>People who needed to make a lot of phone calls would often do this because it was faster than waiting for the rotary wheel to return to the start Allow me to

>People who needed to make a lot of phone calls would often do this because it was faster than waiting for the rotary wheel to return to the start Allow me to doubt that, the time the rotary dial goes back is exactly the time needed for making the pulses at the correct interval/rate, typically 10 pulses per second: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing#Pulse_rate_and_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_dialing#Pulse_rate_and_c... Even if the switch allowed usually (and in theory) 7 to 12 most phones dials were set for exactly 10 and I doubt that anyone could get relably 12 pulses per second by tapping, in any case, a 999-999999 would have taken some 9-10 seconds by dialing and no less than 7 seconds by tapping or anyway at the most you would have been able to shave off at the most some 20% of the dialing time, introducing a high risk of getting "another" number.