Candlestick Telephone - Successor Telephones

Successor Telephones

When Western Electric had sufficiently developed modern handset design in the 1920s, the Western Electric candlesticks were superseded by a series of new desktop models, starting with the A1 mount in the mid 1920s. This was essentially a candlestick telephone that had its vertical tube-shaft shortened to about 1.5 in in height above the round base, and had a cradle on top of it, designed to hold a combined handset with both the receiver and the transmitter in the same unit. The cradle contained a plunger that operated the hookswitch in the base below. The A1 was only distributed for a very short time until the B-type telephone mount (model 102 telephone) was completed in 1927, a streamlined design that replaced the tube-shaft with a sculpted cone shape. By 1930 this round base was redesigned into the oval-footprint D-mounting to avoid instability of the unit when dialing. At the same time the electric circuitry was upgraded to produce the model 202 telephone, which reduced the strong sidetone characteristic of earlier designs.