Coiled Line Cord

[HarrySmith]

I remembered a discussion a while back about coiled line cords. There is a good example on eBay right now. The conductors are correct for a mounting cord, it is not a repurposed handset cord.

http://tinyurl.com/3fv5dsv

[Adam]

He he.  Thanks Harry, I saw that too.  I was one of the disbelievers in the original thread.  Interesting stuff.

[JimH]

My aunt and uncle had a white 500 in their upstairs hallway on a table that had a coiled line cord.  They didn't have a phone in the "master" bedroom, they did this so they could just pull it in whatever bedroom or the kid's rooms.  I remember it in the 1970s, I think they moved in in 1969.  I always thought it was strange to see that coiled cord on a table phone!

[AE_Collector]

How do you know that it isn't a long handset cord for an AE phone being used as a set cord? Most of the long handset cords we used here didn't have the strain relief on them where they would go into the handset. They could be used for either although the metal bits weren't always correct for what we were using them for. As I recall many of them were set up with AE set cord type metal parts.

Terry

[bingster]

If you zoom in on the photo above, you can see the cord has a wingband restraint on the free end, which was specifically designed to lock into a WE 44A connecting block.  Besides that, WE coiled mounting cords are listed in the BSPs.

[Adam]

Excellent points, Bingster.

In addition, if that was an AE handset cord, yes, the wire colors would be right, but the wire ends themselves are too short.  The phone end of a handset cord has four long wires, the handset end has two short and two long wires.  This wall end of this line cord correctly has four short wires.

[bingster]

There's something else interesting about that phone.  Despite the seller's assertion that it was her mother's in the 1950s, the phone is later than that.  The round plastic feet, narrow fingerstop opening, solid-center fingerwheel, etc., give that away.  All these things came along after named exchanges had been dropped in favor of numbers-only dialing.  And yet the phone has a later area code style dial card, with an older "DE 1" exchange.  Odd and interesting.

[Adam]

The round plastic feet, narrow fingerstop opening, solid-center fingerwheel, etc., give that away.

Narrow fingerstop opening?  I never heard that mentioned before.  Could you document that a little more, please?  Perhaps comparative pics?  Thanks.

[Dennis Markham]

Adam, the #7 series dials have what I call a support post under the finger stop.  The opening on the dial bezel is wide to accommodate the support post and the finger stop.  The later, #9 series dial do not have this support post.  The opening on the dial bezel for the finger stop is much more narrow.  That is a tell-tale sign that a dial has been replaced somewhere along the way or issued with the later dial and finger wheel.

[Adam]

[slaps his head says "doh!"]

Of course!  That's a very easy way to tell the difference between a #7 dial and a #9 dial!  I knew about the difference but I never thought about it before from the standpoint of identifying a dial era without seeing it from behind...

Thanks!