About a week ago while still in Michigan, we visited the famous “Cops and Doughnuts” bakery in Clare. This is a bakery owned by former police officers who saved it from closing down. (insert cop and do-nut jokes here) A neat place with wonderful tasty treats! They also have a variety of old law enforcement related historical items on display there in addition to the usual souvenir type stuff for sale…almost a miniature museum. If you are in Clare it is worth the visit. Blow off the diet for a day. Who can resist being pulled over for do-nuts? (ba-dum-bump…sorry.)
While looking around in the place I spotted an old Gamewell Police Telegraph Call Box on display. These were developed in the late 1800’s and found use in many major cities. There are still some in service in both San Francisco and New York. Such antiquated technology still finds a place in modern society simply because it works and sometimes, as was discovered after the attacks in 2001, works when other more modern systems fail or become overloaded.
I did not have time to ask about getting this specific box opened for view, but it reminds me of a very similar device in my collection that I found a few internal photos of and a rough video lurking on my computer which will do for demonstration of the principle of operation.
This device is the Western Union 6B call box. As you know, Western Union was the telegraph, telegram, and (later) money-gram company. This was a big enterprise and had many various services available to customers large and small. One of the telegram services offered was to call in a messenger boy to take your message and hand deliver it to the telegraph office to be sent on your behalf. Businesses or locations that had high traffic but perhaps not enough to set up a branch telegraph office on site could make good use of the call box.
The person requesting service simply twisted the knob. This wound a clockwork mechanism that rotated a coded wheel. The notches in the wheel opened and closed switch contacts that would send a series of pulses (the dots-and-dashes of Morse code) to a telegraph sounder in Western Union’s nearest office. This coded signal corresponded to the location of the call box and the messenger would be dispatched to pick up the telegrams to be wired.
The Gamewell Police Call Box functions in much the same fashion. Police and Fire call boxes sometimes had additional features such as the ability to select the type of message to be sent (a beat cop, just checking in on his route that all was well….or a specific type of call such as a need for an ambulance for example) Later versions also added a telephone as well. Regardless of variation or purpose these simple boxes continue to provide a valuable service in times of need when other systems may be unavailable.
Victorian speed dial.
Thank you. I am finding your posts to be most interesting, not to mention enlightening as well.