Ericofon

Ericofon

Ericofon, bottom view

The Ericofon, or Cobra Phone is a plastic one-piece telephone created by the Ericsson Company and marketed throughout the second half of the 20th century. It was the first commercially marketed telephone design to incorporate the dial and handset into a single unit. Because of its styling, and influence on future telephone design, the Ericofon is considered one of the most significant industrial designs of the 20th century and is in the collection of Museum of Modern Art.

History

The Ericofon is a Swedish telephone handset created by Ericsson. It was designed in the late 1940s by a design team including Gösta Thames, Ralph Lysell and Hugo Blomberg. A specific feature of the telephone is that the two major components—the handset and the dial—are combined in a single unit. This one-piece design anticipated the evolution of the typical cordless phone and cell phone by several decades. The Ericofon is considered a landmark in plastic industrial design, and is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Serial production began in 1954. The earlier models were only sold to institutions, but in 1956 production for the open market begun in Europe and Australia. In Sweden it is known as the cobra telephone, due to its similarity with the serpent.

Bell Telephone Laboratories would initially not allow the use of the Ericofon on the Bell System network in the USA.

Production of the Ericofon for the North American market took place at the North Electric facility in Galion, Ohio.

Design

The original phone was produced in two slightly different designs. The earliest version is slightly taller, with the earpiece at nearly a 90 degree angle to the base. A later version has a shorter handle, with the earpiece angled slightly downward. These are referred to as "new case" vs. "old case". The other difference is that the earlier case was molded in two pieces, while the later version was molded as a single piece. Both versions were initially produced in 18 colors. Ericofons were produced using the four-prong plug common in the USA at the time.

A third version, the Model 700, was produced beginning in 1976 and is easily distinguished from earlier Ericofons by its squarish design, as well as changes to the handle and plug.

Colors

When it was introduced on the USA market, it was available in 18 different colors, but after subsequent transfer of the production to North Electric the number of colors was reduced to eight. A small number of clear and metallic finish phones were also produced for special promotions. The most popular and most produced colors were bright red and bright white. Other colors were various pastel shades of blue, green, and pink. The phone was never produced in black.

Ericotone

Most of the Ericofons made had mechanical rotary dials, typical of all phones made in that era. While Ericofons produced by Ericsson used miniature buzzers as their ringers, North Electric introduced the electronic "Ericotone" ringer in its Ericofons. The Ericotone ringer used a simple, 1-transistor oscillator circuit to produce a distinctive "chirping" sound to serve as the phone's ringer. This was one of the earliest applications of a transistor in a telephone, as telephones with mechanical bell ringers and rotary dials did not need transistors.

Touch-tone

North Electric also introduced a touch-tone version of the Ericofon in the United States in 1967, but this variant was not produced in the numbers that the rotary dial version was. The touch-tone version has also become rarer over time as a design flaw in the hookswitch mechanism can cause the phone to become unusable if it is set down too forcibly. North Electric ceased production of the Ericofon for North America in 1972.

Ericsson also introduced a push-button version of the Ericofon, the model 700, for the company's 100th anniversary in 1976. The model 700 had a squarer design but it was not touch-tone. Instead, its electronics generated electrical pulses as its buttons were pressed, simulating the pulses produced by a rotary dial. Ericsson also continued to produce rotary-dial Ericofons until about 1980.

Recent production

The design is produced today by Wild and Wolf. It is produced in red and metallic silver touch-tone versions and can be bought from internet stores. This version has touch tone buttons and plugs into a normal land line socket with a cord.

Bluetooth version

An electrical engineer and designer "sqnewton" (link below) commercializes original Ericofons that connect via Bluetooth to any cellular phone. The designer created a tiny, microcontroller based board that resides inside the Ericofon and enables special features, such as providing dial tone, dialing numbers using its rotary dial, providing busy tone when the current call drops, receiving calls, mimicking the original Ericotone ringer, redial, speed dial, voice recognition dial, direct inward dialing using dtmf tones to reach and select phone menus, text message notifications and other features, making this type of phone unique.

In the media

The Ericofon has been featured in several feature films and TV shows, mostly from the 60s and the 70s.

• In the movie The World of Henry Orient (1964), Peter Sellers uses an Ericofon in his bedroom.
• An Ericofon is featured in the opening scene in In Like Flint (1967).
• In the movie Two For The Road (1967) shooting star architect Mark Wallace (Albert Finney) receives a long distance call at a housewarming party on an Ericofon.
• In the 1967 film Casino Royale, Le Chiffre (Orson Welles) receives a phone call from SMERSH on an Ericofon.
• An Ericofon can be seen on a table in a scene of the 1973 film Theatre of Blood.
• Many Ericofons are used in the French adult comedy Young Casanova (1974).
• A yellow Ericofon is placed on a table in the living room in the 1980 movie Sunday Lovers (segment "Armando's Notebook").
• Dominique Lavanant uses a red Ericofon in La boum, a 1980 French movie starring Sophie Marceau.
• The character of Myra Gale Brown (played by Winona Ryder) uses an Ericofon in a few scenes of Great Balls Of Fire! (1989).
• The Ericofon was also featured in the 1997 movie Men In Black, where it was the deskphone for each workstation in the Headquarters.
• A character in the 1999 film But I'm A Cheerleader is seen using a green Ericofon.
• In the French TV movie L'affaire Ben Barka (2007), a white Ericofon is used in an office of the Paris-Orly Airport. The action takes place in 1965.

• An Ericofon appears prominently in The Twilight Zone episode "Third from the Sun," first broadcast January 8, 1960.
• The Ericofon appears briefly in the headquarters of the enemy in the first episode ("Eleven Days to Zero") of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964).
• In the 1969-1972 television series, The Courtship of Eddie's Father, the Corbett household featured an Ericofon.
• In "Live Bait", the eighteenth episode of the third season of Mission: Impossible, the phone is shown many times as the desk phone of Helmut Kellermann (Anthony Zerbe), the episode's main antagonist. In the preceding episode, "Doomsday", Jim Phelps (Peter Graves) uses a white Ericofon.
• A red Ericofon is used in a top-security U.S. tracking station in the 1972 episode "The Ninety-Second War: Part II" of the TV series Hawaii Five-O.
• The character Teddy Forzman in the TV show The Adventures Of Pete & Pete (1993-96) uses an Ericofon in the third-season episode "The Trouble With Teddy."
• A modified Ericofon appeared as a prop alien telephone in the first-season episode "I, E.T." of the TV series Farscape (1999-2003).

See also

• Trimphone - another telephone from a similar era
• Trimline - AT&T's answer to the Ericofon, the Trimline phone incorporated a dial into the handset, but still had a separate cradle containing the ringer.
• Grillo - Another innovate telephone, from Italy. Its design anticipated the cellular "flip-phone."

External links

• http://www.ericofon.com/
• Ericofon at the Museum of Modern Art
• http://www.sqnewton.com/