sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Antique Telephones vintage phones, no ringers

hello,
I recently bought a lot of 18 vintage phones. they consisted of mostly SC, early to mid 70s, ITT, 70s. what caught my eye was 3 LIME GREEN SC phones. 2 500's, and 1 554B. all the phones came WITHOUT ringers, and handset cords. they are all NOS. not in original boxes, but, they have NEVER been installed. I installed ringers, and sold 1 LIME GREEN 500, and the LIME GREEN 554. sold a few other moss green SC 554's too. why did all these phones, apparently new, have no ringers installed???

Perhaps they came from an area with party lines, and an appropriate frequency ringer would be installed when the phones were installed.

What Tommy said. SC and ITT phones were almost exclusively sold to independent telcos. Most independents were on shoestring budgets and had to rely upon frequency-selective ringing in an effort to avoid the expense of plant improvements. It was cheaper to buy phones without ringers and stock them on the trucks with a selection of different ringers that were field-installed based upon the installation requirements.

Your location indicates that you are in NC, a state that is full of independent telcos, so your find doesn't surprise me at all.

Oh yes. The old "mini-ringers" trick. We had trib offices that had Terminal Per Line shelves where the last digit was the ringer frequency, and later the fancy "frequency per shelf" where the 100's digit was the ring frequency and we had to deal with both harmonic and decimonic bells. In truth, normally only the 40/42,50/54 and 66 2/3's ringers had to be selective and the straight-line ringers would work on everything else.

I still have a box of them in my warehouse for my estate sale https://public.carl.airpost.net/misc/Mini_ringers.JPG

...for my estate sale HA!

I've got a ring generator to test varios cycle bells

Oh what memories! I changed a lot of party line ringers.

You can tell an old telephone man when he picks up a phone and bangs it into the heal of his other hand. Listening to hear if a ringer has been installed by the sound, or lack of, of the clapper hitting the bell.

Jim

....so they, the company, in this case, Lippincott Industries Inc, had the phone company install different ringers in the phones, so that certain numbers would generate frequencies matched to a particular ringer? something like that!!!??? Well, the phones, mostly 554 SC and ITT, which has most, if not all SC internal parts, are NOS, and all from the 70's. I paid $125 for the lot of eighteen, and installed ringers in the 500 and 554 LIME GREEN SC phones, and sold each for $75, so I made my money back already. kept one SC LIME GREEN for myself. don't see many of them around!

Bob, can you post a picture of one of these lime green phones? I've never seen one!

How do I post pics? I tried sending JPG.'s, but you cant open them. Help, pls!

Bob