Party Lines

Most people on here are probably too young to remember party lines unless you lived somewhere that had them. These were telephone landlines where more than one house would share the same phone line. Sometimes a dozen or more houses would share the same line. Incoming calls had distinctive ringtones for each subscriber; when a call came in, every phone on the party line would ring, and the subscriber for whom the call was intended would pick up when they heard their unique ringtone.

Party lines were cheaper than individual phone lines, and were also used in rural areas where installing individual lines to each house was impractical. In some areas, barbed wire fences were used as impromptu telephone lines. Problems with party lines included not being able to make a call when someone else was using the line (you were supposed to get off if someone needed to make an emergency call). They were disruptive as each phone on the party line rang whenever anyone called any of the numbers that shared it. It was possible to make a prank call by dialing one's own number and hanging up, causing all of the other phones on the party line to ring. Calls to the police could not be traced, so if the caller didn't provide their address, the police wouldn't know where the call originated from. Eavesdropping on other peoples' calls was also a problem, satirized in the 1959 Rock Hudson and Doris Day comedy Pillow Talk, about a couple who meet through their shared party line. Party lines also featured in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and I Love Lucy.

Party lines were pretty much phased out in the United States by the 1980s, although the last ones were decommissioned in Michigan in 2002. It's estimated that 5000 party lines are still in use today, although they are used as individual lines with a single subscriber, so the problems above aren't applicable.