Comment by marzetti

Thanks for this article and the comments. Reminds me of a trick we kids did in the early 60s (yeah, sorry) with the British 'phone box' pay phones. We called it 'tapping the phone', but it wasn't spy style listening. Passed from kid to kid the amazing trick was you could dial the number by tapping the handset (10 taps for zero, 9 taps for 9, ..) and the phone would ring the number but you didn't then have to 'press button A' to speak.. you simply made the call, spoke normally, hung up, and pressed button B to get your money back! Sadly, I never tried international calls... When we moved to New Zealand around '63-4, I discovered the phone dial was reversed, in the UK it was 1-9,0, in NZ it was 9-1,0. (So emergency calls were 111 not 999 as in the UK.) The trick still worked but, except for 0, you had to '10s complement' the taps. Maybe because of that none of the kids I knew at the time in NZ appeared to know the trick...