Antique & Vintage
Telephones
- 1902 Stromberg Carlson wooden wall phone
- 1904 Western Electric 20-B candlestick phone
- 1905 Stromberg Carlson candlestick phone
- 1906 Western Electric / Gray Co. pay phone
- 1908 Kellogg candlestick phone
- 1915 Western Electric 20-AL candlestick phone
- 1921 Western Electric 51AL dial candlestick
phone
- 1928 Western Electric 211 hanging
handset phone
- 1929 Western Electric 102 desk set
- 1930 Automatic Electric Monophone 1A
- 1933 Western Electric 202 desk set
- 1940 Automatic Electric AE40 – “the Matrix
phone”
- 1938 Western Electric 302 desk set
- 1948 Western Electric 191G Pay Telephone
- 1949 Western Electric 5302 set
- 1950Western Electric Ivory 302
- 1950 Western Electric 500 set
- 1962 Western Electric pink Princess phone
I like Western Electric better than any
other manufacturer because they were the supplier for the Bell System. The Bell System was the phone company
of every major US city and it was hard not to use a Bell System phone made by
Western Electric if you lived anywhere between 1890 and 1990. Bell System phones are also marked “Bell
System – Not for Sale” and were rented by the phone company for a monthly
fee. The phones were then
collected by the phone company after they were taken out of service and they
were destroyed. The fact that any
of the phones survive today is lucky, especially specialty phones like pay
telephones. Western Electric also
has a neat numbering system which assigned a number or number/letter
combination to every set they made.
Among telephone collectors, it becomes a way of shorthand and a code
language to talk about personal collections. I have found no other group of antique collectors more
obsessed with part numbers and part collections as phone collectors.
1920s
Candlestick Telephone Stand
Ringer Boxes and Subsets
:
Early phones didn't have internal bells (among other components), so
subsets had to be built. Subsets contained electric parts
to make the phones work and bells to let the subscriber know when he had a call
coming in. Click here to see some.
Vintage Telephone
Accessories
Antique telephone after market accessories and attachments.
Paper and Fun Things
Period telephone related prints and my friends talking on old
phones.
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