atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems Antique Telephones What type of vintage device is this?

Hi all,
I have what I thought was a field phone, others say it is a line tester, this has been my quest for months. All I know is that it came out of a cottage in the Lake of the woods in the early 70's. I will include photos of the unit



Any help or direction I can get will be much appreciated

Nice! I would vote for it being a piece of test equipment, basically a butt-set unit designed to work on 4 wire circuits. What is inside the metal chassis?

There is also a good chance that there is a small schematic printed on a label inside said chassis, a common trait of equipment of that era. If there is, it might tell you everything you want to know.

The number stamped on the chassis is reminiscent of Western Electric numbering of that era. I don't know if Northern Telecom used similar numberings. Is there a manufacturer's logo anywhere, even possibly inside the metal chassis? (I'm dying to see inside the chassis, in case you haven't guessed...)

By the way, Welcome to The Forum!!!

Jim
**************************************************
Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

Some interior pics, this whole search is slowly making me bonkers



I can find no manufacturers mark other than the Northern Electric logo on the handset, the handset itself does have a button that you would depress to talk???

Keep the input coming, Thanks for the welcome

It appears that it uses a pair of 'D' cells. And a rather large oil capacitor. And the item mounted next to the capacitor is a relay? And at least two dangling wires that would seem to indicate something missing?

Hi, The wires may appear dangling but all wires are attached and fastened

It is definitely a self-powered talk set for a four-wire circuit. The transmit/receive from the handset is equalized, then split over either a two-wire or four-wire span based upon the switch setting. My guess is that it was used by cable technicians to communicate over especially long spans.

The large cylinder is a transformer to provide the equalization and the smaller cylinder is a capacitor to minimize the loud click that would be heard when initially connecting to a dry pair.

My guess would be a field set, here is a link to one that looks similar to it but older and was used in the WW II time frame.

https://www.jitterbuzz.com/indtel.html#field

Thanks for all the help so far, its amazing how hard it has been to find one exactly like or very similar to the unit I own

Sorry to hijack this thread, but Russ, what a fun site! I especially enjoyed the videos. How to use the dial phone (1927) besides being wonderful in and of itself, has additional videos available after watching it to the end. I never thought much about the early dial phones saying "Wait for dial tone" until now. I heartly recommend this link to every member!
:dance:

Yea it is very interesting, I found it a few years back.

With the CN4A on the face, could it be from CN Rail's internal communication system? Something for a train or work crew to hook up to the lines besides the track and call into the yardmaster or dispatcher.

Because you said it was found in the Lake of the Woods area you probably know that the CN Sprague subdivision runs out of Manitoba by Hwy 12, (Vassar, Sprague etc) through the US under the Lake of the Woods and then back into Ontario.

I wonder if you send your pictures to the Winnipeg Railway museum at the Winnipeg CN station or the Prairie Dog Central steam railway, maybe one of their members can say if its a railway telephone set?

Great idea, Thanks very much

Well I shot off a email over to the Winnipeg Railway museum, hopefully hear something soon. I also would like to get an idea of value so I know to treat this unit with kit gloves or not. Any ideas whom I could contact for that??? I thank you all for all the help so far, this has been a cool journey

I LOVE IT when someone thanks us for all our co-operation, brain straining and hard work! g/c thank you very much from me and I'll betcha everyone else here! Please keep us posted on progress. :toast: John C.

If the WRM says its not railway telephone stuff, try asking the Winnipeg chapter of the Telephone Pioneers of America.

If it belonged to MTS I am sure they must have a retired outside plant guy as a member who will know what it is. https://www.411.ca/business/Manitoba/Winnipeg/Telephone-Pioneers-of-America/680339.html

Well after many emails and inquiries I am still no further along. None of the inquiries I have sent have been answered...bummer. Anyone else here got any ideas? I am really wanting to get some kind of ID on this unit.

You can try these people. They run the site I mentioned above.
Worth a shot

https://www.jitterbuzz.com/contact.html

Try sending an email Don McCarty of McCarty products inc (see the contact us icon). He writes a monthly column on outside plant repairs so he may have seen one of these in his years of service.

As far as what it is, I'm 100% sure that it is exactly what Ed said, i.e. a talk set (aka self-powered butt set) for use on 2- and 4-wire lines. "Talk set" is the most correct term for it, because it includes no provision for signaling (ringing). There is really nothing else that it can be, given the internal components. It is a very standard design.

As far as who made it and why, I'm 99% sure it was made by Northern Telecom for use by Phone Company technicians, meaning the customer (I assume) would have been one of the Canadian Phone Companies of the 1960's era.

Somewhere, in some dusty pile, there may be a printed "Practice" covering this unit. Living in the US, I've never even seen the Canadian equivalent of a BSP (Bell System Practices), but I have to assume that they do exist. I don't want to send you down another road to nowhere, but if you can find out that they do exist, and that an archive of them exists somewhere, you could get lucky. [Insert more disclaimers here, such as "Not Responsible For Hair Pulled Out In Frustration"].

The fact that it turned up at a lake cottage is interesting. It could have been used as an intercom or in conjunction with an Army style field phone, but this would have been unlikely given that it has no provision for signaling (outgoing or incoming). If the location was really remote, someone may have been using it on a phone line with a separate ringer. So-called "Toll Stations" were often insanely long (100 miles or more) and hand-cranked ring generators and local battery were the norm. The four-wire capability would have been superfluous in this case, because (I think) most Toll Stations were actually single-wire (ground return) circuits. All of my conjecturing in this paragraph relates to the "second life" of your phone - it definitely started out life as a piece of portable test/maintenance equipment and only went on the see the Great North Woods after it retired from that gig.

Jim
**************************************************
Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

Update to my final paragraph above (the conjecture paragraph):

I just did a little digging on Ringdown Toll Stations, and I saw a reference that leads me to believe that some Toll Stations may have in fact been four-wire lines (with analog repeaters).

Interesting...

Jim
****************************************************
Still trying to reach "Drakesbad No.2" (I think it is/was in Nevada)

Hi and thanks gain with all the help. I have been running into brick walls everywhere I have gone. Either emails have gone unanswered, or messages on machines never responded to. I do know that the cottage was in fact very remote and was situated on one of the smaller islands that cover the Lake of the Woods. It does make some sense that the old fella may have used the unit to communicate with a neighbour or ??? Man I didn't have enough hair to begin with, but I may have to buy some Rogaine before this is all over.

FINALLY!!!! This is an email I received from the Prince Edward Island telephone museum;
Hi Ted:

That isn't actually a field phone. It was a train telephone
made by Northern Electric for the Canadian railways for
communication to the dispatcher before the advent of radio
on trains.

At the side of the tracks, there were boxes on the poles,
that the crew could open and connect the phone to - crank
it, and get through to the dispatcher...

I have one of these shown in: https://www.islandregister.com/phones/museum4.jpg

Bottom shelf, right. Now, if I remember correctly, they
aren't self powered. If you remove the metal section
behind, you will find batteries.

Dave

Dave

On 31 May 2010 at 10:59, Ted W Lepp wrote:

> You have a new entry in your Telephone On P.E.I. Guest/Queries Book:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Hostname:
> IP: 38.113.114.156
> Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0;
> Trident/4.0; GTB0.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0;
> Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media
> Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.30618; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)
>
> Ted W Lepp <[email protected]>
> Steinbach, Manitoba CAN
>
> Dear Sir/Madam,

> I have in my possession a self powered Northern Electric
> talk set?? Can you help identify it? The item was found in a small
> remote cottage in the Lake of the Woods along the Manitoba/Ontario
> border. The following are links to pictures of my unit.
> [IMG]https://i439.photobucket.c
> om/albums/qq113/twlepp/th_fieldphone3.jpg[/IMG]

> [IMG]https://i439.photobucket.c
> om/albums/qq113/twlepp/th_fieldphone2.jpg[/IMG]

> [IMG]https://i439.photobucket.co
> m/albums/qq113/twlepp/th_fieldphone.jpg[/IMG]

> [IMG]https://i439.photobucket.c
> om/albums/qq113/twlepp/th_fieldphone5.jpg[/IMG]

> [IMG]https://i439.photobucket.c
> om/albums/qq113/twlepp/th_fieldphone4.jpg[/IMG]

>
Any assistance you could give me would be greatly
> appreciated as so far I have hit only dead ends


> Thank You, Ted Lepp
>
> Monday, May 31, 2010 at 10:59:59 (ADT)
> ------------------------------------------------------
>


The Telephone on Prince Edward Island: https://www.islandregister.com/phones/phones.html

The Telephone Museum of Prince Edward Island: https://www.islandregister.com/phones/museum.html
Free Admission - Call (902) 651-2762 to arrange a visit!

Congratulations on finding out what it was and letting us know.

Like I thought a few posts above the CN4A marks on the face and where it was found suggested to me that it had to be something railway related.

There are at least two companies in the Winnipeg area that appraise antique's like this and may be able to give you an idea of what its worth.

Ted, glad to hear you finally got an answer!

I wonder, did the pole mounted box that the engineer plugged into contain a hand-cranked magneto to ring the operator? I ask because there is no provision for signaling on your phone, at least not that I can see. I have seen portable boxes that contained a hand-cranked magneto and a ringer (and ringer cap) made by WE and others, so if the user also had one of those, they could plug in anywhere.

I was confused at first when Dave said "they aren't self powered." Then I remembered that in the world of Historic Telephones, there were phone sets that relied on voice energy for talk power (they were somewhat weak in the decibels department). These are sometimes referred to as "self-powered." To us guys with modern butt-sets on our belts, "self powered" means you provide your own talk battery (like your phone does).

If you find any more cool old equipment, wheel it on out (we can't enough of this stuff)!!

Jim
**************************************************
Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

Edit to add this: mbhydro, I just went back and read your earlier post. Dude, you nailed it right on the money!!

Thanks again to all, I really am greatfull for all the assistance and guidance you have all given. Thanks for sharing this investigative journey with me.