Nice things have happened!

Earlier this month I was contacted by a Swedish Ericofon collector, Johnny. He did have a few interesting Ericofons for me. So in the end I got 2 new Ericofon shells in the mail today (26-02-2026).

The story goes that these 2 Ericofons were taken (…) from the production location by a lady working there. The lady had them on her attic in Olofström until 2001, the moment Johnny got them from her. Now they end up in my collection. Which is very, very nice.

In the beginning of the 1960’s, in the struggle against the de-population in the south of Sweden, an Ericsson production facility was opened in Olofström in the Blekinge region. It closed down in 1982. Most of the Ericofon production took place in Karlskrona, so the Blekinge region was already heavily involved in this production process. It is most likely that these models come from one of the production plants in that region. Olofström itself sounds plausible.

These are not shells that were made in between 2 production colors. In an earlier post on swirls I told that this was the normal way of ‘swirl production’.

In these shells I see at least white, red and some grey in their color palette. The lady who took them confirmed they put some leftover colors in the machine for ‘fun’ and then took the shells home. They must have done this while there was no supervision in the plant. Both shells were taken directly from the molding process as they do not have any after-processing done such as holes and notches.

What is nice to see, is that the swirling pattern is more or less the same on the 2 shells. Although the colors are different, the flow of the plastic is the same every time. Of course this is logical in a industrial production system, but it is nice to see that they are actually twins.

To get swirls in my collection was a dream that I never thought was possible. So far, I have never seen any swirls for sale in the past years. Thanks Johnny to give me the opportunity to get these 2 nice ones!

The development of the push-button telephone was merely done at Bell Labs, with the DTMF system being invented in 1959. The 10-button layout was the result of extensive user research by John E. Karlin and his team at the Human Factors Engineering Department of Bell Labs in 1963. The original design did not include the * and # keys, which were added later to facilitate additional functionality. Plus, DTMF phones were able to generate 12 different tone patterns (3×4 matrix), so why not add 2 buttons for future use. It was until 1968 that 10 buttons were quite common. So far history…

Below is a picture of a set Ericofon parts that I got this week. This is just a part of the whole set, but at least the most interesting part.

So what do we’ve got here? Two NOS shells, a non-wired Touch Tone chassis, some chassis plastics, some dial faces, an extra horse shoe switch and a few ear caps. Let’s have a closer look.

The 2 shells are full Touch Tone shells, but… they do not have any holes for the microphone (yet). My best guess is that they were taken from production to be used for assembling the Touch Tone in an early stage.

Two of the 3 ear caps are still on their production reel. The chassis with the dial-face only has 10 buttons and it is not wired. It is just the mechanical basics. On top of that, the keys do not have any print on them.

On the bottom left picture you can see 2 horseshoe switches. A regular one (on the table) and one from this set (on top of the other). You can see that the length is different which also reflects in a post I made earlier.This also means that the dial-faces of the 10 and 12 button version have different shapes as you can see. Not only that, also the plastic chassis part is different. The last picture shows a 12 button wired chassis versus this one. The shapes differ in quite a lot details.

It seems that the set I bought is a set with some prototyping material, that must be obvious. It is considered that a 10 button Touch Tone Ericofon is a prototype. There has been no reference to this type of keypad in any Ericofon documentation and as far as known they were never sold. They were introduced with 12 buttons from the start. Although a fancy dial-face with 10 buttons exists.

All with all I was quite positively surprised when I got the box with this material in the mail. As it normally goes in online buys, the pictures are not always very clear.

I have assembled 1 prototype, so I can add it to my collection. The transparent dial-face I like the most 🙂