B1....rare dial?

[John S]

Hello..

I picked up a nice B1 and an antique shop yesterday...and the dial is very strange.  I never seen one like this before. Has anyone anyone seen a dial like this before?  There are letters on half of the numbers. Numbers 1,2,3,4, and 8 have no letters.  5, 6, 7, 9, and zero have letters on them.  Its a nice phone...decent shape.  The headset has a crack on it.  Here are some pics.......


John

[foots]

I'm no where near an expert but I think that phone was on a party line, hence the letters. If its not too personal, how much did you pick this phone up for?

[McHeath]

I've never seen a dial plate like that, but I'm no expert.  Weird that they would make one like that.  It's a very interesting phone for that reason alone, methinks. 

[John S]

I paid 30 bucks for it....I love the old phones....Most of my collection are pre 40's......It was sold "AS IS".  I  guess the dealer had no idea, so I took it for 30 bucks....Its a bit more than I pay for phones....but I think it really looks cool.  It has all the wire clips attached to the wall cord. 

[bingster]

That's a party line dial plate, as Foots mentioned.  Party line numbers often ended in a letter, such as "559-J" or "12-317-R."

Incidentally, $30 for a B mount is definitely the steal of the day.  Congratulations!

[Phonesrfun]

John:

The B1 is not all that common, but you can find them out there in antique shops and on E-Bay, so some would not call that rare, but definitely rare in the sense that they don't show up in every day life.

The dial you show in the photo and have described is a party line dial from early days of dial telephones.  The letters were not indicative of a prefix name, but rather a suffix that was added to a number to designate which party they were on a line.  The suffixes were J,M,R and W, but there is no rhime or reason for the letters.  I have a phone directory for the town I live in from the early 50's and the town still used those suffixes.  Numbers were like 12345-W, for instance.  Everyone on line 12345 were on the same party line, but the letter designated which one on the party line got the ringing current sent down the line to ring the phone.

-Bill

[bwanna]

very cool, john.  $30 was a good price, too. thanks for finding it, so we could all get an education on party line designations.

[Phonesrfun]

By the way, I have been thinking about my last post.  I did not mean to diminish your find.  The price you paid for it is super, and the dial number plate even makes it more so!  It also has the earlier seamless handset.  You can get reproduction spit cups from places like Old phone Works, and there is a seller named Adele on E-Bay that had some a while back too.  The reproductions are made of plastic and they fit a little tight, but I have used one and they show well.  You can also get a subset for it and hook it up for every day use.  Oh, and one more thing.  The "bullet" style transmitter, like the one on yours is also early, but they had some problems with clarity.

So, yours is early in every sense of the word.

Great find!

-Bill

[bingster]

Speaking of bullet transmitters, does anybody know when they made the change to the transmitter cartridges?  Was it about the same time they switched to anti-sidetone?

[Phonesrfun]

According to Larry Wolff's book, Desk Telephones of the Bell System, the bullet aka 395B barrier-button transmitter was replaced with the "F1" style cartridge element in 1935 (page 50).

According to Ralph Meyer's book, Old-Time Telephones!, the antisidetone subsets came out in about 1930. (page 72)

So, while the antisidetone subsets seem to have come out before the barrier-button transmitter was replaced by a better transmitter, it all seems to have been pretty close together in time, and probably a lot of overlap.

-Bill

[Dan/Panther]

John;
The handset is worth more than twice what you paid for the entire phone, plus a unique dial to boot.
Here I thought Finlover had the corner on; "coming out smelling like a rose..."
If you know what I mean...
D/P

[John S]

Thanks for all the post...replies.  I learn some much, when I post on here, or just browse the forum.  Thanks to everybody......Keep posting!!!!

John

[rp2813]

My mom grew up in a small farm town outside of Chicago.  Their number was 20-J.  I think I still have a bill for that account somewhere, with the name "Viola" written in pencil, as if to have confirmed payment.  She probably worked the switchboard and all the rest including accounts receivable.

I think I read somewhere that the letters used were chosen because they sounded nothing alike.  You couldn't mistake W for R, J, or M no matter how bad the transmission quality may have been.

Ralph