Lassie - Episode

A local gossip keeps tying up the party phone lines which cause aggrivation for the other folks sharing the line. However, the situation takes a turn for the worse when Paul's truck is stuck in a storm and Timmy tries to get through to call for help.
TRIVIA: Party lines - shared phone connections - aren't as far back into our communications past as we would expect. Up until about the 1960's there were still shared phone lines in some of the most rural areas of the US. Telephone companies offered party lines since the turn of the century, the main benefit being a cheap rate, although the downside was that anyone else sharing the line could "listen in" on a private conversation. Each person on the shared line was issued an identifying ring tone - when the phone would ring each member would listen to hear if the number of rings was their code. The connections were all made by human operators who were often housed in their own home with a manual switchboard comprised of plug in wires and slot connections. The operators also worked as the phone accountants, tallying up the calls made by each party subscriber. In the early cranked magneto phones, the phone's own battery powered its transmitter as well as the receiver when the person used the hand crank to spin the copper magneto to generate electricity: this is the same type of phone shown in the Martin's kitchen.
With party-line service, particularly if there were more than two subscribers on the line, it was often necessary to complete a long-distance call through the operator to identify and correctly bill the calling party.
As individual phone lines became more popular, they started making an appearance in the wealthier homes, but that progress didn't have time to filter down to the Middleclass before two world wars put a crunch on the copper used in wire, subverting it to the war effort. Thus party lines continued to remain well into the middle of the 20th century. Nearly three-quarters of Pennsylvania residential service in 1943 was party line, with users encouraged to limit calls to five minutes. Shortages persisted for years after each war. Many jurisdictions require a person engaged in a call on a party line to end the call immediately if another party needs the line for an emergency. In May 1955, a Poughkeepsie, New York woman was indicted by a grand jury after her refusal to relinquish a party line delayed a volunteer firefighter's effort to report a grass fire; the fire destroyed a shed and a barn.Objections about one party monopolizing a multi-party line were a staple of complaints to telephone companies and letters to advice columnists for years - as well as fueling the content to this Lassie episode! - and eavesdropping on calls remained an ongoing annoyance.
By the 1980s technology had advanced so quickly that party lines were abandoned due to the need for electric lines to service answering machines and phones with features such as call forwarding and call waiting which was incompatible with party line technology. The changeover as rapid, driven by consumer needs, fiber optics, new computer products, subsidies for new equipment, and an outdated infrastructure. By the late 1980 there were few, if any, party lines in existence. Connecticut's independent telephone company abandoned its last party lines in 1991, the last in that state to do so. By 2000 party lines became a thing of the past in serving the outside public in the US.