Circular Dial Telephones
The whole reason we have 999 -the circular dial telephone took aaaaages to return to start before you could turn the next number in. People didn’t make so many phone calls because it was actually less effort to run round to your mate’s house or write a letter to your granny. I’m not quite of the operator operated phone era, but we did have a circular dial telephone until i was about eight years old. 9 was the quickest number to dial, hence the emergency number for Britain.
Button punch dials were much quicker and swiftly superceded their cumbersome cousins. However, there’s something very romantic about the James Herriot-era phones that still sees some people install them as a kitsch item. Now that voice operated systems are possible it seems really odd that we used to have to wait for each digit to click away before we could get through.
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I collect and restore these old retro telephones and they are very popular. A few years ago you could pick them up for £5 at car boot sales but now they are getting harder to find and more expensive