I have a rotary dial phone in my pool bar and a rotary dial wall phone in the garage
There is not really much special in the pay phone itself. They get installed on a special "ground start" line from the CO. If you install one on a regular line, they work normally.
The "ground start" requires that you momentarily ground one line to get dial tone. When I was a lifeguard they made the mistake of putting the terminal block for the pay phone in the guard room. We had a regular phone hooked up and we shorted it out with our whistle.
This is done by the coin acceptor in the pay phone, usually grounding through the coin itself on the old ones like this one.
The other trick on a pay phone was to "pin" a call. You stuck a pin or needle through the cord or into the mike hole and shorted it to the phone base. That is why the newer cords are armored and they put in a pin proof mouth piece mike. They glued the cap on.


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Greg Fretwell