R is for Rotary Dial

 

I can remember as a child, how long it used to take to dial my good friend on the phone, as her number had four 9s in it. There was no real way to rush the dial, as it slowly turned back to it's original position once you pushed it around clockwise.

The rotary dial, sometimes also called the "finger wheel" is a device that mounted on telephones starting in the late 1800s. This dial allowed the phone to send electrical pulses which corresponded to the number dialed, allowing you to connect to another phone using a unique series of pulses. The push button phone eventually replaced the rotary dial, after it was introduced in the 1960s, but it took several decades for the button phones to make the rotary completely obsolete. Technology once evolved at a less frenetic pace.  

Here is a news service announcement from back in the day when the rotary dial telephone was simply known as a "dial telephone." Another obsolete object, described as a directory (eventually to be popularly described as a "phone book") is also presented in this news piece.