This brass candlestick phone features a base with a vertical cylindrical neck extending upright for up to 10 inches in length. At the top of the stand is mounted a carbon microphone (transmitter) to speak into, and a switchhook extending sideways upon which an ear piece (receiver) is hung. Attached to the base is a dial and a key to lock the dial in place.
Weight: 4.4lbs
Size: 11.5"
Age: 1920s
Material: Brass, Plastic, Bronze
Marks: North Electric Company
History: In 1856, George Shawk purchased an electrical engineering business in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1869, he became partners with Enos M. Barton and, later the same year, sold his share to inventor Elisha Gray. In 1872 Barton and Gray moved the business to Clinton Street, Chicago, Illinois and incorporated it as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. They manufactured a variety of electrical products including typewriters, alarms, and lighting and had a close relationship with the telegraph company Western Union to whom they supplied relays and other equipment.In 1875, Gray sold his interests to Western Union, including the caveat that he had filed against Alexander Graham Bell's patent application for the telephone. The ensuing legal battle over patent rights, between Western Union and the Bell Telephone Company, ended in 1879 with Western Union withdrawing from the telephone market and Bell acquiring Western Electric in 1881.Western Electric was the first company to join in a Japanese joint venture with foreign capital. It invested in Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. in 1899. Western Electric held 54% of NEC at the time. Their representative in Japan was Walter Tenney Carleton.Western Electric secretly purchased controlling interest in a principal competitor, Kellogg Switchboard & Supply company, in 1901, but was forced by a lawsuit to sell.In 1920, Alice Heacock Seidel was the first of Western Electric's female employees to be given permission to stay on after she had married. This set a precedent in the company, which up until that time had not allowed married women in their employ. Miss Heacock had worked for Western Electric for sixteen years before her marriage, and was at the time the highest-paid secretary in the company. From a memoir of her life, she writes that the decision to allow her to stay on "required a meeting of the top executives to decide whether I might remain with the Company, for it established a precedent and a new policy for the Company - that of married women in their employ. If the women at the top were permitted to remain after marriage then all women would expect the same privilege. How far and how fast the policy was expanded is shown by the fact that a few years later women were given maternity leaves with no loss of time on their service records."In 1925, ITT purchased the Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company of Brussels, Belgium and other worldwide subsidiaries from AT&T, to avoid an anti-trust action. The company manufactured rotary system switching equipment under the Western Electric brand.Early on, Western Electric also managed a thriving electrical equipment distribution business, furnishing its customers with non-telephone products made by other manufacturers. This electrical distribution business was spun off from Western Electric in 1925 and organized into a separate company, Graybar Electric Company, in honor of the company's founders, Elisha Gray and Enos Barton.Bell Telephone Laboratories was half-owned by Western Electric; the other half by AT&T.

A brushing of tarnish down the right side of this phone marks it, but is otherwise in excellent condition.