Princess phone refurbished by AT&T 1990???

[rtp129495]

Hey all the Princess I bought on Ebay which looked spotless had a weaker reciever volume when making calls. So I decided to look in side. When I looked inside there was a taped up circut board which at first I thought was amatuer repair until I untaped the small circut board. This is what i saw:

The Dial is from 1971 (touch tone)
Ringer is 1977
Case didnt have a date (odd considering its WE originally)
Little circut board with 4 Diodes dated AT&T 1990.

Could AT&T have been refurbishing WE phones in 1990? This would seem late to me but certianly someone from AT&T was in the phone in the 90s. Never seen that before!

[GG]

Oh, that's an electronic bugging device, so they can listen in on ambient room conversations when the receiver is hung up. 

Heehee.

Actually it's not a bugging device, it's a polarity guard.  The purpose of which is to ensure that regardless of line polarity at the line cord, the correct polarity is delivered to the internal components in order for the touchtone dial to work.

[rtp129495]

Interesting device, makes sense. I remeber before these when touch tones wouldn't work. Didnt realize that 4 diodes could correct that no matter what the polarity on the line is.  thats pretty cool.....

[LarryInMichigan]

The device is a bridge rectifier.

[Phonesrfun]

When the Bell system put up large quantities of refurbished phones for sale after deregulation, they had to equip all phones with modular plugs and all touch tone phones with polarity guards.

The polarity guard was necessary because of the fact that nobody could guarantee that the polarity of house/apartment wiring in all cases was correct.

[paul-f]

There are also several current sellers of vintage phones (off web sites and on ebay) who always add a polarity guard on the early touch tone dials.

they have also been available for years through the club lists and on-line.

For example:  http://www.ericofon.com/catalog/parts/pg.htm