Why they call it a 'dial tone'

According to Dr. Mac's Cultural Calendar for August 20, the telephone rotary dial was patented on this day in 1896.

I still have a rotary phone, one of three in the household and the only phone that functioned during the blackout. (The other two are cordless push-button types that require electrical current.) It no longer rings, for some technical reason having to do with digital phone lines, I suspect, but the dial still works and I can make calls with it. When I pulled it out of a closet and hooked it up in the bedroom about a year ago, my son asked me what it was and how it worked. I showed him how to use the dial, which he thought was quite peculiar. It is a weird device when you think about it -- a relic of a slower-moving world when it took (horrors!) 20 seconds to dial a phone number. (Why do we still say that we "dial" a number, anyway?) I bet a lot of people used that time to think more carefully about what they really wanted to say, though.