Antique and Vintage Telephone Signs

Unlike porcelain and tin signs designed to sell a particular brand of gasoline, bread, soda pop, paint, or farm equipment, vintage telephone signs are location-oriented, directing people to payphones in an era when the idea of a telephone in one's pocket was the stuff of science fiction. The need to identify the locations of telephones goes almost all the way back to the founding of the Bell Telephone Company in 1877 by inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who patented his device in the United States the year before. By 1898, the first payphone as we think of it today—in which coins are inserted into a phone before dialing can begin—had appeared, and by 1960, the Bell System had installed a million payphones throughout the United States. A lot of signs were needed to guide people to all those payphones. Some of them were designed to be hung on the outsides of buildings, to alert would-be callers that a payphone could be found within. Typically, these signs were made by companies like Lafayette Steel & Enamel Co. of Ohio and Ingram-Richardson of Pennsylvania, just two of many manufacturers of durable, weather-resistant porcelain signs, in which colorful enamel was baked onto sheets of iron. Many porcelain telephone signs were one-sided, designed to be secured flush to walls, but others were two-sided, designed to be hung at a right angle to a wall so that people walking along, say, a sidewalk could read them from either direction. Such signs were either hung from a bracket or secured via the sign's flange, which was an extra flap at the base of the sign that was bent at a right angle so that the flange could be attached to a wall. As a rule, telephone signs usually featured only a handful of elements, the most prominent of which was the outline of a blue bell. In fact, some of the earliest telephone signs from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries were coated in blue enamel and shaped like bells. The words "Local & Long Distance Telephone" are often found on these early telephone signs, as are the words "Bell System" and the name of a regional Bell System company, be it the "Southern California Telephone Company," the "Southern New England Tel. Co.," the "Wisconsin Telephone Company," or the "New England Telephone & Telegraph Company." As directional aides, vintage telephone signs frequently incorporated arrows into their designs. Some had red arrows in their centers while others used thick white arrows to point the way to the nearest "Public Telephone." Occasionally, illustrations of pointing hands, usually in Bell System blue, were used. By the 1920s, telephone signs became even more simplified, discarding the names of the regional companies and graphics like arrows for just three components—a blue bell, the words "Bell System, and (lest there be any doubt what was being advertised) the words "Public Telephone." Such signs were produced into the 1940s, although like a lot of metal, countless numbers of vintage telephone signs were scrapped for metal drives during World War II. Two other types of telephone signs worth noting include those affixed on, in, or near phone booths, whether as a simple, diecut metal plate, a sign admonishing callers not to smoke, or as an illuminated sign spelling out the only word that mattered, "Telephone." In recent years, some collectors have also been drawn to signs produced by telephone companies to prevent workers from damaging underground cables.