Western Electric hand telephone sets
Type of American telephones by the Bell System / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Western Electric hand telephone sets comprise a series of telephones that were produced from 1927 by the Western Electric Company for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and the Bell System. The series features the mouthpiece (transmitter) and the earpiece (receiver) combined into a hand-held unit, originally named a hand telephone, or handset. The handset would be held against the ear and in front of the mouth simultaneously, in contrast to earlier telephones in the Bell System where only the receiver was held against the ear, while the user spoke into a fixed transmitter mounted on a telephone stand or wall telephone.
Hand telephone sets consist of three principal parts: the handset, a handset mounting, and an apparatus box, called variously desk set box, bell box, subscriber set, or just subset. This box is typically mounted on a wall or desk-side, and contains an electromagnetic bell ringer and a speech transformer, called induction coil, to connect the telephone to the telephone line wiring. The handset mounting is either a desk-top stand to cradle and secure the handset when not in use, or a small box mounted against a vertical surface or wall that featured a switch-hook for hanging the handset.
Other American and foreign telephone manufacturers had already produced this type of telephone, often referred to as French phone. In the Bell System, hand telephones formally replaced the hitherto used deskstand, colloquially called candlestick, by the end of the 1920s, although reconditioned candlestick telephones remained in service for at least another two decades.
The shape and styling of these telephones by Western Electric evolved from the candlestick. Three main styles resulted for use on the desk-top, designated the type A, type B, and type D handset mounting. A and B had a circular base, while type D is identified by its elliptical footprint. The most notable examples of telephones constructed from the handset mountings, are the model 102 and the model 202 telephones, variants which differed in their electric circuitry, with improvements of speech performance. In addition, the type C, and later type G, handset mountings were small wall-mounted units for hanging up the handset.
The 1927 handset and its telephone stand marked a milestone in AT&T's telephone development and of the Bell System, as it represented a new design methodology, away from inspired invention and empirical testing and toward theoretical planning and quantitative testing and quality assurance. It became the origin of all later telephone instruments in the Bell System.[1]