The Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company was founded in 1897 by Milo G. Kellogg after Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patents expired in 1893 and 1894. Primarily a manufacturer of equipment for independent telephone companies, Kellogg was known for its superior switchboard technology and beautifully designed Art Deco phones of the 1930s and '40s. The company competed with Western Electric and the Bell System before being absorbed into ITT in 1951.

Like Bell, Kellogg was a voracious inventor, with about 150 patents to his name (125 of them were granted on October 17, 1899). His company ’s first magneto-powered phone was a wood, wall-mounted two-boxer, whose pressed-steel arm was designed to position the phone’s transmitter at mouth height. By the early 1900s, oak Kellogg phones were being integrated into matching tables so the devices would literally become a part of a home’s furnishings.

Standard, single-box phones followed and were produced until the early 1920s. Concurrently, Kellogg also made candlestick models such as the Desk Stand 15D and 16D. But Kellogg differentiated itself from its competitors in 1905, when it introduced the No. 1 Microphone telephone, the first U.S. telephone to integrate a transmitter and receiver in a single handset. Preceding the Western Electric A1 by 20 years, the Microphone was eventually renamed the GrabAPhone, and by 1911, the handles of these handsets were sheathed in Bakelite, which Kellogg called Kellite...