During the 1970s phone subscribers were permitted to own decorative housings for their phones for the first time.
from WORTHPOINT.com
Teleconcepts was one of the pioneers that provided innovative decorative phones.
This unique and quite charming clamshell phone is the “Shellamar” by Teleconcepts. It has a retractable fabric cord and YES, it absolutely works. I believe the color would be ‘caramel.’
Did you know deregulation brought us these phone designs?
The Deregulated Phone
from SLATE
The 1977 breakup of AT&T revolutionized telephone design, which had been, as Michael Sorkin noted, “sheltered from the vagaries of taste and the manipulations of the marketplace.” The phone was no longer a standardized, leased portal into AT&T’s network; it became an object unto itself, with results that verged on a kind of giddy kitsch, as if people were overcompensating for the long gray-flannel winter. “Today Alexander Graham Bell’s invention comes in a menagerie of forms,” the New York Times wrote in 1986, “that include Coca-Cola bottles, toucans, peekaboo Lucite globes and, in the case of the desk-top Versailles phone, with a reproduction Renoir discreetly planted in the number card.”
What fun it is to consider the changing look and feel of telephones and the continuing changes from big, boxy, cell phones to our modern-day ‘smart’ phone where the telephone function is a small part of the instrument!
In 1973, the company came up with a prototype of the world’s first portable cellular telephone, using the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) system. In the year 1983, the world’s first commercial hand-held cellular phone, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X phone, got FCC’s approval.
Weighing in at 28-ounce (794-gram), it went on sale the following year. The device used to take 10 hours to fully charge, and offered around 30 minutes of talk-time. Capable of saving last 30 dialed numbers, it carried a price tag of $3,995.
from GSMArena
The Motorola DynaTAC (1983)
The phone had long appeared in advertisements in the hands of executives as they sat in their cocoons of power, surveying their empire below, but a new kind of power was typified in the 1987 film Wall Street, in which Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko clutches a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. “Oh, jeez, I wish you could see this,” he tells Bud Fox, as he walks a Hamptons beach, “the lights coming up over the water.” It’s like an advertisement for dominion over place: You can’t be here, but I can, and I’m going to use this wonderful instrument to remind you of that fact. A descendent of Motorola’s walkie-talkie work for the military (and looking like it), the DynaTAC, designed by Rudy Krolopp, came on the market in 1984, at just below $4,000 and 28 ounces.
from SLATE
The LUCITE CLAMSHELL PHONE is a beautiful collectible from 50 years ago that reminds many of us just how quickly things have changed. We look forward to showing you this great piece and any collection ‘of our many collections’ that you might want to peruse. Yes… we are watchin’ for ya!
