The Black Rotary Phone

     Hard to imagine a time when phones like this venerable Model 500 made by Western Electric occupied prime real locations in everybody's home. We had this model upstairs and it had a cable long enough so that it could be moved between my Dad's study and the hallway outside the master bedroom. We also had a white rotary in the kitchen which was hung on the wall. This had both a limited length handset cable and no easy means for moving it, which meant if you were taking a call in the kitchen you had no privacy at all.

      I dare say when current and future generations look back on our phones from this era they will wonder how we did it. They will wonder about the lack of portability, ring tones, colors, and the fact most houses had a single phone number. And who can forget being on the phone and having somebody mistakenly pick up the phone in the other part of the house and then have to quickly apologize for interrupting the conversation? These sort of things just don't happen anymore. Now we have people who sit in the same room and text one another in order to communicate. I wonder if that is progress?

      I do like all of our new phones and all the tasks like email and searching the web which they are capable of accomplishing. Though I would one day like a working replica Model 500 phone in my future home. It would have to be able to perform the digital tasks required by our modern phones because the phone company as a rule doesn't install rotary phones any longer. I am sure there are some still out there but they are slowly but surely being replaced. My wish for a rotary phone is entirely an aesthetic choice, not that they were pleasing to look at only that I am old school and having one would match my style.

       This is from Wikipedia:

"Originally, the 500 was available only in black and had a rotary dial with a black-painted metal fingerwheel (black remained the most popular color throughout the model's production,[citation needed] and the Model 500 has been affectionately nicknamed by some as "the black brick"[citation needed]). Within a few years the Model 500 was available in a variety of colors, and the metal finger wheel was replaced with a clear plastic rotary dial, by about 1964."