Re: OT - Another Goody For The Old-timers

<ranck@xxxxxx> wrote:
notbob <notbob@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd now like to find one of the old origial Pincess phones. They not
only are built like a tank and take up less room, but the the
push-button dial is backlit, another handy feature when the power goes
out at night.

I hate to tell you this, but the Pricess Phone's backlight
is/was powered by a local tranformer in the house, usually mounted
in the basement or similar location and the power delivered to
the phone via the second pair of wires in the 4-wire cable.
In other words, your power goes out, so does the backlight
on the Pricess. The phone would still work, just the light
would not.

That's definitely true of Princess phones, but the later Trimline phones lit the dial via the normal phone wiring by means of an LED powered by the the phone company CO. Believe it or not, they actually made Trimline phones with rotary dials AND LED lighting:

http://www.porticus.org/bell/images/trimline/glowing_dial.jpg

The "best" of old and new technology all in one phone! ;-)

I have a Princess but didn't have the transformer for it. I still wanted to get the lighted dial working though. As luck would have it, a free transformer magically appeared in my house one day. Actually what happened is a piece of *** AT&T digital answering machine made in 2003 died on me. I was tossing it out, and it occurred to me that the wall wart that went with it might have the right power output to run the light in the Princess. I looked it up, and wouldn't you know it was an exact match on power rating. So I wired it up and now have a working lighted Princess.

There's a ton of useful technical information on these old phones on this web site:

http://www.bellsystemmemorial.org/

I got the both the bell and the light working on my Princess based on info there.

--
wff_ng_7 (at) verizon (dot) net

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