Is this the party to whom I am speaking?

Finally, a thread all about vintage telephones up to 1989. Advertisements, humor, history, collections, equipment, restoration/repair, technical questions, resources or just plain memories, it's all here. While emphasis is placed on American telephones, vintage telephones from around the world are also most welcomed.

"Hello central???"

Two, ni-yun, fi-yuv, ni-yun, four, fi-yuv, O.

Hey thanks Eddie! I think this is going to be a fun thread.

This website is a treasure trove of historical AT&T films. 

techchannel.att.com/showpage.cfmQ...

This one showcasing the Bell System display at 1962 Seattle World’s Fair is great.  Check out the size of that new "Bell Boy" pager just after the 5 minute mark!

techchannel.att.com/play-video.cf...

Another scarred-for-life Ma Bell veteran here, and Eddie & Tim you are both so right!  Stepford hags every last one of them!  Once we had heavy rains and it was almost impossible to get to work due to flooding in the area where our building was located, but I made it in.  By Noon the parking lot was beginning to flood and the river behind the building was on the verge of spilling over its levee so we were told to go move our cars.  We were almost trapped in the building and nobody had the guts to make an executive decision to evacuate.  The area manager from 50 miles away had to come down -- at the hags' request, and in the middle of the storm -- to decide.  He was pissed off but good, and asked them why in the hell they hadn't already gotten everybody out of there.  That's how blinded the hags were, and fearful of using their own judgement, lest customers have to wait longer on hold than the PUC mandated.  I never had any respect for them from day one, and on that day they lost any chance of gaining it.

Another story I was told by someone in Operator Services was about a guy who needed a bathroom break.  The hag/hags wouldn't let him leave the board, so he stood up and pissed all over it.  A true hero, he was.

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Those color phones and the sets with special features not only cost extra back then, but they do now, too.  The Oxford Gray phone is a super rare color.  The "mushroom" lighted dial phones are also highly sought after.  Those two-tone phones were just plain fugly IMO.

Eddie, I like your landlord's style.  Sticking it to The Phone Company was considered a sport by many.  We had a 25' cord on our phone but I know damned well my dad wasn't paying for it.  I don't know how that happened.  It might have been there already when we moved in back in 1960.  Neighbors next door had a long cord too.  Their phone was all over the TV room and living room, with the thick black cord snaking across the floor behind it.

I kept a landline (with our same 1960 phone number) when we moved recently.  I was really disappointed to find out that, because AT&T has abandoned copper in favor of fiber in our neighborhood, the dialtone passes through the fiber gateway on the premises, and if the power goes out, so does our landline.  That is precisely why I wanted a landline -- because it would still work when everything else didn't.  The installers told me not to even waste my time trying to get it converted to copper POTS service.  How far the mighty have fallen.

Here's a shot of one of my most prized phones:  a 1950 model 500 that saw very little use.  Although introduced in 1949, those first 500s produced were only test models and had to be returned to Bell Labs.  Very few of them exist.  The 1950 500s are fairly rare as well, as deployment was both selective and spotty due to certain components being in short supply attributable (supposedly) to production or other roll-out issues.  One thing that sets early 500s apart from those produced in 1952 and later is the painted alphanumerics on the dial plate, which were protected by a fitted clear plastic cover.  In 1952 Western Electric began using a soft plastic injection mold process for the numbers and letters instead of paint.  That I even managed to come across a 1950 500 (at a thrift store in 1981) on the west coast is amazing.  Pacific Telephone was Ma Bell's ugly stepchild and was the last to get anything new.  How a 500 made its way to the Bay Area in 1950 is a real mystery. 

I have much older phones, but they're actually not as rare as the 1950 500.  While the straight cord is age-appropriate, I opted to put a far more manageable coiled cord on it, as it sat on my desk as my daily driver for a number of years.  It will be pulled out again once I've done some wiring work to add a couple of jacks.  I love the feel of a heavy bakelite type G-1 handset, its superior e(a)rgonomics, and the solid sound it makes when replaced on its cradle.

It has been suggested that the model 500 is the mother of all industrial designs from the 20th century, and I have to agree.

A-MEN!

Now you pull a phone out of your pocket to do it, and for a lot less than $16.00 for three minutes

Here's the phone niche in our 1922 house.  I'm wondering if it was original or added later.  Usually there's a recessed space below with some sort of screening material on the front, which is designed for placement of the subset (aka bell box), and I don't recall ever seeing one like ours.

The plan is to relocate the jack from the upper corner and mount a subset on the front of the lower section.  The severed original wires are visible in the basement and are fairly easy to access for reactivation.  This will function as the main ringer that can easily be heard from anywhere inside the house, and likely outside as well when windows are open. 

While I don't envision myself or anyone else choosing to talk on the phone in this location, I figure that as long as there's going to be a live connection there, I might as well have the phone serve as something more than just a prop.  I'll leave this same manual phone there rather than one with a dial.  I don't intend to initiate any calls here, but there might be incidents where I would answer one.

My research on the GIBRALTAR exchange indicates this phone belonged to a mom & pop local exchange provider somewhere in Arizona.  The F1-W handset is also a dead giveaway that Western Electric produced this for use by an independent provider as opposed to the Bell System.  The Bell System phones don't have the "W" designation on their handsets.

The house I grew up in had one of those telephone niche things in the hallway. I guess people didn't mind standing up while carrying on a conservation, there was little or no room for a chair. The phone had long ago been moved to a more convenient location, so my mom kept a big plaster religious statue in the niche. If you moved the statue you could see the phone jack behind it...St. Anthony calling. The only other religious statue I remember was a plastic magnetic one on the dash of our Oldsmobile. 

Cool panel switch video!

Locally, we had one last 5 xbar switch that Pacific Bell took forever to upgrade and cutover to a 1A.  We were fielding complaints from subscribers in that exchange for a long time because they wanted Call Waiting and the xbar switch couldn't support it.  I think it was 1992 before that switch was upgraded, over a dozen years after the neighboring exchange got a 1A.  That xbar may have been the last of its kind Pac Bell territory, or at least in one of their major urban exchanges.

Wow - 1992.

The custom calling features provided by ESS were featured in that 1962 Seattle World's Fair video.  30 year wait for them!

Yeah Jim, as I stated above, Pacific Telephone was Ma Bell's ugly stepchild.  They had a lot of catching up to do after the modified final judgement for divestiture of the "Baby Bells" by AT&T effective 1/1/84. 

Joe, let me guess.  The Oldsmobile was home to St. Christopher, and he was glued to the speaker grille.  As for St. Anthony, was your mom always losing things?

All of our extension phones were bootlegged in by my dad.  He disabled their ringers, as the level of current during the ring cycle was monitored by Ma Bell to detect any equipment they didn't know about and could charge for.  He routed all of the wires through a false electrical box covered with a porcelain light bulb receptacle that was attached with a single screw so it could be swung out of the way.  A single pair of alligator clips connected all of the extensions to the adjacent telephone terminal block.  If ever there was a call for service, he'd go down and unclip the wires and shove them into the decoy electrical box behind the porcelain receptacle.

My room didn't have a phone, so one day when I was 7 or 8 I took it upon myself to install one.  I got an old oval base phone off a shelf in the garage and proceeded to take it upstairs and stick the wires into an electrical outlet.  Of course the smoking began immediately and I ran out of the room.  My older sister had to go in and yank the phone out of the wall.  There was a black mark on that outlet for many years afterward, and my dad was not at all happy that I had ruined that old phone. 

This Western Electric 554 was manufactured in June 1962. The modular plate has a date of June 1982. It was amazingly filthy when I got it last year. Cord is new. Even the wall jack will be age appropriate.

John, what you had with that extension phone was a model 5302.  Those phones were basically the old 302 type (as seen in Sam's picture above) that were given a new case and dial assembly to resemble a model 500.  During the first half of the 1950s, the 500s were in such demand that Ma Bell couldn't keep up.  Seeing as how Ma Bell was the undisputed queen of corporate frugality, they hatched a plan to give the suddenly undesirable model 302 a new look.

One of the reasons everybody wanted the 500 was the loudness adjustment for the ringer.  Western Electric made modifications to the 302 base that gave it a ringer adjustment, and with the more modern looking case and dial assembly, they fooled millions of subscribers into thinking they were getting a new model 500 when they were actually getting an old, recycled many times over model 302 with a ringer adjustment.  Some of the 5302 models got a G1 handset like the 500s, others kept the old style F1 handset, which looked just so wrong on a 500-type base.  The G1 handsets required modifications to accommodate the transmitter and receiver elements from the F1 handset because the elements used in the 500's G1 handsets were not compatible with the 302's older technology.

I have a model 5302 with G1 handset.  I was using it the den at our previous house, but it's boxed up now.  I liked the idea of people thinking they were using a '60s phone when really it was much older.  At first glance it's not easy to tell.

The guts from this:

Combined with a modified case from this:

Equals this:

Or this (like mine):

How they did it:

A Western Electric Princess phone I picked up last year. Manufactured April, 1960. Sadly one of the prongs of the modular plug has broken off.

A Western Electric C/D 500 set manufactured December 1964. This phone was hard wired. Notice how thick the wire to the wall was. This is just like my parents bedroom phone when I was growing up.

Very cool Barry. There are various ways to polish up that phone. And rewiring it to a modular cord is a cinch. Click the link, I think this would be the appropriate line cord for your 500.

Barry, try some Brasso on that dial bezel and see if it removes the white film.  Pry up the number plate at top dead center and then loosen the nut underneath it so the finger wheel can be removed to allow easy access to the whole bezel.

Brasso will also shine up the handset and case.  Unless that phone saw refurbishing, it should still have its heavy original bakelite handset.

Here's what you need to put on that hard wired original mounting cord so it can be plugged into a modular jack (no need to buy a whole new cord).  You might be able to find one cheaper than this ebay listing:

For me at least. A General Telephone & Electronics Mod 80. Manufactured July 1978.

I guess it's a question of esthetics when it comes to the line wire Barry. Wow, that 500 led a hard life. Never seen one with a broken finger stop.

I didn't even notice the broken finger stop. 

I think it's worth putting the older phone into use.  The 500 is really easy to work on.  Loosen the two screws at front and rear on the bottom and the case will lift off.  The dial is held in place by two or three screws depending on the age of the chassis.  Two on the sides and the third one (if there) in front.  You don't have to remove them completely; just loosen them enough to lift the dial off the mounting bracket.  The intricate part of the job is removing the transparent plastic cover for the mechanism behind the dial.  The two tiny screws that hold it in place can easily get lost, and you'll need a smaller screwdriver to remove them.  

Use just a tiny bit of light oil such as Zout or 3-in-1, like on the tip of a toothpick, and apply sparingly to the exposed gears and any related posts that may also rotate.  After each application, give the dial a try and see if it's working properly.  Don't over-lube.  Dab away any excess with a paper towel.  It's also not recommended to lube the spring mechanism (located inside a round brass casing about the same diameter as a nickel), but I've done so in the past and haven't had any problems.  At worst, lubing that spring would perhaps cause the finger wheel to return faster than normal.  I would only do this if lubing the gears didn't help.  The spring mechanism is calibrated and is best left alone.

If you restore the dial to proper operation and then outfit the end of the mounting cord with the modular adapter, the phone will probably work fine.  If it's been sitting for a long time, unscrew the cover for the transmitter capsule and remove the capsule from the handset.  Shake it and you should hear the carbon granules inside if you listen closely.  If you don't, rap the capsule's sides gently on a solid surface to loosen the granules.  Transmitters are the weakest link on any old telephone set.

I remember the Mickey Mouse phones!  I wanted one but at the time we didn't have touch tone at home.  It cost extra and my dad wouldn't switch.  Later in the 80's we did, but it wasn't truly a touch tone system I don't think because when a number was dialed quickly with the buttons, I could hear the clicks on the other end for a couple of seconds and I'd count them...they correlated with the number dialed.  Now it's all the real deal.

That was called "Pulse" dialing. You would still have button dialing, but it mimicked the clicks generated by a regular dial phone. It was only slightly faster than dialing a rotary phone. I remember back in the late 1980's touch tone dialing was still not widely available in Germany and pay phones used "pulse" dialing.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw off the floor. What a great collection. I have never seen a Rovafone or a Porta-Call. And here I thought cordless phones came out around 1979. Those 102's are beautiful. And I agree about the husband complaints. The smaller the appliance, the less grumbling.

Nice phones John! 

I do like the round base phones and they're less common than the oval base types.  My oval base is nearly identical to the one in your picture 4.  I have it connected to a minty 1931 subset, but for now it's all boxed up.  Do your E1 handsets still have their original transmitters?  I retrofitted mine to accommodate an F1 transmitter capsule and nobody on the other end of the conversation has any idea that I'm talking on a phone that's nearly 90 years old.

I may have to look into an X-link.  I'm beginning to receive more casual calls on my cell phone than I'd like, so being able to use a real phone as an alternative when I'm at home would make the whole experience more tolerable, even if it doesn't resolve the annoying lag time of wireless communication.

I bought an Ericofon on ebay a few years ago.  I thought it would be useful in our den and would also serve as a conversation piece in more ways than one.  It turned out to have an issue with the switch contacts related to the dial and switch hook, and because it was so flimsy in comparison to a WECo phone, parts broke when I tried to repair it.  I declared it junk, and decided that an Ericofon wasn't worth owning.

While the design was interesting, there had to be a learning curve regarding how to set down the phone if stepping away for a moment, since standing it on end would terminate the call.

What a BEAUTIFUL Redbar!

I enjoy seeing Northern Telecom (now Nortel) novelty phones. I bought a lot of these as a department store buyer years ago. They were high-quality phones. My late partner was a director for Northern Telecom/Nortel. Being a Dynasty fan, he'd always remark that the phone on Blake Carrington's desk was part of a Nortel system. Dale passed away in 2001 from a brain aneurysm at age 45. We were together 22 years, really just kids caught up in the disco era. Somewhere I have a tape of him doing a Nortel presentation. Oddly enough I have never viewed it...the only video of him I have. Sorry, just going way off track and waxing sentimental. 

these were fun phones...

I loved the discreet "ring" of Alexis' office phone!  I wish I could find one of those, whatever they are.

Nortel made the "EBS" phones (Electronic Business Sets) that only worked on Nortel switching equipment.  They were one serious PITA to provision, as what one phone was capable of doing had to be acknowledged in provisioning every other phone in the system.  That could really snowball and a giant matrix was needed to map it all out.  An integral part of the design and programming involved Multiple Appearance Directory Numbers (MADNs) and they were indeed a maddening thing to plot out.

These were great phones and had some good options on them, but we used to dread it when the account reps sold them.  Thousands of these EBS phones were all through the big HQ building in San Ramon.  Business customers with EBS phones that they bought and paid for were not happy if they moved to a new location where there were no Nortel switches in the CO.

I have two Northern Telecom Contempra phones, one in green (rotary) and the other in Harvest Gold (touch tone). They're buried somewhere in the closet.

Family friends had a beige GTE "Space Maker" installed in the breakfast nook of their home when they built it in the early 1960's.  I was always fascinated by the look of it.

I had this WECo 201A set above the bench in my workshop at our previous place.   I won it for $10.99 on ebay without a handset.  It's boxed up now since I don't have a shop set up at our new place yet.  I originally wanted one with a dial, but decided I'd never initiate a call from the work bench, and the adjacent room had a 500 model on the desk in there.

This phone was hooked up to a 634A subset.  The handset should be the older E1 type, but the later F1 style also works on it.  I had a spare F1 laying around, and I prefer the coiled cord that stays out of the way.

Verizon hangs up on landline customers in Brooklyn

Trump’s FCC reduces consumer protections

If you’re a Verizon customer who uses a traditional landline in your home or business, you may soon be facing an unpleasant surprise.

Over the summer in Brooklyn Heights, numerous customers, with no warning, discovered their phones no longer had a dial tone.

Kevin Carberry, an independent real estate broker specializing in Brooklyn Heights brownstones, co-ops and condos, told the Brooklyn Eagle that the phones at the six work stations in his home office on Columbia Heights were recently shut off with no warning.

“I noticed I was getting no calls on my business line and when I checked, the line was dead,” he said. When he got in touch with Verizon, “I was informed that my service was out and my voicemail was not activated.” Verizon told him that there had been a major interruption to a trunk line and repairs would take 3 to 6 months.

Carberry said Verizon provided him with a “wireless gizmo” [Voice Link, which connects to a cell phone tower] that would answer one phone. “I have six stations,” he said, and trying to answer all the calls on one phone is not feasible for him. “I had all the calls forwarded to my cellphone. What a mistake.”

What bothers Carberry the most is Verizon’s “cavalier attitude,” he said. “To be without a business phone for 3 to 6 months with no answering service is outrageous. I complained that their solution is not a solution to my problem. Their fix was to charge me to forward calls to me.” Their solution is not “consumer friendly,” he said.

The Eagle has received complaints from other Brooklyn Heights residents concerning their Verizon landline service outages as well.

Jeffrey Smith, an area activist who checks up on a number of elderly residents, wrote via email on June 29, “Over the last two weeks I have received mounting reports of home phones suddenly becoming inoperative (no dial tone) with little or no warning over a wide area of Brooklyn Heights. When people call Verizon (through an outside or cell phone), they are told that the outage is due to ‘cable problems’ or ‘the installation of new cables.’ Beyond this, they are offered little or no further information.” The residents were told repairs would take roughly two weeks, Smith said.

Smith called the outage a serious concern because wired landlines are used for home security systems, fire and intrusion alarms and personal emergency notification devices for the disabled and elderly.

“Pendants are used by the hundreds among the elderly and impaired in the general downtown area. This provides the option of living independently. But given a service interruption, especially a prolonged outage, such a situation could spiral into a tragedy,” he said.

When the Eagle reached out to the Brooklyn Heights Association to learn if the organization had received any complaints, Executive Director Peter Bray said their own phone service had been affected.

“The BHA’s DSL line stopped functioning in mid-May and despite endless promises by Verizon to repair it, it is still not in service. Instead, Verizon provided the office with a device that establishes our internet connection through cell phone towers, though it is not 100 percent reliable and there are days when the connection is intermittent,” Bray said.

He added, “The last time I spoke to Verizon, I was told by a representative that Verizon has no intention of repairing our line, which is part of the old copper network. The line will only be restored when the building we are in switches to FIOS, the fiber optic network, which is something we do not control. In the meantime, we have to make do with a band aid approach to our problem.”

Happening Across the Nation

The problem is not limited to Brooklyn Heights or New York City, according to the non-profit Washington, D.C.-based public interest group Public Knowledge.

Across the country, copper lines are being replaced with fiber or wireless networks that use Internet Protocol technology, which can provide faster and better phone service. But new rules adopted by the FCC under the Trump administration do not contain sufficient consumer protections or sufficient outreach to the 49 million customers who are still using landlines, Public Knowledge says.

The technology transition will be a good thing in the long term, Daiquiri Ryan, Policy Fellow at Public Knowledge, told the Eagle. In the meantime, however, Verizon and AT&T “are not taking care of their copper” network. She said the FCC under President Trump “rolled back all the consumer protections the previous administration put in place.”

The Voice Link units customers are given as a replacement “are so unreliable they don’t even consistently call 911,” she said. Landlines, by comparison, continue to work even when the power goes out, and they are compatible with credit card machines, faxes, alarms and medical devices.

“For the disabled and elderly, it’s a huge deal,” she said. The FCC eliminating advance notice requirement could make a big difference “if grandma falls.”

The problem is there’s no competition, Ryan added. “Seventy percent of Americans only have the choice of one or zero landline providers.”

Depending on the carrier, customers with a complaint have only a certain number of days to contact the FCC to oppose their repair or landline replacement, and the average consumer won’t be able to navigate the process, she said. She recommended people affected complain directly to Verizon. “Let them know that you know this is about copper retirement, and know Verizon is trying to push [you] into a higher contract.”

Because of the cost to replace copper with fiber (about $30,000 a mile) consumers will be paying higher costs for the upgraded service, she said. “Verizon is the only provider; they can charge what they want.”

Public Knowledge says the problem can be even worse in rural areas, where service providers like Verizon can virtually abandon their customers, and in places like Fire Island, where Verizon was blocked from abruptly terminating service to the entire island in 2013.

“They just let the [copper wires] rot when they stop working,” she said. Public Knowledge is fighting in the 9th Circuit to “get some of these rules back on the books,” she said.

“Verizon’s tactics are definitely Trumpian,” said one longtime Heights-based business owner, who fears retribution from Verizon.

“I need a fax, I need a hard line,” he added. “It is typically short-sighted and again, Trumpian, to allow the abuse of something like underground cables under public streets … it’s a public trust, for God’s sake.”

A Verizon spokesperson told the Eagle on Tuesday that Verizon would be looking into the cases we reported, and would have no comment until they knew “what’s going on with individual customers.”

Another incentive for Verizon to rip out landlines is the fact that most employees of Verizon’s landline business are unionized, while most wireless operations are not. As landlines disappear, unions slowly lose ground. In Brooklyn, however, wireless workers voted to join Local 1109 in 2014 and won a contract in 2016 after joining landline workers on the 49-day strike against Verizon. According to CWA, the workers fought off “an extremely aggressive anti-union campaign.”

FCC Rule Changes

According to Telecompetitor.com, the FCC adopted rules in November 2017 eliminating certain consumer notice requirements, enabling service providers to discontinue certain low-speed data services that had been grandfathered and eliminating the need for service providers to receive FCC approval before upgrading legacy services.

The FCC is expected to give permission to the phone companies to stop maintaining the old copper networks somewhere around 2020, according to ARsTechnica, “potentially bringing an end to the century-old regulations that guaranteed universal service and other consumer protections.”

In a press release, the commission said the new rules “allow carriers to invest in modern networks rather than devote scarce resources to outmoded legacy services.” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said that carriers such as Verizon could save $40 to $50 per year per home if they were not required to maintain copper infrastructure.

The FCC changes flew under the radar because the public was more focused on the net neutrality fight going on at that time, Ryan said. “Net neutrality is our number one issue — 85 percent of people want net neutrality back on the books. So many FCC protections have been rolled back. It’s been a stressful year and a half.”

This might be news to some, but there has been a smug Verizon puppet in charge of the FCC for the past couple of years, thanks to YKW.  Scroll down to the last couple of paragraphs in the linked article if you don't want to read the whole thing.

I recently called Verizon and the rep tried mightily to make me switch from copper to fiber. Basically telling me  it was going to happen soon anyway. I said we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. What infuriates me is that we'll loose service in a black-out. And they'll only provide a battery for one hour back-up not talk time. Last black-out we had lasted 23 hours. Talk about taking a huge step backward.

The telecom lobby is so huge in D.C. that there's not a chance in hell that we can save the copper network.  Particularly as long as the fox Pai is guarding the FCC hen house.

I'd have no issue switching over from copper, except for the loss of service in a black-out. When tropical storm Sandy roared in I lost cell phone service, (although strangely, internet service via the cell provider remained unaffected) but I never lost the landline. It worked flawlessly. It's sad that there is no incentive to remedy this. And with things as they are in Washington, I doubt there ever will be. We really are at their mercy.

It's not that Eddie. Verizon only offers a 1 hour stand-by battery if you loose power. Use the phone and the battery dies even faster. During Sandy, we lost internet service and voice cell service. The lights were flickering, but we never lost power. Verizon should provide at least a battery that will last 48 hours of continuous use. Yeah I know, fat chance.

Part Two:

www.automaticwasher.org/c...

I remember years back, we had emergency generators to power the water pumps, elevator and hall lights. Last black-out, they failed and never repaired. The management company and the president of the COOP board were found guilty for corruption and are now serving prison sentences. It's my hope that now that these crooks are out, the generators will be repaired. I have no idea whether Verizon would permit, or the COOP allow, phone equipment to be connected with the emergency power supply.