ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Telephone

C-H,
Are you sure that all the Swedish dials were the same as British?

I've never come across a genuine old Swedish phone, but I've always been led to believe that zero was at the opposite end of the dial. The NZ dial had zero in the same place as the U.K., but went backwards on all the other digits: i.e. going counter-clockwise:

British/American: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0
Swedish: 0-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9
New Zealand: 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-0

You can see this reflected in some of the choice of codes. For example, London was assigned STD code 01 as being the shortest to dial. Auckland got 09 as being the quickest on the NZ dial.

I'd always assumed that the Swedish emergency number 90-000 was also assigned at least partly because all those zeros would be fairly quick to dial. (Compare also the NZ emergency code 111, which in terms of dial pulses is exactly the same as the British 999).

Phones here did have letters on the dials years ago. They were used as the exchange prefix in London and some other large cities, and within STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialing) codes. They were phased out by 1970 or thereabouts, after which the letters were dropped from the dials. Evidence of the system can still be seen in area codes and some prefixes today.

The letter assignments differed from those used in America slightly though.
1 (none)
2 ABC
3 DEF
4 GHI
5 JKL
6 MN (UK), MNO (USA)
7 PRS
8 TUV
9 WXY
0 OQ (UK), Operator (USA)



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 11-04-2002).]

Belgian,
The current British arrangement (introduced about 20 years ago) still needs 3 wires to each phone, although as in practically every other country the line from the house back to the exchange is only 2 wires.

Two of the lines to each jack are connected directly to the tip and ring of the incoming line (called the "A" and "B" wires here). The third line is wired to the B-wire via a capacitor and provides a separate feed to the ringer on each phone, the other side of each ringer being commoned to the A-wire.

Telephone jacks in residential work are most commonly wired with 4-core cable. The fourth wire is generally connected at the jacks, but is spare.

Have a look here for the wiring diagrams and some pictures of the plugs and sockets.

Prior to this system, single phones were most often hardwired to a junction box. Where a phone needed to be used at more than one location, we had a system of 1/4-inch Post Office jacks (follow the "Plug 420" link from the above link).

The wiring on these was different to that used in the modern system.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 11-04-2002).]

You are 100% right, Paul! I went home and had a really good look at my phone. The position of the zero was what confused me from the start.

This also explains the problem a friend of mine had with his pulse dial phone. It has buttons, not a dial. When you dialed a phone number you ended up at someone with a number displaced one position:

445533 became
334422

(or if it was the other way round)

We eventually managed to set it to tone dial.

The international problem was another reason for dropping letters from dials. Calling ACOrn 1234 or HOLborn 9876 from a phone within London, or within the UK was fine, but imagine the trouble it would have caused placing a direct-dialed international call to one of these exchanges from North America.

By the way, some of the very early automatic exchanges (i.e. turn of the century) in America used phones with an 11-hole dial. The extra position was marked "Long distance" and stepped the selector to an 11th level for accessing an operator.