A telephone museum in Northern California, dedicated to preserving telephone history
The JKL Museum / American Museum of Telephony and surrounding residences were lost to fire last night (September 10 2015).
The community of Mountain Ranch CA where the museum was located may also be affected. We were told by firefighters that the museum burned to the ground. Currently no one can get into the area. The fire is called the Butte fire. As soon as we have more news we will post it on our website: http://jklmuseum.com
Today several signs were mounted in and outside of the museum. Something interesting was discovered while mounting a Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania sign.
The old 1964 Bell System logo was covered with the 1969 Bell System logo. The replacement 1969 Bell System logo has now been mounted above the sign. You can see the mounting holes in the sign were the replacement logo was mounted. It must have been a lot cheaper to create covers for the old logo than create more signs.
The sign is a very heavy one that has been cast in bronze.
We thought you might enjoy this photo of the Western Electric PicturePhone Model II:
“PICTUREPHONE® sets come rolling along conveyor belt toward final packaging at Western Electric’s Indianapolis plant. Most of Western Electric’s 19 plants funnel parts to Indianapolis for final assembly in preparation for the inaugural of PICTUREPHONE service on July 1 in Pittsburgh by the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania.”
For more information about the Western Electric Picturesphones see:
GPO (BT) Vision of the Future
Happy Birthday, Trimline! ??? Guess you just missed it too? According to Events in Telephone History by AT&T, August 2 1965, was when “Michigan Bell became the first company to sell Trimline phones on a companywide basis.”
Interested in reading more about the Trimline? Check out the upcoming August 2015 issue of the Telephone Collectors International publication Singing Wires Journal. It contains an article “From Butt Set to Beauty” The Trimline is 50 Years Old by Paul Fassbender.
The JKL Museum of Telephony collection contains many antique telephones and a few not so antique. There are several telephones in the JKL Museum collection that are related to the Trimline development.
You can check them out on our site in the virtual exhibit “Pre—production models, prototype, display telephones, and related objects.”
Look for the Demitasse, Schmoo, Contour, Trimline I, a golden Trimline and others.
You are also welcome to come and see them for yourselves at our telephone museum. Check out our homepage or use the contact option in the menu bar to get in touch.
Also don’t forget to check out the Trimline page at Paul Fassbender’s site
Last week Jerry & Chris managed to get one of our Western Electric 1964, Model I, Picturephones working. There is still work to be done but we hope to be able to put this on display at the JKL Museum.
For more information about the Western Electric Picturephones:
We just created our Facebook page. All posts to the Updates section on our site are also visible on our Facebook page.
Follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jklmuseum
We acquired a new addition to the JKL Museum Collection. Keith Cheshire acquired this rare for our telephone museum through Steve Flocke at a recent telephone show.
We are very happy to be able to add this dial to our collection of dials at the JKL Museum of Telephony.
Keith Cheshire hopes to provide us with more information about this very interesting dial and its use. He is currently doing some research regarding this dial and we hope to be able to give an update in the not too distant future.
Scroll down for a short video of this dial.
Click here to view this movie on YouTube.
We’ve added a Google Custom Search option to the telephone museum’s website.
The Google Custom Search helps our telephone museum’s website visitors find the information they’re looking for.
Go to https://cse.google.com/cse/ to create a Google Custom Search for your own site.
Google makes it very easy to setup your own Google custom search. Just login to https://cse.google.com/cse/ using your Gmail account and following the instructions. Please note that the free edition of Google CSE comes with ads, you can upgrade to Site Search with optional ads.
