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Kellogg 5/58 DK 591 Phone.... tell me about this ....

Started by LoveOldPhones, November 24, 2016, 11:48:21 PM

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LoveOldPhones

Quote from: Dan/Panther on November 30, 2016, 12:16:59 PM
I hope I didn't confuse anyone when I mentioned about the dial. I mentioned it took me awhile to get a Kellogg dial for my Banjo. Did not mean to suggest yours was a banjo. They are two separate phones. I was just commenting on how hard it is to find the original Kellogg dials.

D/P

Hey Dan... thats OK... I am easily confused about alot of this because I don't really know that much about the phones.  lol but its all cleared up now.

LoveOldPhones

#31
I like the idea of painting the cord... I will think about it if I don't find a matching cord.

however....  today I went to see that fellow that works on old phones and he was kind enough to put a line cord on this phone and now I CAN call out.
BUT !  he says it will NOT ring because of the frequency its set up on.....  or something like that. ( I should have taken notes)

He knew right away when he opened it up and looked at it.... in fact...  the wires to the bells were not even hooked up.

SOOO .... he told me that he has a ringer somewhere in his parts that he will be able to swap out  and then the phone will ring when calls come in. but... for the time being... I am thrilled that I can call out... although that cheese smell is too overwhelming to be on the phone
for very long.  lol

thanks SO much for all the information.  I really love the color of this phone.... it reminds me of the waters of Lanikai beach in Hawaii.

and it IS this blue !   I have seen it..... looks just like the phone. lol

http://www.best-beaches.com/images/lanikai-beach/lanikai-beaches.jpg

now all I have to do is give her a good polishing up.  there is some slight discoloration of yellow but really..... the color is still pretty good so I won't worry about it for the moment. I imagine if I could restore the original color it would be even a more brilliant color of turquoise.
still.... its slight enough I am not thinking about doing it anytime soon.

I'll be happy to just have it working.

I will try to post some pics of the inside if I can get my camera phone to work without blurring.


unbeldi

I don't have an example of the Kellogg #10 turquoise to compare, but I suspect that the color was originally a little less greenish than the pictures show, but it is certainly a unique color, because it was not copied from the Western Electric set of colors.  WECo didn't make turquoise telephones at all until 1959 when they came out with the Princess telephone and the plastic then was ABS, not the CAB Tenite plastic used previously. For the 500-type desk set, WECo didn't introduce the color until 1964. WECo's color code was 64, coincidentally.

By the smell of your phone you identified that Kellogg was also using CAB Tenite to mold the plastic parts.  The smell wasn't there when the phone was new, but has developed over the decades since, by breakdown of a very small fraction of cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB) into butyric acid, which is the same substance responsible for the smell of rancid butter. This is the origin of the name: butter <==> butyric.

Material degradation has also caused some discoloration.  We find examples of WECo's turquoise also having turned almost algae green.  This happens from expose to the elements.  When you unscrew one of the handset caps, you should see inside the handset a closer representation of the original color.

LarryInMichigan

Replacing the ringer with a standard WE C4A ringer is fairly simple, and those ringers are plentiful and cheap.  I probably have a spare or two somewhere in my mess, and I am sure that many other forum members have then.

Larry

LoveOldPhones

Quote from: LarryInMichigan on December 01, 2016, 11:54:33 AM
Replacing the ringer with a standard WE C4A ringer is fairly simple, and those ringers are plentiful and cheap.  I probably have a spare or two somewhere in my mess, and I am sure that many other forum members have then.

Larry

yeah..... thats what my phone buddy said.... he has one and will let me know when to bring the phone around again so he can put in on. 

LoveOldPhones

#35
Yes... you are right about the color...  the first thing I did when I got the phone was unscrew the mouthpiece to see what the original color looked like.
and you are correct that it now has a more greenish hue.   the stump of that old line cord  matches the inside of the mouthpiece.
i actually can't decide which color I like better.  lol  its the first phone I have seen that  still looks good even with the aging color change.

what I would like to know is....  how did Kellogg decide what colors to make and did they actually make these sets themselves ?
or... were they contracted out to make them?

thanks

LoveOldPhones

#36
ALSO..... was there a color chart for Kellogg telephones ? 
I am wondering what other colors they offered that were different from the WE colors....  like that sea green ?
and maybe the yellows ?  what did they look like ?

thanks

unbeldi

Kellogg did make their own telephones.  They had a long history being not only a manufacturer, but a cutting edge developer of new technologies as well.
They were one of the first in the 1910s and 20s to develop a transmitter that was not as much plagued by positional dependence of performance as was needed for making usable combined handsets, i.e. a handset with both the transmitter and the receiver in one unit.   They also were leading in development of frequency ringing systems that were better than the first generation harmonic system by Western Electric.  The ringer in your set is likely either of the synchromonic or decimonic type, which are two kinds of frequency-selective ringing systems.

As for color selection...  I think it worked pretty much like today.  They did market studies, or hired market consultant firms, during product development.  I don't know how much documentation there still is about Kellogg's ways of business at that level of detail. We probably have more to go by about Western Electric, who did the first such market studies, for color choices, in the early 1930s.

TelePlay

Quote from: LoveOldPhones on December 01, 2016, 02:21:38 PM
ALSO..... was there a color chart for Kellogg telephones ? 
I am wondering what other colors they offered that were different from the WE colors....  like that sea green ?
and maybe the yellows ?  what did they look like ?

This may have been the colors available, at least in 1957. Being a scanned image of an old document, the colors probably don't match the actual colors of the phones back then but it seems to show at least 3 color choices plus black (link from Reply 18 above)., maybe white?, don't know. And I doubt Kellogg would have used a color number such as WE did with all their colors over all the years. Maybe someone knows better, just a guess on my part.

1956 Kellogg K500 Brochure showing the Banjo Design and available colors

unbeldi

The No. 12 catalog of 1957 advertises "... now in 8 modern decorator colors".  That does sound very much like the WECo slogans, as the WECo also produced in eight colors.

The 1957 colors were:

2 red
3 brown
4 yellow
5 green
6 blue
7 beige
8 gray
9 ivory

For the redesign of K-500, which is your phone, they added

10 turquoise
11 rose pink
12 aqua blue
13 light beige
14 light gray
15 white

So, if you know the WECo color history, you can tell that they DID copy the general marketing moves of the Bell System, but your set's color was NEW !

LoveOldPhones

Hey thats great !

I did see that listing on the Phones in color page where he lists all the colors of the Kellogg 500 sets.
I just wondered if there was a color chart like there was with western electric.

Anyway....thanks for all the info.... I will keep my eyes open for other Kellogg phones... wonder what that sea green color looked like.

LoveOldPhones

OK... I have taken some pics of the inside of the phone...  not sure they came out too well.
I have not yet gotten a camera so this is my old cell phone.

unbeldi

Quote from: LoveOldPhones on December 01, 2016, 05:33:15 PM
OK... I have taken some pics of the inside of the phone...  not sure they came out too well.
I have not yet gotten a camera so this is my old cell phone.

The ringer is clearly enough to see to determine that it is indeed a frequency-selective ringer.   However, I would give this ringer a try nevertheless. It looks like one of the lower frequency range, perhaps 25 or 30 Hz.   It may also be possible to move the large weight on the clapper (between the two gongs) outward even more to tune the frequency lower.  I have got such ringers originally at 33 Hz to work at 20 Hz.

LoveOldPhones

Quote from: unbeldi on December 01, 2016, 06:12:56 PM
The ringer is clearly enough to see to determine that it is indeed a frequency-selective ringer.   However, I would give this ringer a try nevertheless. It looks like one of the lower frequency range, perhaps 25 or 30 Hz.   It may also be possible to move the large weight on the clapper (between the two gongs) outward even more to tune the frequency lower.  I have got such ringers originally at 33 Hz to work at 20 Hz.

well thats real interesting...  how do I do that ?  does that weight  unscrew or what ?  how do I move it forward ?
the ringer isn't even connected right now....  the wires are just loose.
I would have to know where to connect those.

Jim Stettler

Quote from: LoveOldPhones on December 01, 2016, 08:25:14 PM
well thats real interesting...  how do I do that ?  does that weight  unscrew or what ?  how do I move it forward ?
the ringer isn't even connected right now....  the wires are just loose.
I would have to know where to connect those.


Take a deep breath and start experimenting. The highest value of the current ringer is educational.
  You won't screw up your phone and if you do you can get it back together. Before long you will be the local "go-to" person for old telephone repair.
There are diagrams in the K500 handbook. (link posted earlier).

JMO,
Jim S.
You live, You learn,
You die, you forget it all.