News and Events

 

16 November 2007

Thanks to the generous help of a collector who provided a catalog, we now have Siemens and Halske. The article still needs work, especially in the area of model numbers, foreign versions, and bakelite phones, and I would appreciate any help in these areas.

 

24 February 2008

Some additions of new companies, and some errors corrected. Some of the errors were silly ones caused by me not properly checking what I had written, You do that sometimes when you work at 5 in the morning, and my eyesight is getting worse anyway. Please let me know if you find anything wrong (or stupid). I would rather be embarrassed but get it right.

Particular thanks go again to Alan Gall, a researcher in Britain. Alan's passion is the General Electric Company. As I mentioned before, he was able to put me right on a number of errors in the history of that company, and provide most of the research used for the history of Peel-Conner. From the number of hits on the Peel-Conner page, it looks like a lot of people were looking for that information.

 

31 March 2008

Greg Haywood of Queensland has provided a lot of information on the development history of the PMG and Telecom Australia 800 / 8000 series of telephones. He has compiled this from examination of hundreds of phones and it should allow collectors to pin down the history of their telephone quite accurately. Thanks Greg.

I have put up a small section on the Berliner Telephone Company. This was started by Emil Berliner, who also invented the gramophone. I really need some catalogs or advertising to check the accuracy of the telephones shown to make sure that they are indeed Berliner. It is possible that Berliner's transmitter capsule was used by other makers . Can anyone help?

 

13 April 2008

Federal Telephone and Telegraph has been added. I am not entirely confident about the details of the early history and buyouts - there is conflicting information and dates from telephone and radio collectors about who took over who and when. I have tried to base it on newspaper reports to overcome this, but you can't always believe what you read in the papers either.

 

22 July 2008

I have just about finished cleaning up the page format to make the pages display properly on the newer widescreen monitors. Pages are now set to a 1000-pixel band. I hope this makes them easier to read, although people with monitors set to lower resolutions like 800 X 600 will still have to do some sideways scrolling, I'm sorry. I picked this size because some of the pictures won't go any smaller without losing detail. I also found some pages that hadn't yet been indexed, such as Early Receivers and Handsets . These should answer a few questions people have asked, although I am doing more work on Handsets.

 

16 August 2008

The cleanup is finished, so if you find any busted links or other stuffups please let me know.

Jan Verhelst is researching the Belgian company ATEA, particularly the early days when the company was formed by ex-Bell Telephone Manufacturing Co directors. His work-in-progress is at http://home.scarlet.be/jan.verhelst/atea/atea_english.htm . Any help you can give him would be appreciated.

I have put up a draft article on Telephone Exchanges. It's getting a bit out of hand, so I will probably break it up into smaller pages, but there is still a lot of information to be added. Marvin Hodges, if you read this can you please get in touch with me? I have the wrong email address for you, and I would like to check the captions on some of the photos you generously provided.

I am sorry about the continued "Bandwidth Exceeded" messages. The people who host this website have been very generous, but the number of visitors keeps exceeding the download quota.

 

14 September 2008

At the suggestion of Jan Verhelst, I have finally got around to putting up pages on Automatic Electric. It also got a bit out of hand. I could use some help on their overseas manufacturing interests, though. There is very little information on some of their companies or associates.

 

24 October 2008

Again in cooperation with Jan Verhelst, we have put together a fuller history of the Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company of Antwerp.