1955 554 w/ black switch hook

[MagicMo]

I would go by the latest date if the dates are clumped together.  So if you had a 7-55 network and the shell was dated 8-55, then your phone is from August 1955.  If the shell was dated 10-72 then you'd have a 1955 phone updated in October 1972.

Makes perfect sense.
Thanks!

[MagicMo]

Did she have any Bell System tools or Bell System Practices (manuals)?

I didn't see any but I will ask tomorrow. She might have more phones too! Now, I will be sure to get there at 9am. She gave me a handful of other stuff too (pic).
Mo

[WesternElectricBen]

Are those payphone locks in the corner?

And what are those screw things in the box? anyone?

[MagicMo]

No. I took a pic of the box
Mo

[Dennis Markham]

Wow, Mo.  That phone really cleaned up nicely.  Great find!

[AE40FAN]

Nice find/rescue Mo!  The things people consider trash...

[jfrutschy]

Nice find, and what Fantastic Job looks sweet

John

[MagicMo]

Did she have any Bell System tools or Bell System Practices (manuals)?
[/quote]

I asked her. No she didn't. She gave me the handset to go with the phone, Bell locks and mechanical pencils. I also met another Bell guy while I was out today.We talked for a while and he told me an interesting story about the divestiture. He said that he was amazed at all the "stuff" that they were giving away to everyone that worked there. Piles of phones, parts and supplies. He also told me that in the river near my house, he and a bunch of other Bell guys would toss old phones in to it. He said that he himself tossed in over a hundred over the years! OMG! I can't imagine that any would be salvageable. Why would they do that? I thought they got credit? Oh well, it is tempting to go take a look.
Mo

[MagicMo]

Nice find, and what Fantastic Job looks sweet

John

Thanks John, just a little soap and water. It looked worse than it actually was.
Mo

[Jim Stettler]

Thanks Ben

I have a question regarding the "date" of a phone. Seeing that most phones have dates of parts within a few months of each other, what part truly "dates" the phone? Just curious
Thanks
Mo

I have been told it is the transmitter date, that you should use. The transmitter also has the longest wear cycle so it does make sense.
My $.02,
Jim

[poplar1]

Did she have any Bell System tools or Bell System Practices (manuals)?

I asked her. No she didn't. She gave me the handset to go with the phone, Bell locks and mechanical pencils. I also met another Bell guy while I was out today.We talked for a while and he told me an interesting story about the divestiture. He said that he was amazed at all the "stuff" that they were giving away to everyone that worked there. Piles of phones, parts and supplies. He also told me that in the river near my house, he and a bunch of other Bell guys would toss old phones in to it. He said that he himself tossed in over a hundred over the years! OMG! I can't imagine that any would be salvageable. Why would they do that? I thought they got credit? Oh well, it is tempting to go take a look.
Mo
[/quote]



I've heard stories over the years of candlestick phones being thrown into the Chatahoochee River by the truckload.

According to my friend Bill, who worked at the WE shop in Atlanta, when Bell sent phones back to WE to be remanufactured, if they weren't repairable or were obsolete, they didn't give Bell any credit for them. When you consider that the number of leased phones went from 140 million to under a million by 2006, that's a lot of phones! He said that later on, the shop had "advanced" assembly lines: Any 500s with wool feet or 7C or 7D dials they didn't bother to reissue, but instead sent them to ACI as scrap.

[WesternElectricBen]

That really is too bad, the felt feet 500s are my favorite! And some of them are quite rare.

I wonder what other plants did when they had discontinued colored phone color?

[poplar1]

If you are talking about the 23 WE shops, they probably all followed a similar procedure. By the early 90s, though, the Atlanta shop was the only AT&T/WE one left. It closed around 1995.

Before there were so many returns, they would just keep remanufacturing with housings in the then current colors. That's why you see refurb dates on the bottom, or find a green 500 with a dial marked 7C-55 instead of -51.

[paul-f]

I wonder what other plants did when they had discontinued colored phone color?

This Bell Labs Record article just sent in to the TCI Library by Chuck Hensley shows in graphic detail what happened to some returned phones!

Plastic Recycling

Check out the photo with the caption: "Turning scrap into scraps. Herb Kern of the Plastics Research and Development department feeds battered plastic telephone housings into a knife-blade granulator."   

Ouch!

[poplar1]

I wonder what other plants did when they had discontinued colored phone color?

This Bell Labs Record article just sent in to the TCI Library by Chuck Hensley shows in graphic detail what happened to some returned phones!

Plastic Recycling

Check out the photo with the caption: "Turning scrap into scraps. Herb Kern of the Plastics Research and Development department feeds battered plastic telephone housings into a knife-blade granulator."   

Ouch!

It's interesting that at first they had problems with recycling black housings because they were made of phenolic materials instead of ABS until sometime in the 1960s. One original idea was to scrap all the black housings. So are the soft plastic housings not also phenolic?

It was several years after this 1975 article that they switched to "insertless" housings that contained no metal.