Stuck Sender
Revertive Pulse was faster than dial pulse, but the greater advantage was when something went wrong. In earlier systems when a worn pawl or other problem in a Strowger selector caused it to fail to advance, nobody knew except the calling party, who only knew nothing was happening. The caller eventually lost patience, redialled, and might easily get stuck again on the same selector, or another caller could get stuck there. One bad Strowger selector could block dozens of calls per hour until subscriber complaints led staff to discover it.
With RP, the pulses were going backwards to the sender, a complex and sophisticated piece of hardware. If a selector failed to advance, it stopped sending pulses to the sender. A timer in the sender detected the failure, returned a trouble tone to the caller, held the switch train out of service with a grounded sleeve lead so no other caller would use the faulty circuit, and sounded an alarm. Staff could then trace the stuck sender, and identify and repair the defect while the caller tried again and usually succeeded.
Read more about this topic: Panel Switch
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