Monthly Archives: October 2015

Various Hands

The phone above was originally a Swedish phone, created for the European market in 1962. It is a flat new case.

Sometimes the need for phones in certain markets was so big that other markets had to deliver them. This is the case here. This phone was more or less re-branded from European to North Electric, to be sold on the US market.

In this picture you can see that the neon light that is normally present on the Ericotone ringer is applied on the chassis directly. This makes sure the phone lights up when it rings.

The other picture shows the original dial face sticker that was used to re-brand the dial face from a 1 to 0 dial face to a North Electric like dial face including the letters so typical for the US.

The missing Ericotone was replaced with the external Ericsson ringer with the buzzer. The big wall moutable box only contains a small buzzer as normally used outside the US. It sounds different, but in the end, various hands transferred an European Ericofon ready to be sold in the US.

Absolute Elsewhere

“Haha, the Dutch are not going to the European Championships?”

The picture was not made by me 😉 but was taken at the 1958 World Cup at the Råsunda Stadium, Stockholm. It shows Pelé and the Brazilian team.

Truth

Yesterday I watched a Dutch movie on the abduction of Freddy Heineken, the owner of the Heineken beercompany, in The Netherlands in 1983. The movie was made in 2011.

On the picture the girl is going for the truth. She’s calling her boyfriend with a nice red Ericofon which resulted in the localization of one of the criminals.

Actually it is half the truth. The Ericofon used is not a typical Dutch model. The color is Mandarin Red, not PTT Red and the dial face is not black but white. There is also a text on the dial face that I cannot read. The British Post Office tends to place texts on the dial face.

There were Mandarins around in The Netherlands, but they are not very common. Usually they are found in the borderregion with Germany (imported?), not in Amsterdam where this event was located.

Nevertheless it could still be historically correct, but I doubt. The Ericofon is found numerous times in the media. There are a lot of appearances in movies.