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A party line (multiparty line, shared service line, party wire) is a local loop telephone circuit that is shared by multiple telephone service subscribers. Party line systems were widely used to provide telephone service, starting with the first commercial switchboards in 1878.
Learn what telephone party lines were, how they worked, and why they disappeared. Find out how they influenced communication in rural and urban areas, and what challenges they faced.
- Kara Kovalchik
- 6 sec
- Busy Signal. These days, if a person is currently engaged on their telephone, any incoming calls be automatically sent to a voicemail system. There are not only consumers today who have become so unaccustomed to being thwarted by the stentorian tones of a busy signal that they are temporarily flummoxed at the concept of having to hang up and dial again later, there are also younger users who have never heard a busy signal.
- Off-Hook Alarm. It’s much harder to accidentally leave your telephone “off the hook” these days, since most folks using land lines have cordless phones that require different buttons to be pushed to start and end a call.
- Party Lines. Party lines were very common in the first half of the 20th century, especially in rural areas and during the war years, when copper wire was in this short supply.
- Pipeline/Jam Line/Beep Line. Thanks to a quirk of the old analog system, savvy phone customers had access to “chat lines” long before that term was coined.
Apr 19, 2018 · Learn about the history and types of party lines, the shared phone connections that were common in rural areas before cell phones. Discover how party lines worked, what challenges they faced, and how they were eventually phased out.
PARTY LINE meaning: 1. the official ideas and goals of a political party: 2. a phone connection that is shared by two…. Learn more.
Learn the meaning of party line in politics and phone contexts, with synonyms and related words. See how to use party line in sentences from the Cambridge English Corpus and the Hansard archive.
In politics, "the line", "the party line", or "the lines to take" is an idiom for a political party or social movement's canon agenda, as well as ideological elements specific to the organization's partisanship.
