Mike's Virtual Telephone Museum

I am planing to eventually feature telephones from the very beginning all the way to the first commercially available ISDN phones.

Most of the phones I will feature are part of my own collection.  I started playing around with telephones when I was 11 and somehow it became my hobby.

My collection includes phones from as early as 1903 and all the way to 1991.  Although most of my phones are German. I do have a few phones from far away places like Japan and Korea, a small collection of US phones, and a selection from other European countries.

Here are a few pictures for now.  I will slowly expand this page when ever I have time to work on it.

This is a stf 03.  The standard German wall phone in 1903

This is an OB05 the standard German desk phone around 1900
This one is from 1915

W28 were built from 1928 on

In 1936 a new design was introduced the W36.  This design eventually evolved in to the W48 and a bunch of derivatives for special purposes.

These phones were also available as wall phones

The next major step towards a new design came in the early 1960s with the W611

Now I will jump a little in history the next phone is one of the first ISDN phones available in Germany. It was called the Granat 1. This phone was made in 1989. The early German ISDN phones use the national Layer 3 protocol 1TR6. Nowadays the international Layer 3 protocol DSS1 is used in all new ISDN lines, which renders the older phones useless sooner or later.


Please drop me a line if you are also interested in old telephones.  I'll be glad to answer any technical question concerning Telephones (POTS or ISDN).

michael@the-deges.de

Created: October 10, 1999
Last update: March 26, 2001