sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems 1A2 and Comkey Telephones & Systems Loose Finger Wheel.

1500 for sale on eBay.

With so few people having touch-tone service back in the 60s coupled with the (what I've been told was) high rental fee, I'm not surprised that the 1500 was uncommon.

I have a 1500 at home...got it at a garage sale

ok so 1500 is 2500 with a 10 button dial ?

I was thinking it was a 500 with a round insert and tt dial (didnt look close enough at this picture ) :rolleyes:

Yes, the 15XX series was the standard touch-tone dial pad minus the * and # keys.

was there a "official" designation for 500 conversions ?

(500 set , round insert and standard TT dial ? )

desk version of this 3554

Not really. Bell (Western Electric) never did that; it was one or the other. They had the bucks to simply replace the whole set and be done with it. ITT and Stromberg-Carlson came up with the blank that allowed a rotary dial to be replaced with a tone dial in an existing 5XX set. I'm sure that they had number for the physical part, but I don't remember it.

I was told that these conversions only became necessary because tone dialing took off a lot faster than many independent telcos expected.

ITT and S/C were the primary hardware suppliers to the independent telcos that had small budgets. They came up with these conversion options to help them increase monthly billing revenue at minimum cost. These conversions were done in the field by a telco technician. There were also thirteen color options for rented phones at that time.

These conversions also helped the manufacturers deal with a dramatic drop in sales of rotary-dial sets when they had tens of thousands of them sitting in inventory. Tone dialing took off like crazy in the early 1970's at a pace that the phone manufacturers couldn't support.

That was also back in the days when the phone cost was $25.00 and a technician worked for a third of that. Now, they work for more than the cost of the phone, so field conversions are out of the question.

LoL I think all of the surplus rotary dial sets went to the military!

Hey Ed, I guess if I have a spare 65 bucks I can finally get that orange phone I wanted!
https://www.oldphones.com/servlet/Detail?no=7

Actually, WE/AT&T did indeed reuse former rotary (500) sets to create 2500 sets. I have several examples in my collection. The rotary dial mounting posts in a 500 set are too far apart to be used to mount a 35-type dial, so there were two ways that they did it.

The first way was typical Bell Labs thoughtful and elegant engineering: the TT dial was first screwed into 2 small gray plastic spacers,
then the spacers were set into the dial mounting posts.

The second method was indicative of the gradual mental illness that beset the once beautiful mind of the Bell System: The dial posts were just bent inward until you could just barely get the TT dial mounting screws to reach. This resulted in the faceplate not quite sitting correctly, and the case was a bit skewed. But hey, "We're the phone company, and we don't care."

Dial posts bent inward to "make it work" sounds to me more like the work of a field technician that ran out of/didn't have any of the aforementioned spacers, or simply didn't care and just wanted to "make it work", rather than an officially prescribed practice.