WE #5F Dial Curved Finger Stop.

[Dennis Markham]

That one on the bottom left looks like a normal finger stop from here.  Is there a photo of the back? 

[JorgeAmely]

Yes, many more pictures at 130405990084

[stopthemachine]

I purchased a #5 dial with the curved fingerstop from eBay quite a few years ago--it was dated 1972/1973--NOS! 

I had it put on a WE steel wall hotel phone (separate receiver variety), and it looks great.  I'll have to post the pix of it.  The phone itself must have been used in an apartment because under the phone itself, there is a separate little box as wide as the phone with a pushbutton on the side of it. 

I believe the original dial on the hotel phone I used for my payphone.

I think the little curve on the fingerstop is pretty cool though--and I'm sure the operators' fingers appreciated the innovation! 

[GG]

I recall reading somewhere (don't recall where) that the purpose of the curved fingerstop was to enable switchboard operators to dial using a "dialing pen" with a round ball at the top end of the pen that fit the fingerholes but didn't touch the number plate behind the holes.

Reasons for this were:

Switchboard operators were frequently writing stuff down e.g. toll tickets in COs, or messages for PBX extensions.  Thus they frequently had pen in hand anyway.  Putting the pen down to dial would have taken more time, and using the fingers would have potentially caused repetitive abrasion to the skin on the fingers (job injury with risk of an infection that could get serious), as well as rapid wear on the dial number plates (causing frequent replacement of number plates). 

So, Ma Bell in her infinite wisdom created the "dialing pen."  This had a ballpoint pen at one end, and a round ball at the other.  The curved fingerstop fit with the ball and prevented over-running the conventional fingerstop and getting wrong numbers.  The operator could keep pen in hand, dial quickly with the ball at the end, not worry about getting her fingers raw from dialing hundreds of phone numbers every day, and have a numberplate that was always new and readable. 

[bigdaddylove]

Here's a youtube video showing the "dialing tool" being used:

http://tinyurl.com/3tf25uy

[rp2813]

Interesting how that Operator's fingerwheel returned so much faster than any similar looking WECo dials from the 2 through 6 series, at least that I've ever seen. 

[AE_Collector]

There are 20 Pulse Per Second dials that were used with test equipment and operators positions depending on the type of switching equipment that they were operating. Anything with Register Senders (Panel & Crossbar) could deal with pulses much quicker than Strowger type equipment could. 10 PPS dials remained the standard for telephone sets so that they were "universal" but there were advantages to having operators dials move a lot quicker since they spent half of their working time waiting for the dials to return between digits.

Terry