1947 telephone from the Bell Telephone MFG Company of Belgium

[unbeldi]

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[dsk]

Maybe it is a little later version of mine: http://tinyurl.com/bn72h7o

By the way, could you please draw, measure, take pics of one of the hings, I need to make new ones to my phone.

dsk

[unbeldi]

Maybe it is a little later version of mine: http://tinyurl.com/bn72h7o

By the way, could you please draw, measure, take pics of one of the hings, I need to make new ones to my phone.

dsk

The hinges on mine have essentially identical dimensions as those of a Western Electric 534 subscriber set. The box is smaller than the 534, but the hinges actually fit in place. Identical dimensions, just that the curvature of the "hooks" is slightly different and the screw threads are in the hinges, not in the case as for the 534.

... Here are some pictures.  The shiny part is the one from this Belgian phone, and the dull one from a 534A subset.


Was your phone also made by Bell Telephone ?
Bell Telephone distributed phones to many places in Europe apparently.

[unbeldi]

After cleaning this phone up a bit, it looks pretty nice. The gongs cleaned up nicely and are pretty, almost like new. The ringer's coils where barely hanging on because the screws were loose and had almost come out.

With three crimp-on lugs, I wired the remaining handset cord into to the proper terminals inside. It's a rather short cord, but for testing or even for display, it is fine. The dial needed more work.  I disassembled it and cleaned it in an ultrasonic cleaner with a detergent for 10 minutes. Not knowing exactly the internals of the dial, the spring popped out right after removing the finger wheel. It was not hard to put back together after studying the components that came out.

After reassembly, the dial was still a bit sticky, but this improved after oiling the spring better. Apparently the self-friction of the spring surfaces as it unwinds needed to be reduced. The dial works fairly well now, pulsing at 9.8 to 10.1 pulses per second, with a 64% break ratio.

The gongs are still a bit weak, mechanically the ringer needs some adjustments, but rings again, probably the first time this century, as it was no condition to do so.

All in all a usable instrument again.

[dsk]

I have made my self some ideas, and since I cant prove it, its still only ideas.

Wen automatizing began in Europe, the Americans started some companies under different brands, and names. The names could change quite quickly, and the reorganized to adopt local rules, and mentality.
Many products was based on US products.

Oslo (Kristiania) Norway had ordered their first automatic exchange in USA before WWi Old local papers shows a picture of a telephone with a reverse dial.
Tho war started, and a shipping of cables and racks was torpedoed. (This caused lots of misunderstanding and roomers confusing Norwegian history writers for decades)
USA started with great restrictions on export, The Antwerp factory was put out of business...
After the war, the marked was starting again, and Oslo got their exchange from USA, all papers of this has diapered, many claims it has to be an Antwerp made exchange, but many parts are marked mad in the USA. An old switcher I now remember to have seen NEWARK witch he misunderstood as NEW YORK --and I don't know.

The first telephones were all imported, some from Western Electric, some from Standard Electric, and I'm not sure the plain worker really understood or was interested in the difference.

From around 1934 about all our telephones was made in Norway, but lots of parts was Antwerp made, and I guess Antwerp transmitters was used until 1967, and the dial was copies of your. The dial mechanism used here was mainly the same until push-buttons was introduced in 1980.

Most of this companies ended up with ITT brand.

Even when western electric has been involved in the early stage the dials look more AE inspired, but both the circuitry of WE (302 lookalikes) and the AE triad = Siemens was present.

It looks like the only development in circuitry without direct US influence happened in the British and Swedish countries. European automatic loop compensation was only developed or at least put in mass production in UK.

This was just a summary of my ideas, and not plain facts.

dsk

[dsk]

Here is a scan of  dial number plat to a similar dial.

[G-Man]

When the Germans overrun Bell Telephone Manufacturing's factory in Belgium during both WWI, plans along with some of the jigs and other machinery were smuggled out of the country and shipped via England to Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in the U.S.

There, Western Electric manufactured rotary and other equipment to meet commitments for prior orders that could not be honored by their European subsidiary, International Western Electric's BTM division.

In 1925, ITT purchased International Western Electric along with its BTM factory, from ATT/Western Electric.

This is well documented and has been covered extensively on the TCI listserve. When I have an opportunity, I will see if I can come up with a more detailed account.

[G-Man]

Here is a brief excerpt regarding the switching history of Norway and a few other countries:

At the turn of the century, AT&T, which became the holding company of the Bell System in 1889, "authorized a study by Western Electric to develop a project for 10,000 line exchange". The outcome of Western Electric's efforts was the Rotary switch, which was regarded as superior to the Strowger system. It did not respond directly to the dialled pulses; instead, the numbers dialled were received by registers, which controlled the setting of the switches. The registers "eliminated the fixed relationship between the numbering scheme and the number of switching
stages", which led to "less switch wear and lower maintenance".

The Rotary switch was installed in several cities; it was produced for more than 60 years and was central in the Norwegian network until the 1980s.

The demand for telephones grew exceptionally in the Norwegian capital from the turn of the century. Telegrafverket realised that the manual switching system that was installed from 1895 would not be able to handle the traffic. The cost of personnel was very high with the incumbent network, both for the physical switching, but also because of the many errors that had to be taken care of. It became a problem for
large cities to operate tens of thousands of subscribers by manual switches.

With automatic switches, it was possible to allocate one switching station to each part of the city. In 1911, there were 130 automatic switches in use in the USA, and it gained ground in Europe too. The expansion of urban telecom networks in these years obliged most PTOs to consider the developments in switching.

The Director General of Telegrafverket, Leonard Iversen, and his chief engineer, Sivert R. Abild, headed a committee that participated on international congresses concerning automatic switches. Thereafter, the committee went on a study tour around Europe and to the
USA, before it produced a thorough report on the need for automating the Oslo network in 1913. This envisaged a plan for 30,000 lines, with a potential for 90,000 lines.

The Norwegian parliament, the Stortinget, sanctioned the plan, and international companies were invited to present tenders. The committee was extended with the inclusion of executives of the telephone companies in Copenhagen and Sweden, to evaluate the tenders. In January 1916, the committee chose Western Electric's Rotary switch for the Oslo network. Besides Western Electric's low price, it was the reputation of Western Electric and BTM that counted the most, along with the fact that the Rotary switches had been tested in other cities.

The contract with Western Electric was signed in 1916, and the first automatic switch was due already in 1917, but the project was postponed, mainly because of the World War. The automatic switch was installed in 1921, which was early in a European context; Hague was the
only capital that installed automatic switches earlier. This suggests that Norway still was in line with the other Scandinavian countries in being pioneers in telecom.

The Bergen Telefonkompagni, which was privately owned, also ordered Rotary in the 1920s. The switches were imported from BTM in Antwerp, and installed by Western Electric Norway, which was founded in 1920, and which eventually became STK's telecom department.

The equipment suppliers that battled for these contracts in Europe were Ericsson, Siemens, Western Electric, and Automatic Electric Chicago (Autelco), which produced the Strowger system.

Western Electric operated through its subsidiary, the International Western Electric Company (IWEC), which handled the overseas business.
Thus, IWEC was a holding company for BTM, STC, Western Electric Norway and other companies. It was not very successful, however, in winning large switching contracts in Europe. The German PTO ordered a variant of the Strowger switch from Siemens, and IWEC lost a long-fought struggle to supply the British network in 1922.

The loss of the British contracts was allegedly due to amateurish political handling. IWEC confused the British by making a combined offer of Rotary and the US version of Rotary, called Panel. Moreover, IWEC and STC planned to carry out the bulk of the manufacturing in Antwerp, not in Britain. This was a "fatal political error" as it was politically impossible to entrust the manufacturing of "nationally important equipment to another country". "The British Post Office considered that Parliament would never sanction such a proposal" and dropped IWEC's offer, in favour of the Strowger switch. The loss of the UK market implied that IWEC would have a hard time getting access to other Commonwealth markets as well.

Thus, "by 1923 two large European countries had made their choice", says ITT's famous French telecom engineer, Maurice Deloraine, "which was against the systems supported by Western Electric". The last large contract for automatic switches in Europe was for the French network, but IWEC had no reason to be optimistic given its record in Germany and the UK. As a consequence, Western Electric's owner, AT&T, considered divesting itself of IWEC. One possible buyer was International Telephone & Telegraph, with its eccentric manager Sosthenes Behn.

[unbeldi]

Here is a scan of  dial number plat to a similar dial.

Does your dial look anything like the one in my phone?
Below is a picture of the connector side of the dial.

Second picture: The spring assembly in the front of the dial behind the finger wheel has a clever mechanism to wind up the spring after it is installed in the center. One has to rotate the metal plate by the little holes, there are tabs that stop the plate from rotating backward and so prevent the coil from unwinding.  Proper disassembly would be to push down on the tabs and let the plate return to is unwound state 1/5 of a rotation at a time.

I started making an overlay for the number plate by repainting the numbers in a graphics editor on a picture of the plate. This keeps the font and size identical, is just a bit of work... but there is no rush and I don't really mind the faded numbers all that much. It's an old used phone and it can never be new again anyhow.

Thanks for the history additions... I have found other accounts of the Bell Telephone MGF Company history as well.

[dsk]

This dial looks familiar, it will fit telephones made in Norway from late 1930ies to 1967, even when they have changed from metal to bakelite to plastic during the years, and the mechanism remained almost equal until 1980. 

The 1930 dial on my phone are different, and don't know much about it.

dsk