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I bought an Ericofon on ebay a few years ago.  I thought it would be useful in our den and would also serve as a conversation piece in more ways than one.  It turned out to have an issue with the switch contacts related to the dial and switch hook, and because it was so flimsy in comparison to a WECo phone, parts broke when I tried to repair it.  I declared it junk, and decided that an Ericofon wasn't worth owning.

 

While the design was interesting, there had to be a learning curve regarding how to set down the phone if stepping away for a moment, since standing it on end would terminate the call.
 
How about a Kellogg?

No corn flakes here... Kellogg was a big supplier of equipment to small independent telephone exchanges and hotels. Here's a Type 1000 "Red Bar" Masterphone, circa 1947. Being that Kellogg supplied a lot of equipment to rural telephone companies that had most of their subscribers on party lines, there were a bunch of factory options for frequency-selective ringers that made it possible to ring a specific phone on a party line. Photo is from the link below.


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I enjoy seeing Northern Telecom (now Nortel) novelty phones. I bought a lot of these as a department store buyer years ago. They were high-quality phones. My late partner was a director for Northern Telecom/Nortel. Being a Dynasty fan, he'd always remark that the phone on Blake Carrington's desk was part of a Nortel system. Dale passed away in 2001 from a brain aneurysm at age 45. We were together 22 years, really just kids caught up in the disco era. Somewhere I have a tape of him doing a Nortel presentation. Oddly enough I have never viewed it...the only video of him I have. Sorry, just going way off track and waxing sentimental. 

 

these were fun phones...

[this post was last edited: 11/26/2018-15:05]

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I loved the discreet "ring" of Alexis' office phone!  I wish I could find one of those, whatever they are.

 

Nortel made the "EBS" phones (Electronic Business Sets) that only worked on Nortel switching equipment.  They were one serious PITA to provision, as what one phone was capable of doing had to be acknowledged in provisioning every other phone in the system.  That could really snowball and a giant matrix was needed to map it all out.  An integral part of the design and programming involved Multiple Appearance Directory Numbers (MADNs) and they were indeed a maddening thing to plot out.

 

These were great phones and had some good options on them, but we used to dread it when the account reps sold them.  Thousands of these EBS phones were all through the big HQ building in San Ramon.  Business customers with EBS phones that they bought and paid for were not happy if they moved to a new location where there were no Nortel switches in the CO.
 

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