Western Electric hand telephone sets

The Western Electric hand telephone sets are a series of telephones that were produced from 1927 by the Western Electric Company for the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and the Bell System. The series features the mouthpiece (transmitter) and the earpiece (receiver) combined into a hand-held unit, originally named a hand telephone, or handset. The handset would be held against the ear and in front of the mouth simultaneously, in contrast to earlier telephones in the Bell System where only the receiver was held against the ear, while the user spoke into a fixed transmitter mounted on a telephone stand or wall telephone.

Hand telephone sets consist of three principal parts: the handset, a handset mounting, and an apparatus box, called variously desk set box, bell box, subscriber set, or just subset. This box is typically mounted on a wall or desk-side, and contains an electromagnetic bell ringer and a speech transformer, called induction coil, to connect the telephone to the telephone line wiring. The handset mounting is either a desk-top stand to cradle and secure the handset when not in use, or a small box mounted against a vertical surface or wall that featured a switch-hook for hanging the handset.

Other American and foreign telephone manufacturers had already produced this type of telephone, often referred to as French phone. In the Bell System, hand telephones formally replaced the hitherto used deskstand, colloquially called candlestick, by the end of the 1920s, although reconditioned candlestick telephones remained in service for at least another two decades.

The shape and styling of these telephones by Western Electric evolved from the candlestick. Three main styles resulted for use on the desk-top, designated the type A, type B, and type D handset mounting.