A Telephone Retrospective

A Telephone Retrospective

Today, calling the operator, receiving a yearly telephone directory, and memorizing all your friends and families’ numbers, rings nostalgia for many. In the era of cell phones, it seems difficult to imagine how revolutionary telephone technology was for its time. Landline telephones work by converting a caller’s voice into electrical signals that travel through wires to another telephone, which then converts the signals back into sound waves. Early phones ranged from large wooden wall telephones to candlestick desk sets. The rotary dial handset, with a receiver resting on its base, permeated American homes by the 1950s. This exhibition will feature an array of classic telephones from the late 1800s to the 1990s—from streamlined Art Deco telephones, pay phones, and novel Picturephones of the 1960s to a 1958 prototype of the first push-button dial telephone.

[image, detail]
Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company advertisement   c. 1940
Collection of the JKL Museum of Telephony