Western Electric Color Telephone Marketing: "Once Upon a Honeymoon" 1956 AT&T; 15min
more at
http://phones.quickfound.net/
"
Delightful musical made to promote color telephones as a decorator accessory in the home."
Public domain film from the
Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone
The Western Electric model
500 telephone series was the standard desk-style domestic telephone set issued by the
Bell System in
North America from late 1949 through the
1984 Bell System divestiture.
Millions of model 500-series phones were produced and were present in almost every home in North America. Many are still in use today thanks to their durability and ample availability. Its modular construction made manufacture and repair simple, and facilitated a large number of variants and derivatives with added features. Touch-Tone was introduced to home customers in
1963 with the model 1500 telephone, which had only the 10 number keys. In
1968 the model
2500 telephone was introduced, which added the * and # keys. The model 2500 is still in production today by several manufacturers, over 40 years after it was introduced.
Model 500
The original
Western Electric Model 500 was designed by the firm of industrial designer
Henry Dreyfuss, the product of several years of research and testing, and introduced in 1949.
The 500 replaced the Dreyfuss-influenced Western Electric Model 302, introduced in
1937, and improved upon several areas of design that were problematic in the earlier models. For example, the Model 302 utilized a porcelain-coated dial plate, with the numbers printed inside the finger holes. After years of use, the printed numbers and the even the dial plate's porcelain coating would wear off. The design of the 500 corrected this by molding them into the plastic instead of printing them on the surface. The numbers were moved outside of the dial to enable the user to see the numbers while the dial was spinning back to its resting position, to position his finger to dial the next digit. This arrangement also had the benefit of reducing mis-dialed calls.
Originally, the 500 was available only in black and had a rotary dial with a black-painted metal finger-wheel.
Black remained the most popular color throughout the model's production.[citation needed]
Within a few years the Model 500 was available in a variety of colors, and the metal finger wheel was replaced with a clear plastic rotary dial, by about 1964. The 500 was also the first phone to use the G type handset, which remains the standard handset on many phones, including public payphones.
The
Dreyfus design adapted itself well to Touch-Tone service. The earliest experimental Touch-Tone phones used the original Dreyfus design almost unchanged
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Electric
Western Electric Company (sometimes abbreviated WE and
WECo) was an
American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of
AT&T; from 1881 to
1995...
History
In 1856,
George Shawk purchased an electrical engineering business in
Cleveland, Ohio. In
1869, he became partners with
Enos M. Barton and, later the same year, sold his share to inventor
Elisha Gray. In 1872
Barton and
Gray moved the business to
Clinton Street,
Chicago, Illinois and incorporated it as the
Western Electric Manufacturing Company. They manufactured a variety of electrical products including typewriters, alarms, and lighting and had a close relationship with the telegraph company
Western Union to whom they supplied relays and other equipment.
In 1875, Gray sold his interests to Western Union, including the caveat that he had filed against
Alexander Graham Bell's patent application for the telephone. The ensuing legal battle over patent rights, between Western Union and the
Bell Telephone Company, ended in 1879 with Western Union withdrawing from the telephone market and
Bell acquiring Western Electric in 1881...
As of January 1, 1984, the new
AT&T; Technologies, Inc. assumed the corporate charter of Western Electric, which was then split up into several divisions...
Western Electric came to a total end in 1995 when AT&T; changed the name of
AT&T; Technologies to
Lucent Technologies, in preparation for its spinoff. All modular telephone plugs were now marked with "
HHE" enclosed in an oval. Lucent would become independent in
1996, and sold/spun off more assets into
Advanced American Telephones,
Agere Systems, Avaya, and
Consumer Phone Services. Lucent itself merged with Alcatel, forming Alcatel-Lucent. Western Electric's
Structured Cabling unit, once known as
AT&T; Network Systems or SYSTIMAX, was spun off from Avaya and is now part of CommScope...