Northern Electric 500

[Froggy]

Hi

I have a Northern Electric 500 and I' ve been searching why this one doesn't have any letters on the bezel.  Does anybody knows?
as well what means the stamp underneath NE 500 (northern electric 500)  76 (date) but QIUA ... I have no idea as well for C/D  can someone shed some lights.

Thanks
Yves

[jsowers]

I'm by far no expert on NE phones, but that 76 looks like the year of manufacture to me. In the USA phones were becoming modular around that time and yours looks to have a modular mounting cord, so the date fits. So your phone is 40 years old, it seems to me.

The lack of letters on the dial means they had gotten away from the alphabetic phone number prefixes of the 1950s by then and really only needed them for 1-800 numbers and such. To this day my power company has 1-800-POWERON and I have to use the letters to report a power outage, which is not fun in the darkness with an incandescent Princess phone.    Luckily I keep a flashlight by the bed too.

The number card en francais is a nice touch. That's why the word "operator" isn't at the 0--it's not French. That was missing from Canadian phones even when the letters were still on the dial. Your number card says what I assume is the French equivalent of "Wait for Dial Tone." Some may have a better translation.

[WEBellSystemChristian]

According to Google Translate, the card reads:

Wait
For the
Signal

Before
Dialing

[Ktownphoneco]

The Northern 500-DQ1A set was sold to independent telephone companies (Telco's).     It's listed in a 1969 Northern telephone catalog that was distributed to Telco's outside the Bell System.
Attached are two pages from that catalog, showing the set itself, and the individual components that make up the whole telephone set.

Jeff Lamb

[Jack Ryan]

The letters were used to dial an abbreviation of the required exchange. This was only needed if more than one exchange could be dialled. In some places, the population was small and there was only one exchange so there was no need for the letters. I don't know how often this happened in Canada - perhaps someone else could comment. Some exported NE 500s also had numbers only.

You asked about the letters "C/D". I did not see those on your phone but they are early WE codes. I believe "C/D" refers to the phone that first included the equaliser in the network - C being the manual (no dial) version and D being the dial version.

Jack