AE50 - Factory or MOD

[NorthernMan]

To all you AE gurus.

The lever in the picture below releases the plunger upwards when pressed against the body  .......  i have only seen two of these. Is this a factory ordered phone option or is this a local telco changeup. Notice the screw beneath the dial  ... very odd it holds a plate inside the set.

Anybody know what purpose or application it would serve.

NorthernMan

[AE_Collector]

I think the lever is factory but I am not positive about that. I believe it is the party line mod so when you go off hook you are just listening to the line to see if there is a conversation in progress or not. If not you push the lever which takes the phone completely off hook giving you dial tone in the case of an automatic CO the operator if a Manual CO.

I don't have any 50's with this mod so can't comment as the whether the screw throught the front of the case is part of it or some other modification. Doesn't really look factory to me at all and I don't recall noticing a screw there on other 50's that I have seen on ebaY with the lever.

Terry

[AE_Collector]

All AE sets in Canada prior to 1953 were made by Phillips Electrical Works at Brockville Ontario. AE did supply their phones with other brands of dials to suit the operating company that they were supplying the phones too. There seems to have been a lot of AE phones used across the prarries with other than AE dials in them.

However, something just isn't right with that one you have there. I'm thinking that the dial was retrofitted into the phone after it left the factory either by the Telco or maybe even someone after the phone was retired from service. Seems wrong even to have been done by a Telco.

I'd convert that one back to an AE dial and hopefully the screw hole is small enough that it can be filled with some black epoxy or something and will become almost invisible.

Terry

[jsowers]

I can't speak for the dial, but that is definitely a party line switchhook on that AE50. You don't see them often. A similar switchhook was put on the AE40 and we had one when I was growing up, on a party line. The dial tone was different when you picked up the handset and the switch hadn't been pushed yet. You listened to see if you had dial tone or if someone was talking. If you got dial tone, you squeezed the lever and the dial tone went up several notes higher. Like from a C to a G on the piano.

Party line switchhooks always had a plunger with tapered sides, as you see here. The lever used the sides of the switchhook plunger to release it in stages. There should be a small spring to make the lever spring back. Sometimes that spring is broken.

Did the phone have an oddball frequency ringer in it? That would be another indication it was a party line phone.

Another (less elegant) solution for the screw that shouldn't be there would be to paint it black. Maybe it would blend in better?

[Doug Rose]

I can't speak for the dial, but that is definitely a party line switchhook on that AE50. You don't see them often. A similar switchhook was put on the AE40 and we had one when I was growing up, on a party line. The dial tone was different when you picked up the handset and the switch hadn't been pushed yet. You listened to see if you had dial tone or if someone was talking. If you got dial tone, you squeezed the lever and the dial tone went up several notes higher. Like from a C to a G on the piano.

Party line switchhooks always had a plunger with tapered sides, as you see here. The lever used the sides of the switchhook plunger to release it in stages. There should be a small spring to make the lever spring back. Sometimes that spring is broken.

Did the phone have an oddball frequency ringer in it? That would be another indication it was a party line phone.

Another (less elegant) solution for the screw that shouldn't be there would be to paint it black. Maybe it would blend in better?

that is very cool. I have never seen anything like it. On the AE40s were the plungers the same tapered head...thanks....Doug

[jsowers]

that is very cool. I have never seen anything like it. On the AE40s were the plungers the same tapered head...thanks....Doug

Yes, Doug, the right-hand plunger on the AE40 with party line switchhook was tapered. The left one was cylindrical. The lever you squeezed was spring-loaded and it was a totally mechanical device that "trapped" the plunger at the narrowest part of the taper, which was halfway up. Then when you squeezed the lever, it let the plunger spring up to full height. Hanging up reset it.

Still to this day I listen for dial tone before I dial a number.

[AE_Collector]

Looks like a Straight Line ringer to me. It could have been changed out at some point in time though.

Terry

[Phonesrfun]

Might be 1800 ohms per coil, and straight line.  At least it looks to be straight line.  3,600 Ohms total coil  resistance seems high but still would work.

The 1800^w seems to be indicating 1800 ohms, but I am not sure.  

Before the use of the Ω symbol for Ohms, the standard was to use the ω symbol (small omega) which looks a lot like a "w".  The symbol change in general use seems to have taken place somewhere in the 1940's or the 1950's, based on my own observations.

[GG]

Re. JSowers re. the dial tone went up in pitch after squeezing the party line switch on the phone: 

I think it's likely that what you were hearing there was:  a) Upon lifting the receiver, what you heard was not a dial tone but the 60 Hz or 1st harmonic (120 Hz) that is present on the line for unfiltered talk battery plus whatever stray AC got into the line.  This is what you hear through a test set in monitor mode.  Those party line latch switches were basically "monitor" switches on the telephones, that allowed AC signals to pass (voice and line noise) but not DC (thereby avoiding interfering with someone else's dialing).  Then b) when you squeezed the latch, the other spring in the hookswitch closed and bypassed the monitor capacitor and made the DC connection, enabling the linefinder to connect you to actual dial tone, which was the higher pitched sound.

Re. plugging up the extra screw hole:

I'd suggest finding a "hole plug" of the correct diameter at any decent hardware store.  These are made in black plastic with a slightly rough finish and can be sanded & buffed to a totally smooth glossy finish.  The advantage of this is that it doesn't alter the original equipment: you just press it into place and all you see is a slight bump in the surface, but it's symmetrical and appears plausible, and is consistent with telco practices of preserving the option to use whatever dial was available in case of a repair.   

Those Siemens GPO dials were correct & original to those phones as-issued in Canada, so for pure accuracy to origins, they're worth keeping on the phones.  But if you want to swap them out, keep them and their misc bits & bobs in Ziplock bags with identifying labels in case you ever want to return the phone to as-found original condition. 

[DavePEI]

All AE sets in Canada prior to 1953 were made by Phillips Electrical Works at Brockville Ontario. AE did supply their phones with other brands of dials to suit the operating company that they were supplying the phones too. There seems to have been a lot of AE phones used across the prarries with other than AE dials in them.
Terry

Wanna See the Factory Where This was Made?

Terry is correct -  Here is a bit of AE's Brockville history. In 1935, the original plant opened as the Eugene F. Phillips Electrical Works, and began manufacturing AE phones. Phillips Electrical Works produced AE phones on King St. West across the road from St. Lawrence Park in Brockville until late 1953.  

In 1953, a new 1.5 million dollar 124,000 square foot Automatic Electric factory was built at 100 Strowger Boulevard on Schofield Hill, by the Theodore Gary Company and it officially opened on Sept. 22, 1954, a design which served as a prototype for the Automatic's Northlake, Illinois facility. The new plant employed some 2300 people, with at least one person out of every 3 families in Brockville working there.

Phillips Electrical Works then became Phillips Wire and Cable (a Division of British Calender Cables) and produced cable until it shut down in 1998, and was demolished in late June/early July 2008 to make room for a new subdivision. The last portion of the plant to be demolished was its huge smoke stack, and it signified the end of an era.

Brockville being a telephone town, led in large part in my interest in telephones. I wasn't the only one - another of the more notorious telephone collecting Brockvillians is Don Woodbury, owner of Old Phone Works, who grew up a few blocks away from us, and whose family went to the same high school I did. Don is the only other Brockvillian I know of that caught the telephone bug thanks to AE, but I am sure there were others - I'd love to hear from them!.

See more of the GTE/AE Canada history on:
http://www.islandregister.com/phones/ae.html

Photo Below: The Phillips Electrical Works Plant from the 1949 plant Calendar. Captioned "Phillips Head Office and Factory at Brockville, Ontario".
Below that: A view of switch bank assembly in the new GTE/AE plant on Strowger Blvd, ca. 1960.
Bottom:An AE Matchbook from shortly after the new plant opened. My best guess is that these were probably issued within the first 3 years of the new plant opening. I remember seeing many of them discarded on the streets when I was very young.

Dave (Proud to be born a Brockvillian!)

[DavePEI]

Hi All:

I was looking through my photo collection, and found another GTE/AE Brockville photo - a view of the front of the Strowger Boulevard plant around 1965. I am posting it below.

Dave

[GG]

Eugene F. Philips!  And here I was running around thinking that Philips Canada had something to do with Philips Netherlands, or some connection to GPO UK.

From the air, the factory complex looks relatively small and ordinary, but presumably this was the state of North American manufacturing for most of the 20th century: aside from automobile assembly lines that were huge, most everything in our households came from smaller factories like this, in towns and cities scattered across the landscape.

And all of it was made by hand, by skilled workers, not by robots.  Humans ran machine tools, the lathes and punch presses and so on, the foundries and die-casting equipment, with hundreds of specialized job descriptions.  If you lived in a factory town, you knew the people who made stuff you had in your house.   And that's also what a full-employment economy looks like, where a kid can expect to graduate from high school and get a decent job that could support a family. 

[DavePEI]

Eugene F. Philips!  And here I was running around thinking that Philips Canada had something to do with Philips Netherlands, or some connection to GPO UK.

Hi there:

Actually, you missed something. The spelling of this Phillips is exactly that - double "L", unlike that of Philips, Netherlands. So, he was Eugene F. Phillips.

Yes, you are correct, at least in the photos, it looked quite small, but in person, it was a very large plant for the time. So was the new GTE/AE plant on the Strowger Blvd., but not compared to the Northlake plant which was modeled on the Brockville design.

When I remember AE in Brockville, it does remind me of how much simpler things were back in the 50s. Brockville is a beautiful town, located at the beginning of the 1000 Islands on the St. Lawrence River. And you are correct. If you lived there, it was impossible not to know people who worked at the plant. Brockville was a small town then, of course much larger now. Life was simple, and it was great! Crime was low, and with the exception of the great Brockville Bank Robbery at Brockville Trust that happened in 1958 when I was young, there was almost no major crime.

Incidentally and off topic, but that bank robbery at the time was one of the largest takes in North America at the time, some 10 million dollars. Three robbers were said to have been involved. One dropped his bankbook during the robbery and was eventually taken into custody in Montreal, but if I remember correctly, the others were never found. An interesting little bit of Brockville notoriety. Other than that, the worst crimes in Brockville were committed by jaywalkers 

Ahh, memories!

Dave

[AE_Collector]

When I remember AE in Brockville, it does remind me of how much simpler things were back in the 50s. Ahh, memories!

Dave

Loose translation - "They didn't put a chain link fence around the dumpster out back of the factory"! Right Dave?

Hi All:

I was looking through my photo collection, and found another GTE/AE Brockville photo - a view of the front of the Strowger Boulevard plant around 1965. I am posting it below.

Dave

That (current) Canadian Flag flying out front made it's first appearance in Canada on Feb 15, 1965 so the picture wasn't taken prior to then. Maybe the picture was taken specifically because of the new flag out front.

Terry

[DavePEI]

That (current) Canadian Flag flying out front made it's first appearance in Canada on Feb 15, 1965 so the picture wasn't taken prior to then. Maybe the picture was taken specifically because of the new flag out front.
Terry

Now, that you mention it...

Interestingly, but off-topic, John Ross Matheson was a Brockville (Leeds-Grenville County) Liberal politician at the center of the development of that flag. He wrote a book, Canada's Flag: A Search for a Country, about the creation of the new flag. If I remember, for a while, it looked as though the flag would have wound up with blue on the two sides representing from sea to sea, but in the end the all red and white design was used.

Re: the chain link fence, actually, there was one, but was open in one spot close to the dump. No, don't look at me, it was open before I started checking it out

Dave