Ancient Web: A Ham Operator's Western Electric Phones Filled a Photo Catalog

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before the smartphone made every telephone look like a rectangle, an American desk phone could resemble a wooden chest, a miniature roll-top desk or even an elaborate basket. One amateur-radio operator's website makes room for all of them.

Visit the Western Electric Touch-Tone phone collection.

The owner introduces the page as a collection of Western Electric telephones from the push-button era. It starts with photographs of ordinary sets and oddities: a ten-button model without the * and # keys, a standard 2500 desk phone, a compact Space Saver, several colorful Princess phones and a Trimline with much of its circuitry inside the handset.

A photo caption also identifies a telephone made for the 1980 Olympics. There are no long product reviews on the front page. It is a collector's index, using images and a few candid notes to encourage visitors to explore.

The hardware beneath the decorator case

The deeper Design Line catalog is particularly revealing. It describes Bell System decorator telephones from around the era of the breakup of AT&T. According to the collector, customers could buy the decorative casing while the telephone company retained ownership of the working electronics.

The models include a roll-top desk phone, a Stowaway, a wood-box Trimline, a wicker basket design and a commemorative model for the 1976 Bicentennial. Not every object is confidently named; the owner openly marks an unidentified green set and another object with “I have no idea.”

Links from the main page lead to commercial telephones, autodialers, payphones, military Autovon-style sets, keypads, technical notes, and telephones used in movies or on television. That range records the many roles of a device often reduced in memory to a black rotary dial.

The site has the modest structure of a collector's home page on QSL.net, with galleries, email contact and an old WebRing link. No trustworthy launch year was established during this review, so the date of the telephones should not be confused with a date for the website.

This is material-culture preservation: the design differences and unlikely shapes of ordinary communication hardware catalogued by somebody who cared enough to photograph them.

Browse the unusual Western Electric Design Line models.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.