Yesterday I drove to Seattle, Washington and spent several hours visiting the Museum of Communications
The first sign you're near some older telephone equipment is the characteristic odor of warm relay windings! I'll bet you remember that smell!
Want to see what is likely the only operating Panel central office switch left in the world? It's here! Want to see a #1 Crossbar? They've got it! Also, a small Strowger stepper, a #5 Crossbar, an all relay PBX, test boards for local, toll, and Teletype service. Most all this stuff works, too! And if it doesn't work, there is a team of retired Bell System people restoring it. During my visit a retired Western Electric installer was working on the #5 Crossbar machine, making the major alarm system work (Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!).
A DC power board furnishes the -48 volts to make all this work and they've got the rotary generators for the various tones and ringing as well as the motor driven interrupters that provide the correct cadences for those signals. Overhead projection meters for test board positions -- they've got a couple! Control Center frames for both network radio and television are there. We've all heard of "T-1" but they've got an actual T-Carrier system in operation, running between the second and third floor of their building. Toll Ticketing? They've got one of those machines that punched small holes in wide, toilet paper-like paper tape!
BSPs and other documentation? They've got a couple bookcases with BSPs -- 20 feet long and six or eight feet high! Of course, that's probably just a fraction of the volumes Bell produced. If you're interested in figuring out how a Strowger Line Finder works they've got schematics of this, that and some other circuits. Even more documentation in the form of "aperture cards", from back in the heyday of punch cards.
The docents are fully equipped with stories of telephoning in the '40s, '50s and later. Stories about the Northern Transcontinental system, stories of storms that caused serious damage, stories about how one crew got the best of some other crew and how the reputations of some people grew and carried across the company! Some funny, some not so funny but all interesting!
Old Western Electric equipment is well represented, of course. To be sure, there's lots of Western telephone stuff. But have you ever seen a Western Electric clothes washing machine? Or how about a nice Western Electric vacuum sweeper to help mom keep the house clean? A little more technical is a W.E. commercial AM radio transmitter -- I can't remember the Call Sign of the station that used it years ago but it's a 1 kilowatt transmitter housed in two cabinets, each about four feet wide, seven feet tall and a foot or so deep. It's even got a water cooled final!
Telephones? Oh yeah! Tons of the common stuff, of course. But how about an early 2500 set with a 10 button TouchTone dial? (No Star or Pound keys on this one!) Or colored 302-type telephones? How about a working Type 50 Key Telephone system (I'd never even heard of this thing!). Coin phones, candlestick phones, telephones designed for paralyzed users (that worked by puffs of breath blown down a flexible plastic tube). Specialized telephones like explosion-proof telephones.
Cord boards for Toll positions and local manual services are available. So are the odd looking positions used for Repair Service and "Information" (later known as Directory Assistance of course). The repair board came complete with the line record cards on which clerks noted troubles and passed to Test Board Men.
Much Outside plant is represented and "installed" to show how open wire distribution worked, how cable was spliced, including coaxial and twin-ax cables and how various cable terminal boxes were used. Lots of examples of the myriads of cable the Bell System used; aerial, buried and submarine.
Well, that's about enough of trying to whet your appetite for a telephone museum. Just go look at it -- you won't be disappointed! (And thanks for tolerating my long, long note!)
(My connection to the Museum of Communications? Just an impressed visitor!)