atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Antique Telephones Remember telephone bells making noise in lightning storms?

I was reading a book, and the author was describing the old telephone bells tinkling or dinging lightly when there was a lightning storm in the area. Was this a common thing during electrical storms?

I could see how on the older phones with mechanical ringers this could happen, especially with the old carbon block protectors.

I have a few 2500 sets and a 500 hooked to my line, and have never heard them do this. is this due to better line protection, and the fact we no longer use open wire routes?

I would say so Will, when I started with the Bell System in 1969 as station repairman in residential we had iron wire, bird wire, etc; in the rural area's not uncommon during lightning for us to get reports of bells ring once etc; Usually would go out and find some one had taken the carbons out of the protector due to a ground last time and didn't replace..Heck I've seen the old 554's blown clean off the kitchen wall with a nice "scorch" mark on the paint...heh

So in answer to your ? it was usually a lazy inst/repair guy that didn't take the time to replace the carbons or fix the ground wire.

...bob...

What vintage phones was the author referring to? Really old ringers didn't have a bias spring to keep the clapper to one side when at rest, or even had real coil springs and thread to provide some mechanical resistance to overcome. If the Tip and Ring were reversed, these sets could tinkle when someone else was dialing.

Well being an old phone guy I can tell you yes it happened. It was because most phones were not private and at least two party lines. These were cut one side to ground for ringing, so the tip party rang tip to ground and the ring party ring to ground, you didn't have to rewire the ring party, so a close hit could ring the bell. Remember there was very little buried plant.

The other thing that made this happen were a lot of phones were feed by open wire and a near lighting hit would build up a static charge and that would make the phones ring or tinkle as you state.

Also what Tommy said while dialing a rotary dial phone not properly wired.

I want to say it was 50's to 60's era, so probably 500 style sets or maybe a 300. I also think it took place in a rural setting, so the open wire routes would have likely been common.

Figured this was likely, but the people I asked didn't remember it happening.

As for blowing a 554 off of the wall, that's wild! I can only imagine what that looked like!

Any other interesting lightning vs phone stories? (I'm also a storm spotter)

I've seen phones that were blown across a room, melted into desk tops, just a blob of plastic. Also protector covers blown yards from the house, just a black spot on a house and where the protector was, drop wire with nothing but the covering, miles of open wire missing and probably a lot more that I can't think of now.

I once received a service call stating that after a lightning hit to the building that her desk set "was on fire". Figuring it was just smoked I rolled into the office to discover the smoldering remains with a hole big enough to push a softball through.

Saw a Nortel SL1-ST hit by lightning...same deal as before- a hole in the back plane big enough to shove a grapefruit through. Components and chips everywhere. Oddly enough the office staff was standing around watching the smoke pour out and no one thought to unplug it.

At one Florida Air Force base in the 70s we had a shortage of outside protectors. Because of the white sands the base was built on it was almost impossible to keep a good ground. It became common practice to mount a 66M desk block on the outside of the building, punch the drop wire down on the top pins and the station feed on the bottom commons pins on the same row. A lightning hit would blow the block clean off the building acting as a fusible link. Oddly enough we rarely lost station equipment with that setup.

And to answer the tinkling bell question..I grew up in rural North Carolina. The bells always triggered during a lightning storm. Sometimes a little tinkle- sometimes a few. We always thought it was normal.

The "my office is on fire" story reminds me of a similar report that I was dispatched on. The "fire" was black soot, prevalent in the air of New York City, that had, over the years, been deposited by convection on a painted wall above a 20B2 power unit. The unit had been hidden from view by a piece of furniture, and someone re-arranged the office. Now the shadow of soot could easily be seen, and the secretary freaked out.

Besides blowing the protector off the side of the building, I remember a rural lightning strike that crystallized the drop wire. If you rapped it against a hard surface, it was just like an icicle and shattered into a dozen pieces.

Pretty crazy.

Carl

I did a job in a mansion on Long Island's "Gold Coast" back in the mid 70's. We returned to the job on Monday morning and discovered that lightning had struck the building over the weekend. There had been a lightning rod installed at the site at some precious time. Lightning struck the rod and travelled down the cable toward the earth, but only got halfway down.

Because halfway down the wall, on the inside of the building, was a large water main which was a much better path to ground then the skinny little ground wire.

The lightning blew a hole the size of my head through the wall to get to the water pipe.

It was fairly awesome.

(No telephones were harmed during this event)

Sam

In rural western PA, it was not uncommon to have 8 party service. Some of those lines, I swear, were delivered on barbed wire.

I remember, in the early 50s, my aunt had one of those 8 party services. During a lightning storm, the phones would ring in cadence with each lightning strike. The customers got so used to it, they would say that they knew how far away the lightning was by the sound of the bell. What amazed me was the people would pick up their phones during a lightning storm so all those on the party would confirm there was a lightning storm!! This can be added to "when we were kids the cars didn't have seat belts and my seat in the car was the back deck where the rear window was." Ah, the "good 'ole days."

Rcaman

Great stories guys! Being a telecom history buff, I can read this stuff all day. I've blown chips off of circuit boards, using a transformer out of a microwave oven! It's dangerous as hell if you don't use common sense, as a "MOT" can easily kill you. (I always use extra precautions when working with high voltage experiments)

Phones on fire and vaporized wire? good grief. and the neighbors all hopping on the party line to talk about the storm while it was happening, wow. lightning is an amazing force of nature for sure.

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
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The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the
lightning ain't distributed right. -Mark Twain

Jim, that's awesome! Also sad when the bells stop "talking". I'd be trying to get the old insulators if I was there. The book was something by Stephen King, not sure which one of his books it was.

I'll still see old telephone/ telegraph poles along railroad tracks with the old open wire and glass insulators, surprised copper thieves and insulator collectors haven't scavenged those by now, as some of those poles are really low.

Wish I had a buck for every insulators I threw in the hole when wrecking out open wire. Only saved the ones that we considered good at the time, but there were a lot of hands after them.