Saving a piece of history

[cathead]

As I left the scrap yard the other day, one of the guys handed me this box well weathered from the sun. He had no idea what it was.
It was what was left of a very old telephone! I put it in the back of my pickup and went home. Today with nothing better to do,
I disassembled and oiled and cleaned, tapped some holes in the broken off bolts and generally got it back into working order.
I knew it was working because it shocked me several times while cranking it over. So, just for fun I connected up an LED 60 watt
equivalent bulb and it lights up brilliantly. I'm not sure what I will do with this treasure but it would be good enough to charge some
batteries for a transistor radio or something. Everything was stuck so I spent a few hours working on the bearing surfaces and
general cleanup. The magnets are marked so was able to easily disassemble the thing and get it back together and working.
I machined up a piece of brass to fashion out a crank handle. I suspect the original was made of wood but don't know for sure.
I had to take a lot of pictures to catch the light on while I used my other hand to take the photo. It needs to be mounted on a board
as it is ergonomically difficult to run as it is.

It's snowing up here today so a good day for playing in the shop.

 

[silence dogood]

When we were kids my brothers and I used to have a lot of fun with one those. After all these years, now I know what it was used for.

 

[francist]

Cool. I have an old shipboard phone off a navy vessel here that’s similar but not as big. Couple of monster capacitors with it too.

-frank

 

[NC Rick]

What was the box like? I'm no expert but I believe the telephone system used 90 volts for the ring output. Military field phones had ringer cranks in ww2, your looks older? Blasting machines use similar insides.

 

[cathead]

I know it was a telephone because it had the ringer in the box along with a capacitor and some wiring. The box was
tongue and groove on each corner covered with brass and brass wood screws. The ringer and capacitor and wiring were beyond saving and the box was weathered from being outside apparently for many years. I was lucky to get the
generator free enough to operate well. There was no carbon microphone on it as the ends of the box were long gone...................

 

[pontiac428]

I bought a WWII German field telephone for 5 Euro at a flea market in Eichstatt near the Buchenwald social dissident camp back in the day. I also found a matching switchboard later on but passed on it because I'd need more field telephones to set up comms. Might be cool to rig between the house and the shop so the Frau can ring me when she needs something.

 

[RWoerz]

Sorry TMI I guess. Yes definitely a very old phone. When I was a kid my Grandparents and an Aunt had farms next to each other. The houses were about a 1/4 mile apart and had a pair of these phones so you could ring up the other house. They had to add a strange looking battery to make it work. A 90v one maybe? I know the ring voltage is 110Vac. I know you didn't need the battery to ring the other phone. I was a phone man in the Army in the early 70's and we had an even older switchboard for some of the on base houses. I have an old phone mounted on the wall in my shops office. My brother had one of the type where the microphone was on an arm sticking out of the middle of the phone. I added a touch tone pad to it and it worked and I think still would. Not sure it would have done any good to turn the crank. When my kids were young I had a rotary wall phone hooked up just so they knew what one was. I also had this one hooked up, it would ring and you could answer calls with it, not great but it worked.

 

[eugene13]

I've heard that you can use a phone generator to make worms come up out of the ground.

 

[randyjaco]

You can also use it to make fish come to the surface of the water eliminating all that wasted time fishing

 

[talvare]

About a year ago a friend of mine (HM member Bob Korves) gave me one of those magnetos. It sat on a shelf in my shop for a few months until I decided to try my hand at some Steampunk/Rube Goldberg craft. I used it as part of a lamp shown in the attached photo.

The way this thing works is that 120V power comes into the gate valve which houses a micro switch. Turning the handle CW about 90 degrees closes the switch which in turn sends power to a photoelectric eye (housed in the old tuna can). I modified the PE so that it closes when it sees light. Cranking the magneto energizes a little 7W lamp housed in the brass sphere which is seen by the PE, which in turn energizes a relay housed in the old film can. The relay is wired to latch in and sends power to the light bulb. Turning the handle on the gate valve 90 degrees CCW shuts it off.

Ted