"mm" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:45:10 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

I just got an old rotary phone from an antique store - the original
cord is attached - I want to hook it up and use it in my home - what
do I do??

I think the odds are more than 1/2 that it will work fine. Just conect
one of the two wires from the phone to the red wire on the wall and
the other to the green. Which is red and which is green don't
matter with dial phones, but if they do have colors, you might want to
attach red to red and green to green.

This is most easy if you have a box mounted on the surface somewhere,
because they have covers that come off, but if all your phone jacks
are below the surface of the wall, with only the hole sticking out,
you can still take off the wall plate and make your connections there.

If your phone system no longer works with dial phones, you still won't
harm the phone system. They're designed to handle even long short
circuits, much longer than the split-second pulse-shorts that rotary
phones make.

I haven't tested this for decades, but used to be, if the red and
green were shorted to each other for a long time, 50 seconds in a
row?, the line would go almost dead (no dial tone but maybe some
background noise) and I had to wait for about 10 minutes before the
dial tone came back. No big deal.

I have a dial phone in my basement, probably not as old or pretty as
yours, and it works fine.

I believe that the old rotary phones were 3 wire, not two. It's been a long
time, but I think it was red/green/yellow (or was it red/green/black) They
connected to the matched red and green on the jack with the third color
attached to the red (again, I think). The third wire was necessary to power
the bell (yes, those phones had mechanical bells).
--
Peace,
BobJ