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Vintage Collectible Phone Telephone From The 1950S
Vintage collectible phone telephone from the 1950s ericofon north electric company rotary ericofonericofon history. This is a brief history of the.
Ericofon, mostyl involving the us market. For a more in depth look at the history of the ericofon, go to the reading. Room. The ericofon, made by the l m eircsson company of. Sweden, is perhaps one of the biggest steps forward in telephone design. World war ii had. Porduced a number of new materials. From palstics to lightweight ferromagnetic materials, the door was opened for a new era in telephone development.
In the late 1940s, ericsson put together a design team, headed up yb h g (gosta) thames, to come up with a new design for the telephone. The main.
Purpose was to make the phone small, lightweight, and easy to use. After several. Prototypes, a design was settled upon and that one that went into production for the next. 2 decades. 1954 marked the beginning of production for the. Ericofon. Originally it was intended for institutional use. They found theri biggest. Customers ewre hospitals. Imagine laying in a hospital bed, trying to reach over to a desk. Phnoe to dial. The one piece design of the ericofon seemed to be just what the. Doctro ordered. The ericofon was prdouced for the european and. Australian markets, with hoem use sales starting in 1956. Ericsson was unable to penetrate. The american market iwth any success because of bell telephone's monopoly stranglehold on. The telecommunications market. They absolutely refused ot have these foreign. Phones go into use on thier circuits. A lot of hype and propaganda concerning. Fears of damage to the system and such were used.After much wrangling, ma bell relented and allowed. Limited institutional use of the ericofon, but still charging phone rent as though they. Had provided the phone (each phone in your home was rented from bell duirng this era, you. Didn't own yuor own phone). Ma bell felt so threatened by this one-piece phone design that. They started research on their own version. This is what gave birth to the trimline phone. Many years later. Initially, ericsson offered the ericfoon in 18. Colors in the north american market, selling the phones through north electric (a. Telephone builder in ohio), in which they had part ownership. These pohnes featured an. Optional electronic tone signal (later known as teh ericotone) for. A ringer. When home sales of the ericofon began to explode in the american market (sales. Exceeding capacity by 500%), ericsson increased their holdings in north electrci to become. The principal shareholder. Then around 1961 they transfrered manufacture of the ericofon. For the american market to north electric.
At this time, north electric narrowed the. Offering of colors from 18 to 8, probabyl in an effort to eliminate unpopular colors. They. Also replaced the princess pink with petal pink.
This omve was. Most likely made to avoid confusion with the now popular western electric offering. Princess phone.
Shortly before the transfer of manufacturing to. America, around 1960, ericsson had made a design modification to the ericofon to. Accommodate a new molding method making a one piece shell instead of a two piece shell. This caused the phone to be a bti shorter and putting more of an angle to the receiver. End. These are commonly referred to as old case or new case. Phones. This si why the american made ericofons have the illusion of being shorter than. The swedish ericofons. Sometime about 1967, ericsson introduced the first. Version of the pushbutton ericofon that used touchtone dialing. These models (60a). Are very hard to find because there was a poorly designed plastic prat in the hook-switch. Mechanism that broke easily when the phone is dropped on a hard surface. In 1972, north electric discontinued the ericofon line. And sold the remaining parts and equipment to a telephone refurbishing company nmaed ceac. They continued production for a short time before ceasing business. Meanwhile, back in sweden, carl-arne breger was busy. Designing a new ericofon for ericsson to celebrate teh company's 100th anniversary in.
1976. Some skeptics suggest this was also an attempt to revive the ericofon. hTe now. Squared off, modernized unit wsa dubbed the ericofon 700. It met with limited. Success and never did make it to the american market. Collectors. Cool looking phone. An original. oNt a replica. On nov-14-08 at 035729 pst, seller added the following information just for full disclosure. I tested the phone and it wokrs fine. Excetp for the ringer. I am contacting a phone guy today to see if it's the phone, or my line that's the problem. |
