The Coming of the Dial Review: A surprisingly hypnotic 1933 tech demo

Is this worth watching today? Only if you are a total nerd for retro technology or weirdly specific British history. 📞

Anyone looking for actual drama or a normal movie plot will probably hate this with a passion. But if you like old black-and-white archives, it is a fun little time machine.

The Coming of the Dial is basically an information film from 1933. It wants to show everyone how the new automatic telephone dials work.

Stuart Legg is behind this, and he treats telephone wires like they are the most exciting thing on Earth. The level of drama he puts into a spinning wheel is honestly impressive.

There is this one shot where the camera zooms in on a giant mechanical switchboard. It feels almost like a sci-fi spaceship from an old movie.

The clicking noises of the machinery are so loud. It gets kind of hypnotic after a while, like a weird proto-techno beat. ⚙️

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Coming of the Dial (1933) through its definitive frames.

I kept thinking about how much effort went into making people understand how to dial a number back then. Imagine trying to explain a smartphone touch screen to these guys.

If you thought the quiet tension in something like The Guilt of Silence was intense, just wait until you see a 1930s clerk staring down a busy telephone line. The stakes feel strangely high for no real reason.

The film does not really have characters, obviously. It is just workers doing their jobs and close-ups of metal parts moving around.

One guy in the film has the most amazing mustache I have ever seen. He looks incredibly serious, like he is diffusing a bomb instead of just connecting a phone call.

It is definitely a bit too long, even though it is just a short. Some of the technical diagrams go on for way too many seconds.

But still, there is a charm here. You can feel the excitement of a world that was suddenly getting smaller and more connected.

It makes you appreciate how easy we have it now. No giant mechanical gears needed just to say hello to someone.