[BC] Getting the phones on air

[Cowboy]

On Sunday 06 January 2008 01:22 am, Donna Halper wrote:
 >   Jack Little, talking into an old-style phone
 >  with that candlestick style (there's a name for that type of phone,
 >  but I don't recall it) .  There is a microphone, but it's next to the
 >  other announcer on the show, Harry Giese.
 >  So, the
 >  suggestions you good folks offered about how America's Town Meeting
 >  of the Air might have put callers on the air live... that was in
 >  1935.  Would the same process have been possible for telephones in
 >  the late 1920s?

  Although I have been around a while, contrary to beliefs held by some,
  that time period does pre-date my electronic experience, however....
  :)

  "Possible" yes. Likely ?
  The candlestick phone did have a dynamic coil-diaphragm ear piece, so
  it would have been possible to wrap a significant number of turns of
  wire on an iron core of some sort, and but it up against the earpiece,
  making a rudimentary audio transformer, with no "direct" coupling to
  the phone or phone system. Likely they removed the steel diaphragm.
  The sound quality of those candlesticks wasn't "good" ( I did have one
  at one point, and it did work on the Ohio Bell system ) so the alternative
  of holding the earpiece against one of the carbon mics of the day would
  likely have sounded pretty bad, but could have "worked."
  The more obvious idea of simply wrapping the earpiece with wire would
  not work, due the shape of the core in the earpiece.
  The principal was known well back into the 1800's but I can find no record
  of it actually being used.

-- 
Cowboy