Vintage rotary phone lamps

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/07/vintage-rotary-phone-lamps.html

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You haven’t lived unless you ever tried speed dialing with a rotary.

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please tell me that you turn them off by pushing down the pegs in the handset cradle.

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I find these… unsettling. Like they are screen shots from a Twilight Zone where the phones come alive or something.

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Also, time to look into some boxes in the basement…

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I am so stealing this idea.

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Needs a built in Arduino to register the pulses when the dial is used so as to set the brightness of the lamp. A rotary dimmer please!!!

Otherwise, I’m just going to build one for fun.

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Good idea. :+1:

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War dialing. Fortunately I had a phone that didn’t engage the spring/gear on the forward stroke.

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You can also keep rotary phones from going to waste by using them as phones. With a bluetooth gateway you an even use them through your cell phone network.

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They also make surprisingly good bludgeoning tools according to 70s and 80s action movies.

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I think I’ll wait until there’s one that’s also a pen.

Because sometimes someone phones you in the middle of the night, so great, you’ve got a light, but what if they tell you something important and you want to write it down? You’re out of luck, and then everyone can see you’re upset that you didn’t have a phone-lamp-pen, because the light is on.

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Even just the handset is heavy and solid enough to drive a nail. The whole phone on a Western Electric 500 series (the ones the artist is using) is of course portable (it even has a handle built in), but is too heavy to swing easily as a blunt instrument. Princess phones are better in that regard.

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This saddens me as the owner, restorer, and user of many rotary dial phones. Yes, you can still use them. For the love of all that is good and wholesome please use the broken ones for craft projects. Everyone should have the opportunity to slam a phone down in anger without risking a wad of Benjamin’s. It’s also fun to watch the kids stare.

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Me as well. Most of these are “just” 500 sets, but that Princess phone would actually be a fairly desirable piece to have. It’s not hard to uses these rotary phones on modern telephone lines and in many cases they still work simply by just plugging them in if you have a POTS line.

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And reality… Awhile back, I picked up half a dozen WE302 sets from a retired NYC Bell worker who took them out of service in the 1960’s and 70’s as illegally installed. Another of his jobs was replacing damaged phones that were in service. He said his boss asked him to remove and discard the plastic housings of damaged 500 sets he was returning that had dried bloodstains or tissue on them before turning them in. Apparently, It was upsetting to the ladies who rebuilt the sets to have to deal with. I thought he was joking, but then he launched into a story about a splintered phone with chunks of skin, hair and blood stuck in it.

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0_0 So these were like private home phones? Yeesh, I mean, I am sure it happened, but didn’t think it would be that common.

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Sometimes it takes some ingenuity. I had to mount a DSL filter inside a Western Electric 554 wall phone; fortunately the circuit diagram for that is widely available. Later, when we switched provider to a cable company, the dialer stopped working, but that is easily fixed either with an adapter or with a pbx.

Might not have been human. The 500 is a perfect size for hunting vermin.

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It was apparently a common thing for him to have to retrieve units in bad parts of town where the bill wasn’t paid or, from crime scenes. The topic came up as I was buying some very early WE302 sets that have a metal case and mentioned their heft and how you could easily clobber someone and he launched into the story about the bloody phone with chunks of hair… I doubt he was pulling me leg, but he was a gregarious older guy, so who knows how common it actually was for him.

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Mine still plug straight into the wall, and the local switch still groks rotary and rings all 5 of my phones. I did have to use a DSL filter when I had DSL, but I’ve been holding onto my old-school twisted pair telephone lines rather than switching to VOIP after the experience of my Moss Green Western Electric 500 being the only functional phone in the house after losing power in the 2004. I don’t know how far up the line I’m still copper, but everything still functions like it’s 1975.