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