French answer to the spacesaver?

[LM Ericsson]

I do not exactly know what this phone is called, but it reminds me of a spacesaver telephone. Sort of France's answer to the American spacesaver telephone. I bought this on Etsy for my birthday so I could use it at my computer desk. It has one of those clicky ringers like my Telcer Hollywood telephone. And a neat thing about it when you open it, it opens like a door. Unfortunately when it arrived in the mail, the center of the transmitter cap had broken in the mail. It was not even put into a cardboard box, just wrapped with packing material, good thing the whole handset even survived!!! Here are a few pictures of it.

[LarryInMichigan]

That's a really cute phone.  You're lucky you saw it before I did   The handset looks alot like an F1 from here, but so did alot of European handsets.  I wonder if you could use a cap from an Ericsson handset as a replacement.

Larry

[gpo706]

Very pretty, I like these French dial cards with all the info crammed onto them.

Can you glue the broken bit back?

[paul-f]

Very nice.  Congratulations on a great find!

For comparison, here are photos of a similar set harvested several years ago.

Hopefully more sets will turn up for the rest of us.

[GG]

The transmitter cap from a Netherlands (Dutch) Ericsson won't work: the Dutch phones had a very large thread, the French ones typically had a fine thread similar to a WE F1. 

Image search "French dial phone" and look for the one that vaguely resembles a 302 but with that French dial on it, and look closely at the ends of the top side of the handset.  That's the standard French handset of that era.  Yours is not that handset.

The one on your phone is closer to Dutch Ericsson or Dutch Standard Electric. So search carefully for one of those Dutch phones and use the entire handset.  The Ericsson ones have the name Ericsson in an oval on the inside of the hand grip.  The Standard Electric ones have no maker's marks on the handset plastic parts, so that would probably be better.  These are often found swapped on the Dutch phones, so you'll have to look at photos carefully if it matters to you.

Keep your existing French handset in a plastic bag somewhere just in case you ever find a patching transmitter cap. 

[LM Ericsson]

Very pretty, I like these French dial cards with all the info crammed onto them.

Can you glue the broken bit back?

Unfortunately, the broken part broke into tiny little pieces.

[LM Ericsson]

Very nice.  Congratulations on a great find!

For comparison, here are photos of a similar set harvested several years ago.

Hopefully more sets will turn up for the rest of us.

I saw one on ebay recently that had a metal dial. I believe it was selling for about 60 Euros.

[GG]

These may date back to the original French handset phone, of the type with the handset that could from a distance be mistaken for a WE E1 handset.

Reason is, that E1-ish handset would hang there in such a manner that the transmitter section, which is deeper than the receiver section, would hang in the space below the dial. 

So, LMEricsson, if you have a WE B1 or D1 with E1 handset, you might want to try hanging that handset on that cradle and see if the dimensions line up right. 

If so, then this wall set is probably a transitional model heading toward the 1950s model.  The latter is more like the Ericsson wall sets of that era (handset cradle at the top of the phone, horizontal instead of vertical, and various stylistic resemblances to a GPO-332).  The "space saver" would have been designed to take either the older or newer handset.

In any case this was clearly approved and used by French P et T, (later, PTT), because it has the standard PTT dial label that would not have been seen on private PAX systems.   And the oddest thing is, it has an internal buzzer, whereas the French 302-ish phone (which is also called a 332 despite not looking at all like a GPO 332) has no internal sounder at all and relies on common bells mounted in central locations.   

Yes, it would be interesting if more of these turned up.