up such that the most populous areas had the codes that would take the least amount of time to dial. So New York City got 212 (under the original area code numbering system, the fastest number to dial), while Wisconsin got the laborious 608.
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