Western Electric Color Telephones: "Once Upon a Honeymoon" 1956 AT&T; Model 500 Phone

more at http://quickfound.net/

Musical promoting color telephones as home decor accessories.

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Western Electric model 500 telephone series was the standard domestic desk telephone set issued by the Bell System in North America from 1950 through the 1984 Bell System divestiture. Millions of model 500-series phones were produced and were present in most homes in North America. Many are still in use today...

Touch-tone service was introduced to residential customers in 1963 with the model 1500 telephone, which had a push-button pad for the ten digits. The model 2500 telephone, introduced in 1968, added the * and # keys, and is still produced by several manufacturers...

The Western Electric 500-type telephone replaced the 300-type which had been produced since 1936. The model 500 line was designed by the firm of industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, the product of several years of research and testing in collaboration with Bell Laboratories and Western Electric. Development started in 1946 with early sketches by Bell engineer and Dreyfuss-associate Robert Hose, leading to pre-production units in 1948 and field trials with 4000 telephone sets in 1949. AT&T announced the new telephone publicly in 1949, and communicated the first availability of approximately 23,000 sets in the second quarter 1950 to the Bell System operating companies on May 1, 1950...

In the following years, systematic replacement of 25 million 300-type telephones commenced because of the much improved electrical and acoustic efficiency of the new model...

The replacement of 300-series telephones with 500-series sets created large stockpiles of 300-type components that had not reached their intended service life. The accelerating demand for new telephone service in the 1950s created pressure on the manufacturing facilities, which the Bell System alleviated by reusing these older components to refurbish used 302 telephone sets with a new modern housing that had a look-alike appearance to the 500 model, but were electrically identical to the older 302 telephone. This program commenced in 1955, and the converted set was labeled as the model 5302 telephone. It was produced until the mid-1960s in the refurbishing shops of each Bell Operating Company, not on the assembly lines of Western Electric factories.

From the 1949 field trials until 1953, only black sets of the 500-type telephone were manufactured. The introduction of telephones in color occurred in several stages from 1954 until 1957, as manufacturing capability was refined and material selection processes were completed.

In the 1960s, after the introduction of touch-tone service in November 1963 in various locations of the telephone network, the basic 500-type chassis was retrofitted with a push-button keypad, along with a new housing and faceplate, creating the model 1500 for the 10-button version and in 1968 the model 2500, having 12 keys.

The 1970s brought the conversion to modular connector technology, replacing the hard-wired cords with cords terminated on both ends with 4P4C connectors for the handset cord, and 6P4C plugs for the line cord...

The Western Electric model 500 improved upon several design features over the earlier telephones. While the 302 had the dial and hook switch mounted directly on the metal or plastic housing, all operational parts of the 500 telephone were mounted on the base plate... Thus, the phone could be tested and serviced easily without the housing. This design improved manufacturing and servicing efficiency. The earlier 302 had been equipped with an enamel-coated dial plate that displayed the numerals and letters through the holes of the rotary finger-wheel... the 500 improved this by molding the characters into the plastic, through a double-injection molding process. This design was carried over to the 1500 and 2500-series telephones and was used in the touch-tone keys to eliminate wear. The numbers and letters on the 500 were moved to the circumference of the dial plate... dots were placed in the center of the finger holes... The 500 series replaced many metal parts, especially in the dial, with much more durable Nylon components.

The Dreyfuss design later adapted itself well to touch-tone service, first announced in 1963..