I remember my father going away and putting a lock on the rotary dial phone - this meant you could only dial 999 I think - but my brother quickly showed him you could 'tap' out the number in the number in the way that you describe. I'm not sure who my dad was locking out - maybe we had lodgers at the time?
Later we bought a 'fancy' answerphone that you could retrieve, save and delete messages from a remote phone by playing a tone down the line. It came with a special tone generating battery operated touchpad you could hold to a receiver to play a tone down the phone, as plenty of phones were not touch tone yet.
I remember you could also use that to dial numbers some how - later a friend had a Casio watch that could also generate and 'dial' numbers for you. I tried from a payphone but it wouldn't work for me.
Those tones were DTMF. Tapping out the number on the hook was how pulse dialing (the other dialing standard) worked. Pulse dialing was superseded by DTMF at some point, but switchboards supported both for a long time. That's why you could use your tone generator (or your mobile phone!) to dial, because that's literally the exact same way that your phone dialled.
Later we bought a 'fancy' answerphone that you could retrieve, save and delete messages from a remote phone by playing a tone down the line. It came with a special tone generating battery operated touchpad you could hold to a receiver to play a tone down the phone, as plenty of phones were not touch tone yet.
I remember you could also use that to dial numbers some how - later a friend had a Casio watch that could also generate and 'dial' numbers for you. I tried from a payphone but it wouldn't work for me.