The telephones that made the history of design

Who was the real inventor of the telephone? If you ask Americans, they will inevitably say, “Alexander Graham Bell”. However, according to Italians, it was Anronio Meucci, an Italian immigrant who, in 1871, founded his Telettrofono Company, and created the prototype of what you could call the first voice-communication apparatus – the telephone. However, we all know what happened: Meucci did not correctly patent his invention and lost first dibs on becoming the inventor of the telephone. A few years later, Alexander Graham Bell patented the invention, and the rest is history.

In the summer of 1876, Alexander Graham Bell astonished the people at the Philadelphia international exhibition with “his” invention, which he had patented the previous March: a ‘voice transmitting’ telegraph, which allowed to hold long-distance conversations thanks to electromagnetic technology.

The following 20 years saw the beginning of the telephone industry as we know it, and the rise of its relevance. A new, great innovation came at the end of the 19th century, when a method for automatically selecting the telephone number of the receiver was invented. The inventor was Almon Strowger, the owner of a funeral home in Kansas City who had to solve a big problem: the lady telephone operator would divert his clients’ phone calls to her husband’s company, which was Strowger’s main competitor.  The first telephone to have an automatic telephone switch, the Candlestick Potbelly, came in 1905, but Strowger also invented the ‘upright’ design: telephones with the mouthpiece separated from the receiver were extremely popular up until the ‘30s.

The first phone with a contemporary design only came in 1931, when engineer Johan Christian Bjerknes and artist and designer Jean Heiberg created the Ericsson 1001. The product was the result of a collaborative project between the Elektrisk Bureau in Oslo, Televerket from Sweden and Lars Magnus Ericsson. Ericsson 1001 is the first Bakelite phone, with an integral cradle, a built-on finger dial and a ringer that notifies incoming calls. The design of the phone was considered to be extremely innovative for the time, and it later spread throughout all Europe and inspired Henry Dreyfuss to create the famous Western Electric’s model 500.

After the Second World War, Ericsson’s Swedish designers were once again in charge of rethinking the design of the object ‘telephone’. The Ericofon is the first telephone to incorporate the dial and the handset into a single unit. It is now part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it is known as the ‘Cobra telephone’, because it looks like a coiled snake, with its head up and ready to… answer a phone call.

Telephone design continued to evolve during the years of economic prosperity, but only in the ‘50s designers started to really experiment with shapes and colours, anticipating op art and the modernist style of the ‘60s. The emblem of the telephone design of that period is the Princess telephone, designed by Henry Dreyfuss. This compact telephone was designed to perfectly fit on an “woman’s bedside table”, as a better and more elegant alternative to the bulky and heavy Model 500.

The Italian equivalent of the American Western Electric’s Model 500 and Ericsson 1001 is Siemens S62, the rotary phone that was deeply loved by three generations of Italians. The project for this telephone was created by Lino Saltini for Siemens. However, in the following years, also FATME, Italtel and Face Standard began producing different models of the Bigrigio. It was jokingly nicknamed ‘bigrigio’ (‘bi’ meaning ‘two’, ‘grigio’ meaning gray) because of the double tonality of gray of the plastic receiver and cradle.

The same decade in which they launched the famous Bigrigio onto the market, Sit Siemens asked Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper to create a telephone with a revolutionary design: the Grillo (meaning ‘cricket’ in English). It was an innovative device, which subverted some of the most typical characteristics of the telephone: its foldable structure made it look nothing like a telephone, except for the wire. In 1967, the Grillo deservedly won a Compasso d’Oro.  

Even though some of the landline phones on this list already were indicators of one’s social status (not everyone could afford to have a Grillo on their nightstand), the telephone only became a status symbol with the advent of the mobile phones. The idea of always being able to make and receive a phone call, no matter when and where, was perfectly in line with the ‘80s yuppie style, just like cocaine and stock market speculations. The DynaTac, the huge mobile phone that Gordon Gekko used in the 1987 film Wall Street was the perfect symbol of that time. Despite his steep price (in 1983, when it was first launched, it costed $4000) it was a total success. In a few years, more than 300.000 Americans decided to buy a cell phone, and Motorola’s ‘brick’ was the only choice.

80’s Italian youngsters learned to make phone calls on two different telephones: the Bigrigio at their grandma’s house, and the more modern-looking Pulsar at their parents’. The design of this telephone reminded everyone of certain 80’s cars, especially its vibrant burgundy version that was impossible to match with the furniture. However, the reason why it was thought to be better than the Bigrigio, was the numerical keypad, much more convenient and faster than the model S62’s rotary dial.

More than the bag phone or the DynaTac, the true Italian status symbol of the late ‘80s was the car phone. The “mobile radio transmitter for conversations”, later called ‘autotelefono’, was perfectly in line with the all-Italian aesthetics of the ‘pre-Mani pulite’ manager driving the Lancia Thelma and wearing Armani. The models of the late 80’s and early ‘90s were the protagonists of a few commercials that you can now find on YouTube. The most advanced car phones worked thanks to the Radio Telephone Mobile System, based on microwave radio waves and cells, which allowed to maintain the phone call, even during handover – the process of transferring an ongoing call from one channel to another.
 

Just a couple years after the Pulsar, another cosmos-inspired telephone was invented – the Sirio. This is maybe one of the most famous designs among the telephones sold by SIP (The Italian Society for Telephone Operations). It is still quite common to find this telephone (even though in its more modern versions) inside many Italian homes. Sirio’s lines were smoother, and anticipated the taste that people would have in the ‘90s, as well as some big changes in the Italian telephone technology that would happen during that decade: the DTMF telecommunication signaling system, direct distance dialing, and, most importantly, the first experiments on collective opinion applied to show business – televoting.

In the ‘90s, the miniaturization of mobile phones was exponential. Another Motorola telephone was leading the way, and it soon became another pricy status symbol – the StarTAC. First released on January 1996, it was the first flip mobile phone of all times. It represented a hitherto-unseen revolution in the field of mobile phone design and engineering. The StarTAC was the successor of the MicroTAC, a semi-clamshell mobile phone launched in 1989. It was one of the most successful phones of that period, with 60 million models sold.

While Motorola was riding the wave of success, creating lots of new cell phones, Finnish company Nokia was preparing to become extremely successful. In 1996, Nokia released the 8110, which was nicknamed Bananaphone for its bizarre shape. In this case, just like for Wall Street and the DynaTAC, the cinema contributed to turning this model into an icon: in a famous scene of the film Matrix, Morpheus calls Neo with his 8110. A few moments later, the camera shows the same mobile phone falling from a skyscraper – a scene that would make Netflix’s product placements pale in comparison. In 2018, Nokia presented a more modern, coloured and 4G version.

At the end of the ‘90s, while mobile phones were already revolutionizing the way we communicate with each other, house landlines were still going strong, and people were flaunting the most sophisticated designs in their living rooms. However, the object that everyone wanted was the cordless phone, which, in a nutshell, was a mobile phone you keep in the house. One of the most interesting cordless phones of the period is Bang & Olufsen’s BeoCom 6000, the first to fully employ DECT, a standard primarily used (even today) for creating cordless telephone systems. Its design, loved by many, looks a little antiquated: the lines and the style are clearly typical of the late ‘90s. It could easily match a Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, one of the few things designed by Jony Ive that aren’t believed to have left a mark on the history of design.
 

As the new millennium approached, and dot-com companies began to crash, the production of mobile phone experienced an exponential growth. The key-year is 2000, the year when the Nokia 3310 was released. Of course there are many iconic cell phones, but the 3310 is the emblem of mobile phone democratization. The Nokia 3310 had a great engineering quality, despite its relatively low price, and it had the reputation of being indestructible. Usually, when falling on the ground, it would ‘break’ into three pieces: the telephone, the rear cover and the battery. You only had to put the pieces back together, and the phone would start working again, as if nothing had happened.

In 2000, the first Blackberry was launched onto the marked as well. The Blackberry, which at the time still had the same name of the Canadian company that had invented and released it (RIM), became a global success, and paved the way for personal digital assistants, the first mobile phone aimed at working just like computers – sending and receiving email was one of the main objectives. The Blackberry is also the first mobile phone that sparked off the debate on the subject of dependence on modern communication tools: in America, people nicknamed it CrackBerry. It obviously referred to crack, the popular street drug, because the possibility of doing work-related stuff no matter where you were, allowed the typical American workaholic to get rid of a healthy work-life balance once and for all. Unfortunately, Blackberry mobile phones were soon supplanted by smartphones and iPhone due to RIM’s strategy error: counting on physical keyboards. 

In 2000, Nokia released its first personal digital assistant, with a design that was as absurd as it was iconic, perfectly in line with the innovative Finnish inventions of that period. When closed, the 9210 Communicator looked like a regular phone. But then, when you rotated it by 90 degrees and opened it like a miniature laptop, you had a keyboard and a display that allowed you to comfortably check and send emails. Also in this case, cinematographic product placement played an important role: the 9110 is James Bond’s special cell phone in Tomorrow Never Dies.

The last real ‘cellphone’ with an iconic design before the advent of the smartphone revolution is the Motorola Razr, released in 2004 by the American company. Thin and stylish, starting from the ‘sharpness’ of the name of the model, the Razr was presented as a fashion phone designed for a rich elite (it was extremely expensive, $500). However, Motorola lowered the prices of the following models. In July 2016, the company had already managed to sell more than 50 million cell phones. The Motorola Razr came back in 2019 in a foldable smartphone version – a nostalgic yet at the same time innovative operation.

The presentation of the iPhone in January 2007 and its launch in June of the same year contributed to making the first half of 2007 one of the most important moments in the history of mobile phones. We could write thousands of pages about the iPhone, its design, and the technological, cultural and social revolution that it brought about. It is impossible to summarize ten years of technological innovations in a single caption. So, we’ll only quote what Steve Jobs said in 2007, on the occasion of the presentation of the iPhone: “Well, today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products. The first one: is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone, and here it is.”

Also when it comes to Android, we could list a thousand of products, but we’ve decided to only talk about the HTC Dream, the first smartphone to use Google’s operating system. After the launch of the first iPhone, Android quickly changed its approach, and started using touch screens. Even though the first model still looks like a pre-smartphone mobile phone with a physical keyboard, it was a historically important smartphone, with an iconic design that anticipated some design elements (like the navigation keys) that would characterize Android’s UX language for quite some time. The HTC Dream is very important, especially because it shows that, as opposed to many companies like RIM and Microsoft, Google immediately understood the great importance and relevance of the iPhone. That’s the reason why, today, iOS and Android are the true protagonists in the mobile phone market.