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.
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@dancingtongue Using DC power was one of the selling features of the telephone in the beginning because it made the telephone independent of the local power grid, which not everyone had hooked up to their house anyway.
@swirlie 1939-1944 or 5. FDR's rural electrification program had not reached us yet. Then my mother, brother and I moved into the big city of Delano to go to school, and my mother could resume her teaching career as part of the homefront war effort.
@swirlie Yes, but no telephone. And it didn't last long. My father had stayed on the ranch tending the cattle; again, part of the homefront war effort. Beef was needed for the troops. But when the war was over, he quit that job, came to town as well, and got a job there. But within a year my parents had bought 20 acres of their own outside of town. It came with an old shack with no indoor plumbing or electricity which we lived in while my father built us a modern house of our own. The shack had never been painted so the outside planking had shrunk, and it had no interior walls so someone had tacked up the brown paper used for drying grapes into raisins on the inside as a substitute. At night you could hear the breeze rustling the paper. But my parents were delighted: they finally owned their own place after being caretakers of various ranches for the first 15+ years of their marriage.
@swirlie Likewise. We actually didn't get our own phone until 1954, and that was partially because I started stringing for a couple of daily newspapers while still in high school and needed a phone to call my contributions in.
