54! That’s how many telephones are now on exhibit in the Henry Ford Museum. The exhibit is one of our new “collections platforms,” a new way to spotlight some of our under-the radar-collections.
The telephones span from one of Thomas Edison’s experimental phones (a “loud-speaking” chalk phone) to a first-generation iPhone, showing the different ways people have communicated by voice in the last hundred years.
Many of our telephones are from the turn of the twentieth century, an exciting time in phone development. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated a working telephone in 1876, and a number of key patents and discoveries were in place by 1900, so that the wall phone was a reliable but still rare and fascinating instrument.
Around 1900, the Bell Telephone system and their manufacturing company Western Electric were market leaders, but they served mostly urban areas on the East Coast. Independent telephone systems sprang up to provide service to rural customers and customers in the Midwest. C.J. Moore, who I’ve written about elsewhere, was a Michigan entrepreneur who both ran an independent phone company and manufactured his own phones. Most independent phone service providers used phones from independent telephone manufacturers, like Stromberg-Carlson, a Chicago company whose “farmers’ phone” was the introduction for many rural Americans to the way telephones could shrink long distances. Other independents used phones imported from Europe, like this Siemens-Halske phone from Germany.
Early phones included a battery, a magneto for signaling (powered by a crank), and a ringer, so though the candlestick desk phones on exhibit might look small, each would have a companion ringer box hanging on the wall, or discreetly tucked under a desk.
We have rotary phones, touch tone phones, pay phones, business phones, car phones and cell phones. Come by the exhibit, located in the front of the museum between With Liberty and Justice for all and Made in America, and see the diversity of telephone history.
Fedora, 1920-1940 (00.1510.86). From The Henry Ford Historic Costume Collection, and one of many items viewable in The Henry Ford’s and Wayne State University’s 
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