So it's the late 1800s.

Your house is on fire.

How are you going to get ahold of the fire department when you didn't have a phone in your house or in your hand?

You run outside, you find the nearest call box.

Call boxes like this would be located normally on the street corner In this situation, this call box is box 155. pull down the access door, pull down on the hook, and it's going to send a pulse down the line to the fire department.

Let's take a look at how it works.

The indicator wheel is the heart of the system.

So the indicator wheel has the number of bumps on it corresponding to the call box number.

This is box 155.

You see, there's one bump, five bumps and five bumps.

Every time one of those ridges, one of those bumps, hits the mechanism, it closes the points.

And those points will send a pulse down the line.

A DC pulse down the line to the fire department.

So after the call box was initiated, the pulse will come into the fire department dispatch desk.

The dispatch desk would have been counting the number of gongs going off to indicate what that number of the call box was, or if they were lucky enough to have a punch, it would punch the number sequentially.

Here are the Koorsen Fire Museum, we're lucky enough to have a very early copy of the city directory for Indianapolis.

On it you'll see a box 155.

That's not original, though.

We had to photoshop that in because Indianapolis did not have a box 155.

We call ours, Koorsen Avenue and Safety Street.

So 170 years ago, that's how you would notify the fire department when you were in need.