My Grandma's Kitchen Phone

[HobieSport]

This little phone is probably nothing at all special, but it has great sentimental value for me personally. This was my Grandma Violet's phone in her kitchen when I was a kid. It was connected to another unit to my Grandpa Herman's big precision machine shop were he worked on the same property, and Grandma used this phone daily to call Grandpa when lunch and dinner were ready. I wish I had the other unit, but I never saw it. I'm wondering what the other unit that worked with this phone might have been. Would it have had a battery?

Grandma and Grandpa had a big 1920s house in Los Gatos, California, and their house was full of all kinds of amazing antiques, and other items of great interest, and was a very magical place to me as a child when we visited them.

But for some reason I was always most fascinated with this simple little phone.
So perhaps I originally "caught the phone bug" much earlier than just a year ago.

I have some good stories about my Grandpa Herman, if anyone might be interested, but they are not phone related.

-Matt

[AET]

Is there a pic of the phone? And I am interested in your stories.

[HobieSport]

Hi Tom, I was just posting the pictures while you wrote.

Gee, let's see, where to begin about stories about my weird and wonderful Grandpa Herman...

Somewhere in my belongings I have a fascinating newspaper article about his life and work, and I should be able to find that article in the next few weeks, and then I'll be very glad to quote the article word for word on this thread.

Meanwhile, here are some enticing highlights from his life. Grandpa Herman was a Swiss-German inventor, physicist, and precision machinist with very wide interests and talents, and he loved to experiment.

In Grandma and Grandpa's big previous home in Oakland, Calif., they had a big old Hammond organ. Grandpa had a big speaker hooked up to it in mono audio, but one day he wondered what might happen if he could separate the audio into two channels with two speakers. This was in pre-stereo days, mind you.

Well, somehow he did manage to get the organ hooked up with two channels with two huge speakers, and it was ready to test. In his enthusiasm he turned the volume up to full and he hit the lowest note on the keyboard.

And every single window in their big two story house immediately exploded.

I've got a few more stories like that.

[AET]

Great story! And very  neat phone.  Looks like an intercom one.

[bingster]

I'm wondering what the other unit that worked with this phone might have been. Would it have had a battery?

It's a lock that the other phone was probably identical to this one.  And there definitely would have been batteries.  These probably operate on the same principle as the little green Connecticut intercoms.  

Great little telephone, btw.  I think that's probably the oldest "family phone" we've come across from our members.

[HobieSport]

Great little telephone, btw.  I think that's probably the oldest "family phone" we've come across from our members.

Gee. Gosh. Cool! Thanks for the info, Bingster. I think I do remember my Mom or Dad telling me that the other unit that this was paired with was similar, but had batteries hooked to it somehow. I wish I had seen it.

[LarryInMichigan]

Matt,

It sounds like your grandfather was the 'mad scientist' type.  I never had anyone interesting like that in my family, but I have known people who did.  I work for a a family-owned company who founder, the owners' father, was that sort.

Larry

[foots]

     Cool story Hobie. The intercom is also very interesting. I've been looking to set one up for a while now between here and my brother's house next door but have not gotten around to it as I do have some more important projects to tend to first.

[HobieSport]

Larry,

A "mad scientist" is a perfect way of describing my Grandpa Herman. Here's another story about him, quite possibly embellished by my creative memory:

A Day in the Country with Grandpa:

Wellsir, (old man story teller's voice, sitting in a rocking chair on the back porch) I don't know where or when this took place, but it was somewhere in California. The US Air Force was selling off some surplus jet engines (so maybe it was just before or after the War in Korea? Just an uneducated guess.)

Well these here jet engines were in working condition, and they were only fifty bucks each. Of course nobody really had a practical use for them, other than as decorative items to scare grandma with, I reckon, but the thing is that these here engines came with their own very well built split cylindrical aluminum cases, and farmers and ranchers where buying them up, putting the engines out to pasture, and using the two halves of the engine cases as feed and watering troughs that would last a lifetime, for their animals.

Well, my Grandpa somehow got hold of one of these engines, and he had different creative ideas for it altogether. Him and a friend mounted a fuel tank on it somehow (or maybe it was already built with a small fuel tank attached? I wouldn't know) then he fastened a very hefty hundred foot steel cable to the business end of the engine, and anchored the other end of the cable very securely, and fired that puppy up.

Wellsir, that sucker reared and roared and shot straight up until it reached the end of the cable, and then just swayed around at "top mast" and full blast, trying to break free of the cable.  Needless to say there was some element of danger in this little experiment, and some decibels were indeed involved.

Then Grandpa's friend turned to my Grandpa and yelled over the din and asked "Say, Herman, how much fuel did you put in that thing, anyway?"

Grandpa just grinned and said "Oh, I just gave her a full tank."

For all I know that engine might have been up there roaring away for hours.

Anyway, that's how the story goes, related by my Grandpa to my older brother (who was also a mad scientist type) and then my brother told me. Yeppers.

[AET]

Sounds like a fun afternoon!!!

[HobieSport]

The intercom is also very interesting. I've been looking to set one up for a while now between here and my brother's house next door but have not gotten around to it as I do have some more important projects to tend to first.

Foots ol' pal, I would imagine that a pair of simple wooden intercom units like the one that I have could be gotten pretty inexpensively. Or how about you and your neighbor maybe using some kind of standard vintage U.S. Signal Corps equipment as an intercom?  I know next to nothing about that kind of equipment , so it's just a thought...

[dsk]

Looks like a state of the art intercom.

Induction coil granted for good quality speech, and a sensitive DC ringer.   My guess is a 3V battery near each phone. (maybe some extra for the ringer if long/bad line)
You could easy get another newer phone working together with this one.  Making it work on the POTS as an answering phone is possible too, but "we" have to make a kind of adapter system.

Do you have any plans for how to use or display this family jewel?

dsk

[dsk]

I have one in bakelite from the thirties witch should work well together with yours.

If we remove the 600 ohms winding from the induction coil here, the wiring diagram could be quite near yours.


dsk

[HobieSport]

Do you have any plans for how to use or display this family jewel?

Yes: Clean it with a damp cloth and stick it on the wall.
I don't plan on hooking it up or using it, as I don't have any real use for an intercom. I guess I could call my pet duck on it...

[HobieSport]

Okay, well, I found the newspaper article on my Grandpa Herman, the inventor, so I'm gonna share it here. I'm breaking the full article down into five installments because it's hard on my eyes to copy it exactly word for word. But it's really fun too!

News Article on My Grandpa, Herman Fanger:
(Installment One of Five)

San Francisco Examiner
Sunday, May 24, 1964

The California Weekly
People

Herman Fanger

Stereo and Sonar are just two offshoots of this Peninsula inventor's incredibly fertile imagination

by Walter Blum

   When Herman Fanger was a youngster in his native Switzerland, he liked to go out in a boat and measure the depths of the lakes by banging a hammer against a metal plate.

   Years later, Fanger perfected the idea, took out a patent, and then promptly forgot about it. But the world didn't forget. For Fangers's "little sounding machine," as he calls it, became that astounding miracle of underwater detection---Sonar.

   Such a casual attitude toward earthshaking discoveries is typical of Herman Fanger, a genial, rumpled bear of a man who, at 69---more than a decade after he supposedly "retired"---still turns out little miracles in a back yard shop behind his home in Los Gatos.

   In characteristic fashion, Fanger assesses his achievements with a shrug and a wave of the hand. He is too busy, he maintains, to look back. "Once I'm finished with an invention," he says, "I'm finished. Then I want to go on to the next."

   One of these, over which Fanger makes little fuss, is a device that literally revolutionized the recording industry. He discovered it while working with the sonar machine, which required a loudspeaker to broadcast sound waves through the water.

   The magnet he was using, Fanger found, just wasn't delivering enough power to do the job properly. Nothing seemed to work until, in a moment of idle curiosity, Fanger wondered what would happen if, instead of a single speaker, he hooked together two speakers, connecting them by induction to the one magnet.

   The result was an amazing by-product---the world's first coaxial speaker, an invention that is now the basis of all high-fidelity and stereo sound reproduction. In it's crude form,it was hardly the most complicated invention. But no one, it seems, had ever thought of it before.

   Stereo and Sonar are just two off shoots of Fanger's incredibly fertile imagination. Even more surprising, though, is his method of work. For, in a scientific era dominated by team research and mass breakthroughs in industry and universities, Herman Fanger is a loner. He prefers to create his "little miracles" on his own.

   Fanger showed scientific aptitude right from the start. "As a child," he recalls, "I used to take apart clocks. Then I graduated to a generator, and electrified the whole house---even the toilet seats."

   He was born in a small town near Lucerne, and completed an eight-year course in physics in four years. One of his first jobs was at Brown and Boverig, a well known Swiss electronics firm, and it was there that an accident occurred that almost ended his career before it really got started.

(...to be continued...)