Telephone History - Blog Posts

Mojave Phone Booth 196?-2000

In the late 1990s, certain corners of the Internet took notice of a strange anomaly in California’s Mojave desert: a lone phone booth, miles from civilization. The Mojave Phone Booth developed a strong following among telecom enthusiasts, phone phreaks, and other fans of odd cultural artifacts.  People called the booth for days on end hoping to talk to strangers wandering the desert, and pilgrimages to the booth itself became increasingly common.

The National Park Service, bothered by the effect of growing numbers of visiting telephone fans, eventually had the booth removed.  Its legacy lives on, with the booth and its story inspiring literature, film, and music as well as the continuing exchange of fond memories.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

K8 Red Telephone Box 1968

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.  The K8 marked the final generation of the classic red booth before the range was retired.

Bringing the classic phone box style into the modern era, the K8 took a turn for the minimalist; multi-pane windows, hard right angles, and wooden doors of the past gave way to single large glass panes, rounded corners, and aluminium doors of the future.  While the silhouette still evoked the distinguished red boxes of old, the updated details brought the range to a close with a thoroughly 1960s flair.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

K2 Red Telephone Box 1926

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.   Britain's very first red booth design was the cast-iron K2, which very quickly became ubiquitous throughout London and the surrounding areas throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Britain’s Red Telephone Boxes continued to take inspiration from the K2 throughout the entire payphone era, and copies and tributes to the design can still be found in phone booths around the world today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Motorola MicroTAC 9800X 1989

The MicroTAC 9800X was not only the smallest and lightest mobile phone of its time, it was the first to feature the trend-setting "clamshell" type design where a mouthpiece flipped to cover the keypad when not in use.

Featuring a dot-matrix LED display, very advanced for the day, the MicroTAC and its immediate variants remained in production well into the 1990s and formed the basis for much of the world’s idea of what a "cellular phone" looked like.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Stromberg-Carlson upright phone 1894

When Alexander Graham Bell’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894, American Bell Telephone Company employees Alfred Stromberg and Androv Carlson went into the telephone-manufacturing business for themselves.

The telephone shown here is Stromberg-Carlson’s first upright desk phone, nicknamed "the Coffee Grinder" by enthusiasts due to its unusual shape and side-mounted hand crank.  Few of these unique members of the "candlestick phone" family survive today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Lobster Telephone Salvador Dali, 1936

Surrealist artist Salvador Dali wrote of wanting to know why, when he ordered lobster in a restaurant, the waiter never brought him a boiled telephone.

Dali brought this fanciful idea into the material world in his Lobster Telephone, melding a plaster-cast sculpture of a lobster (a recurring theme in Dali’s work) with a common telephone of the day.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Sharp J-SH04 2001

Manufactured by Sharp for the J-Phone brand, the J-SH04 is generally recognized as the world’s first camera phone.

The J-SH04 innovatively integrated a mobile phone and digital camera, devices many people of the day regularly kept on-hand, into a single unit with the camera functionality integrated into the phone itself.   For the first time, users could use a single device to take digital photos (at a then-impressive 0.11 megapixels) and share them via the mobile network.

The device (and photo-sharing in general) took off among young users and set the model for all future camera phones, devices which forever changed how we take and share photos and document our world.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Reis Telephone 1861

Having worked on his own telephonelike concept since the 1850s, German inventor Johann Philipp Reis successfully demonstrated that his invention could transmit speech over a decade before Alexander Graham Bell would achieve that goal.  Reis' test phrase was “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat,” which means “The horse does not eat cucumber salad.”

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

The President's Red Phone

The Moscow-Washington hotline which existed during the mid-20th-century Cold War was a teletype-based affair, not a telephone, but that didn't stop the imagined concept of a red emergency phone in the White House catching on in popular culture.  One example of this is the Red Phone's starring role in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; indeed, the film's Spanish title is ¿Teléfono rojo?, volamos hacia Moscú, which means “Red Telephone?  We're Flying to Moscow.”

The iconic “Red Phone” image continues to grip the public imagination today, appearing regularly in fiction, art, and even Presidential campaign ads.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Motorola DynaTAC 8000x 1983

The Motorola DynaTAC series was the first commercially-available, completely-handheld cellular phone.  A full charge of the brick-style phone's battery took ten hours, and offered half an hour of talk time.

The phone has since become iconic to the 1980s in general, and Yuppies in particular.  DynaTACs are used by characters of privilege in productions such as Wall Street, Saved By the Bell, and American Psycho.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Gower-Bell Telephone 1880s-1890s

Having operated a Bell franchise in New England for a time, American entrepreneur Frederic Allan Gower set his sights on the original England.  His redesigned telephone was quickly adopted as a standard and declared “the best and most reliable telephone in service” by the British Post Office in 1882, and spread throughout much of Europe within the decade.

The Gower-Bell telephone's distinctive receiver-tubes, which were held to the users' ears, were designed to avoid receiver patents held by Bell.  Despite using Bell's name on his phone for the marketing value, Gower was not anxious to share the wealth with Bell.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Alexander Graham Plane 1978

As the era of novelty telephones took hold in the 1970s, third-party phones of all shapes and gimmicks began finding their way into homes.   Most telephone companies were still discouraging the practice of customers connecting third-party phones to their lines, but interestingly-shaped phones caught on regardless.  Canadian phone company Northern Telecom addressed the issue with their own cute airplane-inspired phone.

The Alexander Graham Plane, part of Nortel's “Imagination” line of contemporary telephone designs, was one of very few novelty phones of the period to be actively manufactured and made available by a telco.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Bell “Gallows-Frame” telephone 1875

Alexander Graham Bell's original telephone prototype used a single magneto-based device as both transmitter and receiver.  The user spoke into the single orifice, and put the device to their ear to hear the response.

The device, which gets its nickname from its elegant mahogany frame, was the first with which Bell demonstrated transmission of voice-like sounds.  Intelligible speech would be transmitted by Bell with a redesigned unit the following year.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.