Who collects vintage touch-tones?

[McHeath]

DTMF was the norm here when the phone had push buttons, though I have seen some phones that were able to switch between the pulse/DTMF systems if the folks needed to.  I had a little GTE Flipfone in the early 80's that could switch between the systems, but it did true DTMF if you wanted it to.  Of course back then, and I guess even now in some places, they charged extra for the touch tone service, which is why we never got it until the mid 80's as my father was not about to pay anything more for a phone than he had to. 

[Stephen Furley]

No extra charge here.  I bought a dual-signaling push-button 'phone so I could access various services, but the BT exchange was pulse only.  I tried using DTMF from time to time, since I knew it was coming, and one day it just started working.  I can't remember what date this was; I know that we still had the old 'phone when my mother died (1983), but it was before I moved to my current job (1990); I would guess it was about 1985.  LD only push-button 'phones were very common.

[bwanna]

I have one touch tone, a newish Chinese "Premier" (Cortelco?) brand 12 button in aqua, that I use on my desk for business calls.

I way overpaid for it, as it was described on Ebay as a Western Electric. Unfortunately I didn't save the sellers' contact info so I couldn't point out the miss-information (intentional or not) and return it if I wanted to.

So I bit the bullet and decided to just enjoy it, and take it as a newbie lesson. I like the style (the button panel is raised and round, like a dial insert) and it works fine and the aqua color is not faded since it's so new. So at least I can now say that I have one Chinese (read POS) phone in my "international" phone collection.

quit beatin yourself up. i'm sure that being a "premier" model, it is VERY valuable in china. i have never even seen one before, so it must be rare. did you find a date on it? is it vintage? unfortunately, tho, i donot  think it is art deco

i really do think it is a nice looking, unique phone.

[HobieSport]

What? Not Art Deco? But...but...It has geometric circles and squares and...oh, never mind.

[bwanna]

LOL   sometimes i wish we had a "chat room" here

[mienaichizu]

nice idea bwanna

[jsowers]

But first, I need to know what to look for.  I have a couple of them that I picked up in thrift stores a few days ago.  I needed one to access my phone service menu.  Even though my "phone" service (cable) supports rotary dial phones, there still is no # or * equivelant on a rotary dial.

One detail not mentioned so far is the date code on the bottom of your ivory CS2500DMG. It's a fairly late model for a WE phone and the 84132 means it was made on the 132^nd day of 1984. That would also explain the AT&T sticker on the bottom, since that was around the time the WE name changed to AT&T.

About the hard-wired models being scarce, I agree. It's harder to find every color of 2500 and 2554 than it is the 500 and 554. I don't think touch-tone phones were installed in as great a number as rotary in those days. The ones from before 1973 are nice and have Operator in a semi-circle on the 0 touchpad, along with the hard-wired cables and translucent ribbed contrasting faceplates.

My home phone service just did a mandatory change to touch-tone two months ago. I mentioned this before in another thread. I had rotary-only service since 1985 when I built my house (and ran my own phone wiring). I saved $2 a month for 23 years and now they're getting it back because my phone bill went up $7. Sure, we also get an expanded local calling area, but that's no benefit to me. Still, it's better and cheaper than a cell phone.

[Greg G.]

One detail not mentioned so far is the date code on the bottom of your ivory CS2500DMG. It's a fairly late model for a WE phone and the 84132 means it was made on the 132^nd day if 1984.

Ok, I was wondering about that.  I was pretty sure 84 was the year, but couldn't figure out the rest.  That would be May 11, 1984.

[carl]

I have a couple of the touchtones and occasionally use them,especially this princess style.Here are a couple of pictures.When I got
the princess,I noticed that it did ring,but muffled.On closer inspection,I found that the bell had been removed,so using a wall rotary
from the local flea market,I replaced the metal ringer and it now rings properly.The desktop does come in handy for 'press 1,press 2'
calls,so it's always handy. As my wife says,and I can't disagree with her...the old phones are nice but you can't beat modern technology...
I counter with..but they have no character! Carl

[McHeath]

I've considered buying a Rotatone from Oldphoneworks so I can get around the "Press 1 to get to the next menu" junk.  Trouble is that it'd have to be installed in the kitchen phone, as that's kind of the main one used, but that still leaves the others without the ability to navigate those phone menus. 

Why exactly the Bell System was unable to develop a technology that simply read the pulses from a rotary phone to navigate menus I don't know, perhaps there was some reason.

[bingster]

I could certainly be wrong, but I believe either the rotatone or the other one OPW sells can be hooked up downstream of all the phones so that all the rotary phones in the house can access use those features.

[Stephen Furley]

I have loads of push-button 'phones, but most of them are LD; DTMF ones tended to get popular after the period that I'm interested in.

Here are a few to be going on with.  The earliest ones tended to be based on existing dial models.  In the first picture the LD model is a 764, and the DTMF one is a 782; both are based on a standard 746, and use a 706 body.  Both have a keypad unit in place of the dial, the 764 also has a battery, extra hook switch contacts a relay, and a few other components.  The 784 has an extra terminal for a connection from the keypad to inject tones into the line, though some later 746s also had this terminal.  Either could be quite easily converted into a standard 746 by removing the extra components and fitting a dial if I wanted to.  Equally, a standard 746 could be converted into a push-button model if you had the required parts.

The Trimphone is a 766, based on the 722 dial model.  Again, this is LD.  There is a DTMF model, the 786, but I don't have one.  Making a push-button Trimphone wasn't as simple as with the ones based on the 746; a new body was required, which was slightly larger than the original to accommodate the electronic keypad.  By the time the 786 was introduced electronics had shrunk somewhat, so a smaller body could again be used, though it was a slightly different shape to the original, and of course, it had small holes for buttons rather than a large one for a dial.  None of these models was very popular, they were more expensive than a standard 'phone, and the DTMF models could only be used on some PABX systems, the PSTN was al LD at this time.

The second picture shows a very popular purpose-designed push-button 'phone, the Statesman.  These were built by several different makers for BT.  In the second picture the first one is a basic LD model with no recall, the second adds earth recall and the third also has last number redial, in the position where the hash key would be on a DTMF model.  It has a button where the star key would be on a DTMF model, this will press, but has no function.

In the third picture I intended to put a DTMF  Statesman, but I made a mistake, and put in the Maroon LD one again, but who can object when a modern 'phone looks as good as this?  The light grey instrument is an Ambassador, designed as an office telephone.  Unusually, the number card holder can be flipped up to reveal another card on which personal numbers can be written.  Underneath this is a hand grip for carrying.  I bought this recently, unused in original box.    The two 'extra' buttons are real, and have switches under them, but they are not connected to anything.  They do not press as there are prevnted from doing so by plastic clips, but it would be possible to remove the clips, and wire the switches up to something if you wanted to.  The Ambassador was intended as a luxury telephone, and was quite expensive.  It wasn't very popular, but an extended version with many more buttons was used as an operator's console on some '80s PABX systems.  It also led to the decision to develop a low-cost telephone based on it, and this became the Statesman, one of the most successful 'modern' telephones ever, though some are over 25 years old now.  I have 15 of them, all different, though a few differ only in colour.  The BT ones all look the same, but some makers also built the same electronics into cases of slightly different design for other customers; the one shown here is by GEC, and I've also got another one, by Philips I think, but that's at work at the moment.  Note that the GEC one retains the hand-hold in the side which the Ambassador had, but the standard Statesmad does not.

We still have a few Statesman 'phones in use at the College; several others were recently take out of use, still working, simply because they were LD only, and the user needed DTMF to access the voicemail system.  One of these, in really horrible condition from an art room, is now in my collection as it is a different model to any of the others.

In the last picture we have two Viscounts and a Vanguard.  The Viscount was contemporary with the Statesman, but I never liked it.  It was used more as a home 'phone, while the Statesman was more popular in Offices.  One of my examples is an LD model, the extra two buttons are there, and press, but they do nothing, and have a dot on them.  The other is a dual signaling model which also has dual recall, with two switches to select the mode hidden by a small cover underneath.  The LD model also has this cover, but there are no switches under it.

The Vanguard is a later, mainly office, model, dual signaling, dual recall, memory, rather boring, and probably the latest model in the collection.

[Greg G.]

I have loads of push-button 'phones, but most of them are LD; DTMF ones tended to get popular after the period that I'm interested in.

The two-tone brown ones in the first picture look a lot like an Israeli rotary I saw on the internet:

[Stephen Furley]

Yes, that phone is basically the same as our 746, introduced in 1967, with a different plug on the end of it.  There may also be certain minor changes internally.  This is the model which these two push-button ones were based on, and it would take me about five minutes to convert either of them into a 746; the only parts which would be required would be the dial, and the plastic ring which surrounds it.  Rather more parts would be required to convert a 746 into a push-button model, especially the LD one, but the body is exactly the same in all of them.

[McHeath]

What's interesting to me about those later purpose built push button phones is that they have a very contemporary body style, the business looking flat box, with a very old style looking handset.  We've seen those on a lot of British TV shows we watch, such as Keeping Up Appearances where Daisy and Onslow have one that Rose is always using to talk to her boyfriends on.

Here in the US when they went to redesigned touch tone phones with the same flat kind of body they always either used a K series handset or a new sleek job.