Will,
can I ask what book you were reading that started this thread? I'm always looking for something new to read...
Now for my amusing anecdote: My place here in the hills of Pennsylvania sits a good way from the highway, and the phone lines to the house are like a museum - almost 100 years of outside plant history, all on the same run of joint-use poles [actually owned by the electric company, but used by everyone]. First there is the open wire - two pieces of copperweld on glass insulators, with the occasional transposition bracket. When the original poles [which may have been even older than the REA era] were replaced in the early 1980's, they moved the open wire over to the new poles... this makes me think the open wire may have still been in use at that time!
Sometime later, the open wire was abandoned in place, and a LONG run [2,000 feet or more] of Whitney-Blake rural drop wire [Type C?] was installed to connect us to the highway. This is not a twisted-pair cable, and as such is not very well balanced... so the phone ringers really did ding during thunderstorms.
Sometime later still, after we had been here quite a few years, the Type C drop wire was replaced with about two spools worth of the modern equivalent, similar to Superior Essex "ADP NMS", which is a twisted-pair construction. Now the phones are less likely to tell us when there is lightning in the area, but they still let us know when there is a power failure: The joint-use poles have a 7,500 volt primary feeder at the top, and when it goes dark, the collapsing field around the wire creates a strong inductive kick that causes a long, slowly decaying spike on the phone lines... DING-ING-ing-ing..g.g! Or a sickly sounding chiiriirp-p-p-p, in the case of modern phones with electronic ringers.
Over the winter, a brand-spanking new piece of figure-8 PIC was installed, along with promises of more POTS pairs and business-class ADSL2... This remains unconnected, but someday, when they get around to it, they may hook it up, and then my phone ringers won't talk to me anymore. The end of an era.
Jim Bennett
===================================================================
The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the
lightning ain't distributed right. -Mark Twain
