Sterling Telephone & Electric
In 1900 the Berliner
Telephone Factory of Hanover, Germany established a factory in Britain
to take advantage of that country's rapidly expanding market. Shortly before
World War 1 the factory was renamed The Sterling Telephone & Electric
Company. This may have been a reaction to the changing political situation
in Europe, when it seemed a war between Britain, France and Germany was inevitable.
Sterling was an early starter in the days when electrical devices were a new
growth industry. They seemed to have had most success with their range of
small intercoms, and many collectors will have at least one Sterling phone.
Little is known about their management after the change of name, but there
is no doubt that they were well-financed and well-run. One of their major
customers in the earliest days was Britain’s National
Telephone Company. They supplied the National with a wide range
of their CB desk phones and intercoms, and some of their specialist lines
such as mining and tramway phones. The telephones were built at a factory
at Dagenham that they bought from Morris Arming Tube and Ammunition Company
in 1910. They set about enlarging the factory to handle woodworking, ebonite
moulding, metal turning and electrical wiring. The factory covered more than
four acres by the end of 1910, and was increased gradually to ten acres.
Their catalogues show that many of their early phones were partly built with
components sourced from the Swedish manufacturer L M Ericsson and from their
Berliner parent. . This was a common practice for many telephone manufacturers
at the time. During the First World War, these were replaced by Sterling’s
own parts. Prewar they also bought in complete phones from Berliner, Alfred
Graham & Co, Ericsson and Western Electric and simply rebadged them.
Finally, postwar they dropped much of their early product range and produced
phones to the British Post Office’s standard patterns.
Sterling was a general electrical manufacturer rather than a specialist
telephone producer. Their range covered phones, switchboards, and electrical and
telephone equipment and fittings. From early days they also developed wireless
sets to service Marconi’s new invention. During the First World War Sterling
wireless sets were installed in Royal Air Force spotter planes. They continued
this development after the war and were eventually part of the founding group
of the British Broadcasting Company , the BBC.
They seem to have been able to market their telephone products quite successfully
overseas but this was usually done by a local distributor rather than by Sterling
themselves. Relying on others to sell your product is a dangerous marketing
move. It was in this that they lost out to the better organised companies like
GEC and Ericssons who established direct marketing offices in many of the British
Empire countries to secure their markets.. In the end, the sale of the Sterling
company to Marconi’s commercial radio company Marconiphone meant the end
of telephone manufacture.
Sterling
telephones fall into four main groups:
The first group is phones for the public network. The wall phones show a certain
individual style, resulting from the use of common components assembled in different
configurations. Sterling’s Model
U262 long-distance phone is a good example of this. The small box
that contains the electronics is used in many other models. The desk phones
show more variation. The Model
U385 is an Ericsson A300 tin box style base fitted with Sterling’s
straight-armed cradle and their own handset. The Model
U716 also used their handset on a modified candlestick-type base.
They seem to have preferred handsets for their exchange telephones, but later
they had to go back to the separate transmitter/receiver style when they produced
phones to British Post Office specifications. These specs were based on Western
Electric phones that had proved reliable and compatible with the WE switchboards
in wide use in Britain.
The second and largest group was the Interphones, particularly the Primax
models. Today these would be called switchboards. Many of these are the old
Berliner designs. Early models were fairly basic and had no secrecy on calls.
For this reason they were generally controlled by a single person such as
the manager. One-way signalling, main to extension only, was standard. The
Model
U2115 is an impressive example. Note that it is based around an
Ericsson-style miniature phone to handle the electronics. The Model
U410 is a familiar intercom that is present in many collections.
The extension phones for these systems had incoming signalling only and no
automatic cutoff - this was handled from the switchboard. The Model
U125 is another familiar example of this style of phone. As the
internal use of telephones grew, the “Reply and Call” system was
introduced. This allowed extension phones to call back to the main switchboard
as well as receive calls. The extension phones of this system are identifiable
by the small signalling pushbutton built into the phone, as seen on the Model
U505. Model
U310 is another distinctive little phone of this type, with its
sloping front and rear-mounted bell. Switchhook hangup also came into use
around this time. Later, secrecy between calls was introduced as well so multiple
calls could be handled at the same time. These systems were not connected
to the public network. In spite of the amount of cabling required they were
a very popular type of phone system.
The third group was the internal point-to-point intercom, also called “House
Phones”. The Parleyphone range is typical. Model
U61 is an early example. They were basic, mostly consisting of
a wall terminal block with a pushbutton for signalling to the other phone,
and a suspended handset. On the more elaborate models two-way signalling could
be provided, and for the really adventurous a two-extension model was available.
Again, mant were Berliner designs. The Parleyphones and other intercoms were
widely sold in Australia by firms like Anthony Horderns and Warburton Franki.
It is interesting to note that when the British Post Office took over the
National Telephone Company they kept these “house phones” in use
for some time. Handyman books of the time show enthusiastic homeowners how
to convert their internal bell signalling systems to telephone. Many of the
phones could be used on the bigger intercom systems as well, and were fitted
with a pushbutton for signaling as “Reply and Call” came into use.
Model
U305 is a good example – this simple little wooden box desk
phone was introduced in the 1890s with Ericsson cradle and handset, was upgraded
to the Sterling cradle and handset around 1910, was fitted for Reply and Call
and became Model
U510, then was built into a steel case in the late 1910s and became
Model U306.
A fourth and lesser-known group was the Phonopore
models. These were specially designed phones that could handle voice work across
morse telegraph lines without interference to the Morse signals. As such they
appealed to railways worldwide. They could reportedly carry a signal for more
than a hundred miles and appeared to be free of induction and lightning strike
problems. Sterling bought out the Radio, Phonopore and Electricals Company from
Mr C Langdon-Davies, the inventor of the phone, in the very early 1900s and
kept the range going until the 1920s. Because railways workshops tended to keep
repairing and modifying phones long after their usual working life was over,
an original Phonopore is hard to find. In Australia, the last one was taken
out of service in the 1950s. Similar phones were made by Ericssons and others.
Sterling also had a range of specialist phones such as linesmens’ test
phones, miners’ phones, and ships phones. The Model U574
is a ship’s phone from Alfred Graham & Co for use in noisy locations
like enginerooms.
Sterling made a small but useful range of magneto and CB exchange switchboards
as well, but they do not appear to have sold these in great numbers. They completely
missed the potential of automatic telephony, or more likely did not have the
research and development staff to exploit it. It is also possible that their
attention was diverted by continued development of wireless. After the war they
found their sales of telephones were confined to a small portion of the British
Post Office’s needs, and there was no market for their telephone exchanges.
They diversified into newer types of electrical gear like headphones (“radio
head telephones”), but they could not compete with larger companies like
Britain’s General Electric Company.
In 1926 they sold out
to Marconiphone and the factory was turned entirely to production of Marconi’s
valve wireless sets. The GEC company picked up what was left of Sterling’s
telephone business. GEC had been selling Sterling phones for some time, rebadging
them with GEC model numbers. For some years the Sterling factory was quite successful in
its new field. The complex was enlarged to eighteen acres by 1925, with its own
power station, gasworks, printers, fire station, first aid service, canteens,
recreation hall, and undercover storage for seven hundred staff bicycles.
Over the years, production needs changed and the huge estate and factory complex
was broken up and sold off. In the 1970s Ford bought about a quarter of the
complex as an assembly line for production of the Ford Capri. The Sterling name
remained, however, and kept turning up in unexpected ways. As an example, one
of the engineering plants on the estate produced the Sterling submachine gun
during World War 2 for paratroops and commandos.
There are nearly a hundred different phones shown in the catalogues available to me. This shows that Sterling was not just a small maker of intercoms, but a major manufacturer in the early days of the industry. In Australia we mostly see their little intercom phones, and I think they are greatly underestimated because of this.
Bibliography:
Wedlake G E C “SOS The Story of Radio Communication” Melbourne
, 1973
Sterling catalogues : various
Plessey Company History, http://strowger-net.telefoonmuseum.com/
Bateman J “History of the Telephone in New South Wales” 1980
General Electric Company Catalogue 1935
Freshwater Bob Website “Telephone File” http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/sterling/ster1.htm
Howson J. “Dagenham and Broadcasting” , undated. Courtesy Dagenham
Historical Society.
Dargan James “Morse to Micro - A History of NSW Railways” 1988 Sydney
Identifying Sterling components
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