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

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.