3 ms·

Wild! I wonder if the line was shorting out and pulse-dialing random numbers, and it just happened to be 911 sometimes, but that's a total shot in the dark. (I

Wild! I wonder if the line was shorting out and pulse-dialing random numbers, and it just happened to be 911 sometimes, but that's a total shot in the dark. (I vaguely thought payphones had some kind of special connection to the CO, not like a normal phone line you can just DTMF or pulse dial on, but maybe that's made up.)

miki123211 2y ago
Some payphones (at least around here) had special buttons that would one-click dial fire/police/ambulance, with no payment required of course. It's not unbelievable to me that water could get into one of these and "short out" one of these buttons.
mkl 2y ago
That was my first thought. In NZ, 911 has redirected to our emergency number 111 for about 25 years now, but before that, 911 led to a recorded message telling you to hang up and dial 111. I found this out by getting there by accident by pressing the hang-up button a lot of times quickly (for curiosity reasons). In NZ pulse coding for 911 is 1 pulse, then 9 pulses, then 9 again (our rotary dials going the other way is why we use an emergency number starting with 1). I probably pressed the hang-up button once, then decided to press it a bunch more times.
mindcrime 2y ago
(I vaguely thought payphones had some kind of special connection to the CO, not like a normal phone line you can just DTMF or pulse dial on, but maybe that's made up.) FWIW, at one time (relative to here in the US at least) there were at least two different major "kinds" of payphones. COCOTS (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones)[1] and what I call (for lack of a better term) "telephone company payphones". The latter being owned and controlled by the local telco. Part of the difference is how signaling works. For a COCOT, it is the case that the line is a plain jane line, that you could - ahem cough theoretically cough - beige box onto and dial calls using DTMF or pulse dialing. For those phones, the "magic" that made it a "pay" phone was inside the phone itself. For the "telephone company payphones" the line was configured differently and tones were sent in-band over the line to tell the switch that the coins had been deposited. This is the idea behind the old "red box" notion of recording the coin tones and playing them back to get free calls. So yeah, a COCOT line could almost certainly be subject to something like random shorts being interpreted as pulse dialing and could possibly call 911. For a telephone company payphone I'm less sure if those supported pulse dialing or not. The lack of coin tones shouldn't matter since calls to 911 are always free, but I'm not sure if the line was different in other ways as well, or not. Which one the BHI phone was, I never knew. But this was in the late 90's and by then a lot of the old skool telephone company payphones had disappeared in favor of COCOT's so if I had to guess, I'd guess it was a COCOT. [1]: https://payphone411.com/cocot.html https://payphone411.com/cocot.html
- ipdashc 2y ago
  That makes sense! I've heard the telco/COCOT distinction before, but never summarized quite so succinctly.

miki123211 2y ago

Some payphones (at least around here) had special buttons that would one-click dial fire/police/ambulance, with no payment required of course. It's not unbelievable to me that water could get into one of these and "short out" one of these buttons.

mkl 2y ago

That was my first thought. In NZ, 911 has redirected to our emergency number 111 for about 25 years now, but before that, 911 led to a recorded message telling you to hang up and dial 111. I found this out by getting there by accident by pressing the hang-up button a lot of times quickly (for curiosity reasons). In NZ pulse coding for 911 is 1 pulse, then 9 pulses, then 9 again (our rotary dials going the other way is why we use an emergency number starting with 1). I probably pressed the hang-up button once, then decided to press it a bunch more times.

mindcrime 2y ago

(I vaguely thought payphones had some kind of special connection to the CO, not like a normal phone line you can just DTMF or pulse dial on, but maybe that's made up.) FWIW, at one time (relative to here in the US at least) there were at least two different major "kinds" of payphones. COCOTS (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones)[1] and what I call (for lack of a better term) "telephone company payphones". The latter being owned and controlled by the local telco. Part of the difference is how signaling works. For a COCOT, it is the case that the line is a plain jane line, that you could - ahem cough theoretically cough - beige box onto and dial calls using DTMF or pulse dialing. For those phones, the "magic" that made it a "pay" phone was inside the phone itself. For the "telephone company payphones" the line was configured differently and tones were sent in-band over the line to tell the switch that the coins had been deposited. This is the idea behind the old "red box" notion of recording the coin tones and playing them back to get free calls. So yeah, a COCOT line could almost certainly be subject to something like random shorts being interpreted as pulse dialing and could possibly call 911. For a telephone company payphone I'm less sure if those supported pulse dialing or not. The lack of coin tones shouldn't matter since calls to 911 are always free, but I'm not sure if the line was different in other ways as well, or not. Which one the BHI phone was, I never knew. But this was in the late 90's and by then a lot of the old skool telephone company payphones had disappeared in favor of COCOT's so if I had to guess, I'd guess it was a COCOT. [1]: https://payphone411.com/cocot.html https://payphone411.com/cocot.html

ipdashc 2y ago
That makes sense! I've heard the telco/COCOT distinction before, but never summarized quite so succinctly.