【海外の反応】携帯が全滅した夜、ボストンの街角がガチで消防を呼んだ話が有能すぎる

> When many 911 calls weren't going through in December 2018 due to an outage at Louisiana telecomm giant, vintage technology helped save the day in Boston.

> After a fire broke out in a building in the North End, a resident who couldn't use a cellphone because of the outage pulled the fire box on the street outside. And soon, a fire crew was on the scene.

> In Boston, there are over 1,000 fire boxes, a system invented in the mid 19th century, something that still works even when modern technology doesn't.

At least in the original design, the box would have a telegraph key actuated by a spring-loaded wheel that would tap out the box's number when the lever was pulled. That telegraph key could also be accessed by firefighters on the scene to call for reinforcements.

In order to deter prank alarms, some fire alarm boxes had a very loud siren installed, or had a mechanism that would hancuff the user to the box until someone with a key arrived on scene.

I know this because we learned about them in fire alarm class (I'm an electrician) basically entirely due to Boston. I believe they have their own part of the National Electric Code.

As a Bostonian, I never noticed that these *weren’t* around in other cities.

TIL this is a rare thing. There are call boxes on Massachusetts highways for motorists too.

It's stuff like this that always confuses me about Reddit. People on here fucking love to describe the US as precisely it's lowest common denominator and nothing more than that, like we are all in Mississippi or something, and I'm sitting here confused every single day reading about how I'm supposedly living in some horrendous situation.

True. Boston’s fire boxes run on dedicated lines, so they still work during outages.

Gamewell boxes are super common in New England. They’re reliable, using a telegraph type system to send a signal to the dispatcher.

Kind of like a music box, when triggered, a spring driven cylinder spins tapping out the box number. So box 123 would ring 1 bell, 2 bells, and then 3 bells. At the fire station, a bell would ring and telegraph ticker tape would be punched so the guys could confirm box 123.

Based on the box number that comes in, the fire department would know the location or the district.

If you open these boxes, the inside even has a telegraph tap. Back in the day, before radios, a boss would tap in to inform fire alarm of the all clear.

A lot of these boxes are being replaced with radio boxes, but street boxes are generally still this old style.

This is also why, if you listen to scanner traffic, you’ll hear alarms called in as a “box alarm” or a “still alarm”. A box alarm would indicate that the gamewell box had been tripped, a still alarm is something that has been called in by a person with no box trip.