Vintage Trimline Telephones

The Trimline, like the Princess phone, was one of the Bell System's best marketing innovations. Developed with the help of Henry Dreyfuss Associates, produced by Western Electric, and first introduced in Michigan in late 1965, the sleek, slightly curved Trimline was meant to be a Modern, stylish, easier-to-use telephone. The main innovation was to move the rotary dial from the base of the phone to the inside of the handset between the earpiece and the mouthpiece. At the time, this was a radical change that allowed callers to dial a number while being some distance from the phone base; whether you were standing in the kitchen or lying in bed, you were only limited by the length of the phone cord. The dial had to be reduced in size, and the engineers created a "floating" fingerstop that slid past zero when a number was dialed. Thanks to technological developments like printed circuits, the transmitter and receiver could fit into the Trimline's uniquely slender base, which was offered in both wall-mount and desktop versions. Similar to the Princess phone, the dial lit up when a caller removed the handset from the base. The Trimline was among the earliest telephones to employ the predecessor to the RJ11 modular phone plug and jack we associate with landlines today. A huge success, the Trimline was copied by most other major telephone manufacturers. However, the curved plastic handset proved slippery for people who wanted to hold it between their shoulder and ear while using both hands for other tasks. Third parties developed cushioned clamp-on adapters for the phone. The light dials on the first Trimlines required the phones to be plugged into an AC outlet as well as the phone jack. In mid-1966, Western Electric also offered a Trimline model with a Touch-Tone keypad dial. The first of these only had 10 buttons with no pound or star buttons. The 12-key Touch-Tone models were produced starting in 1968. During the 1970s, the plastic keypad backplate was replaced with an aluminum one, and the incandescent bulb lighting the dial was replaced with a green LED light so that the phone could be powered exclusively by the phone jack. In 1983, AT&T began to sell consumers phones directly instead of leasing them. Toward the end of 1984, the Trimline was updated with an electronic chirping ringer, soft-rubber keys, and several technical improvements. A year later, the rotary Trimline was discontinued while the Touch-Tone version became convertible between desktop and wall-mount use.