Automatic Electric Model 80

1954 model 40 Monophone to Model 80 Upgrade Conversion
with GTE Harmonic Ringer, two tone ringer and NO loudness control.

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Not particularly valuable but peculiarly rare. I hold in my hand the Automatic Electric Model 80 Monophone Handset with the earpiece removed to display the imprinted part number A.E. CO. D-51024-A EH of the screw terminal receiver (GTE) 810. I hold it above the familiar rounded shape of the black Model 80 housing and dial face with standard oversize numbers silkscreened on the outside with triangle arrows in the fingerholes of the clear plastic dial. This phone was re-manufactured in 1953 Canada by the new Phillips Electrical Company plant, 100 Strowger Boulevard on Schofield Hill, built by the Theodore Gary Company from warehoused new old stock Model 40's originally manufactured from 1935 and until the mid 50's by the Eugene F. Phillips Electrical Works owned by the Automatic Electric Company (a subsidiary of the Theodore Gary and Company), which was located to the north of St. Lawrence Park on King St. West on the southwestern edge of Brockville, Ontario. The stacks of hundreds of thousands of the robust, and still durably functional, Art Deco style AE Model 40's were made instantly obsolete by American Telephone & Telegraphs introduction of their WE model 302 monophone copy update, now styled with sleek airstream lines designed by Henry Dreyfuss in 1949 to create the 500 model. It only came in black but was the first phone to incorporate a convenient coiled handset cord. To combat the demand from desire of faux modernization, Automatic Electric remanufactured their electrically superior monophone design to a similar airstream shell AE model 80 which re-utilized the previously manufactured equipment parts, but advertised the choice of color! So the warehoused stockpile was sent back to the new factory for updated cover shell, coiled cord and handset replacement. Mine is an example of one of those, owned by General Telephone and shipped to the exciting new post-war suburb bedroom community of Lakewood, California in 1954, which we leased at $4 a month until GTE offered it for sale on our invoice in the late 1970s and we bought it. We still subscribe to inhouse wiring service so the whole house wiring is GTE copper installed and maintained by GTE crew. It's been wired to the wall here since 1954 through three changes of area-code and even more mergers and acquisitions - now the provider company name is Frontier.

Frontier is my General Telephone legacy copper land line provider, they hate me because the CPUC law prevents them from replacing that with cheaper to maintain alternate service. they ran the wire in the 50's and this property has subscribed without lapse ever since. We even purchased the old black Model 40 commonly referred to as the "Shirley Temple" factory remanufactured from new old stock by Automatic Electric, now refitted since purchase with a modular RJ-45 plug. I refurbished it last year, photo documented the process and posted online Automatic Electric Model 80 1954 model 40 Monophone to Model 80 Upgrade Conversion with GTE Harmonic Ringer, two tone ringer and NO loudness control. https://disneywizard.angelfire.com/AutomaticElectricModel80.html. It is a rare example of a model 40 art-decoy made obsolete by AT&T's introduction of the sleek round roto-dial Model 500 https://www.ericofon.com/catalog/classic2/we500.htm 1949 Henry Dreyfuss design from Western Electric. With warehouses full of the robust model 40 they replaced onto them an updated shell similar to the competition yet retaining the same guts and called it the Model 80, it's a classic black desk phone, rare but not particularly valuable. What gives it away is the base plate, genuine later Model 80's have rounded corners, but model 40 upgrades have rubber feet set into the curve across the diagonal corners which had fit perfectly the original 'Shirley Temple' art-deco cover. That plastic shell is indestructible, it's a tank. The base is compatible in that all phone systems in the world are required to be electrically backwards compatible with it and earlier deskset/subset pairs. In 200 years it will still work. The red bar on white water-decal under the base reads model 40 and an identical decal stating Model 80 covers the first. Interesting legacy feature of a spring wire which can rest on one of four stops of increasing twist is the "J, K, L, M" selector allowing up to four phones on a single party-line, lowering rural subscriber costs with the ability to string a single pair along to four widely spaced subscribers and selectively ring each household individually, but lacking any guarantee of conversation privacy. They would each hear an initial ding but the ring frequency would isolate ringers based on their selector spring position. Later on pure Model 80 chassis, with the bell dampener, an indicator arrow showed through the base pointing to 0, 1, 2, 3 & 4 to identify which frequency would drive the bell clapper or was the hole showing the selector circuit missing entirely. The ability of the local exchange to send one of four exciting ring waveforms to isolate and select the deskset which rings was unique to Automatic Electric and the Edison system. (the zero position was disengage - ring regardless) This is why in old publications and the occasionally seen remaining fading sign dating from the original Edison system era will show a phone number suffix of j, k, l or m to tell the operator when requesting a specific connection, the selective ring feature was designed and implemented before subscriber dialing leading to some interesting dials to accommodate selective ring.

A technician added his mark to the Instrument Repair decal in 1966 when he reset the ringer from distinctive ring to standard ring by repositioning the end of a spring to the bottom of four step notches. This feature was primarily what made the AE phone electrics superior, the ability to assign a desk set to ring only on one of four selected ring frequencies, an elegant and brilliantly simple but now obsolete necessity for rural party lines which was selected automatically by the caller with the number suffix of J, K, L, or M sometimes seen on old listings and advertisements. Other elements of the set continued to be of better design than the newer WE 500s; faster and quieter dial escapement, simpler yet more versatile and reliable rounded button leaf switch contacts, lightning protection and a capacitor and coil which improved voice quality on long runs of local loop with or without multiple party line sets attached, an arrangement which also helped eliminate crosstalk and feedback, not to mention the transmitter (microphone) and receiver (speaker) both vast improvements both technically and for the user, quality of service, over the carbon particle transmitter and tin sound of the cupped disk on coil receiver offerings in the WE 500. When we purchased it as a result of the Bell Breakup, a technician came and replaced all the terminal blocks in the house with the female RJ11 wall receptacle jacks. On this phone he replaced the original screw eye terminals on cloth cord with a state-of-the-art modular RJ11 male connector on a clear plastic cord containing two grey plastic insulated stranded copper wire (the locking tab broke off years ago,) Under the decal on the baseplate is a black rubber stamp "40T" which is the model number as originally built.

Pictured is the Automatic Electric model 80 conversion baseplate - ''NB802 CXA 40T'' Model 40 to 80 conversion overlay decal which reads "instrument 80NTS dial S2070 repaired by Bxx7GG" the technician code, I may be mistaken but I believe, is his initials, the serial of those initials, and his home service garage. So he would be the seventh Bob (X). (X). out of Garden Grove, but again that's just a guess on my part.

What's not a guess on my part is the missing "Loudness" wheel. That's well documented as indicating a new-in-box surplus Model 40 upgrade to model 80 factory rebuild. Later firstbuild model 80s have a "Loudness" metal thumbwheel which descends through the slot, shielded by a dimple in the baseplate. The wheel adjusts an expanding cam on which a lever hinges to a felt pad attached on it's end. When the wheel is on loud, the felt pad is fully disengaged, and as the wheel is rotated, the pad contacts and increases the pressure between the two tone bells. This adjustable mute was an innovative yet ingeniously simple feature not offered by its Western Electric rival until later by using a kludgy patent workaround. But the larger bells of the original model 40 ringers didn't permit space for the loudness wheel and mute wedge, so the ringer units were installed without the loudness adjustment wheel.

The biggest visual difference between the 500 and the 80 was the "walking cradle." The cradle on the Western Electric 500 required you to set the handset down square, maybe sometimes missing which also enabled the skilled user to balance the handset pitched forward on the cradle to keep the line open - a poor man's hold feature - but, more often than not, accidentally leaving the line open and ringer disengaged. The design of the AE 80 incorporated the "walking cradle" where the handset would fall into place and hang up without a second thought as long as you came close, insuring disconnect, which was widely advertised as it's chief selling point. Incorporated just beneath the handset resting in the cradle is a hand hold space, placed naturally and intuitively to grip and lift the entire unit, that lip of plastic over the indent was named the "butler handle."

What makes these so rare is GTE ownership primarily. When the obsolete equipment was returned to be repaired they were generally scrapped for metal or otherwise destroyed, and the customer premises equipment was upgraded with newer equipment. A great wave of replacement occurred of both the Model 40 upgrades and Model 80 rotary dial phones with the introduction of the popularized Touch-Tone dialing. Late model 80s could be updated with a new shell cover and dial pad kit in the field and returned to service for the most part, but converted model 40s were scrapped as obsolete. When the Bell System was forced to divest it's monopoly, that affected General Telephone as well, forcing them to allow user supplied terminal equipment (phones) to be connected to their network. GTE also chose offer the phone for sale to the subscriber should the subscriber should choose to buy their old leased phone, which very few subscribers did, choosing instead to opt for competitive newer phones at lower prices with more features such as TouchTone number keys, caller on hold, redial and often a local speed-dial memory. Subsequently a great majority of subscribers no longer leased the Automatic Electric Model 80 rotary dial desk sets which were either converted for RJ11 jacks and sold to the user for about $25 or collected by the same visiting technician and returned to the shops great circular bin in the sky. Most of the customers phones have not survived to this day, outlasted by the durability of the Model 40 factory upgrades. The switchhook, for example, can be slammed, knocked about and cradled millions of times due to the twin round carbon button contacts on the ends of the intelligently stacked leaf switch isolated from the user by a hinged lever which also folded down for the technician when the shell was removed to simulate being on hook, or "hung up," simplifying testing but snapped back in place when the cover was attached in case the technician forgot to return it to it's correct position. The half-dome button switch contacts, fabricated of carbon, which is hydrophobic (naturally water repellent,) rarely needed adjustment and were generally self cleaning and designed to barely arc, avoids the buildup of corrosion, so the occasional emery-board across the contacts would be maintenance overkill for a hundred years of reliable service, while landfills are brimming with e-waste of the phones offered to replace them.

In the 60's due to our proximity to nuclear targets like aircraft and shipbuilding the wiring was 'hardened' - replaced with robust wiring and equipment to insure EMP or electro-magnetic pulse survivability. My phone can withstand a nuclear blast. My step-dad snapped this photo of the lineman on the pole behind our house during "The Hardening."

I'm just sayin' legacy electro-mechanical analog switched equipment is immune to any software update anomaly glitch such like the AT&T meltdown of 2024.02.22, a digital dilemma causing one third of the U.S. to be without service for more than a day.

Mind out more&helips;Also see:
1. The Rotary Dial Telephone
2. The Telephone on Prince Edward Island - On-Line telephone Museum - Automatic Electric telephones!

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