science: telephones

I used to believe that written messages could be passed through the phoneline. I spent ages trying to send cards through the reciever! I even tried to send my grandmother some icecream...

I used to believe that each U.S. state's local phone company was named after the state the company was located. (This was in the late 1980s, after AT&T was split up.) I believed this because I knew that Indiana's phone company was "Indiana Bell" and Illinois had "Illinois Bell," so naturally I thought there was a "Florida Bell," a "New York Bell," and a "California Bell."

When I was little I called a radio show to request a record for my mum. I got the busy signal but I thought that if I stayed on the line, listening to the busy signal, that when the line was free, I would be put straight through....I was on the phone for HOURS!!

When I was about 4 and 5, I believed that the voices heard on the telephone handset travelled in the space made by the coils in the cord, and that I could interrupt the conversation by putting a finger into that space.

For years when I was a child, I believed that telephone cable was curly because curly cable was cheaper to make than straight cable. My dad told me that so it must be true, musn't it?

When I was little, my older sister told me that If I picked up the telephone and dialled the number for that telephone it would automatically trip a self destruct devise and blow up the whole house. I believed this for a very long time.

I used to think that all telephones were wireless, but you had to plug them into the wall because they needed a special sort of electricity (that's why the cable port was different). And I thought cell phones were special only because they had batteries.

My older brother told me that when you diled '0' for operator on the telephone, that a doctor performing an operation on someon (an 'operator') would have to leave the operating room to answer your call, and his patient could die from being unattended while the doctor was talking to you. He explained that is why you should never dial '0' on the phone - you could kill someone. He would then pick up the phone, dial '0', and make me scream.

When i was younger and i would talk on the phone, i always thought that there was a little person inside it, and i could never understand how he got in there, or how they could live in the phone...Elayna

When my mother called someone, then hung up the phone within a couple of seconds saying "busy signal," I thought that meant the phone company knew the other person was too busy to anwer the phone and was letting my mother know.

Since I grew up in a town where the
phone prefix was the same as the first
three digits of the zip code (626), I used
to believe that was true everywhere.

When an attempt to make a telephone call was met with a busy signal -- when the "line was busy" -- I believed that the telephone operating Lion who was in charge of connecting the calls was otherwise engaged.

In pre-school, whenever my teachers talked on the phone, they would say something like "This is Pam" (or whatever their first name was).. but i was used to their name being something like "Mrs. Hall".. So I figured they had code names for the phones at school.

I used to believe when I heard the obits being read on our local radio station that "friends may call between 4pm and 6pm" meant telephone calls instead of "visitation". I thought someone was going to be very busy answering the phone.

I had a toy phone at once when I was about 8 if you pressed 0 it would talk. So it made me belive that there was a person liveing in every phone.

I guess this would fit into this topic:
When I was a kid, I thought that the voice on the phone when you called the time was just one women who had to sit in a little room and answer that phone all day and night.