Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: Bell Telephone introduces push button telephone
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (231) · November 18th, 2007 · 6 Comments
Today in History - “ November 18, 1963 - “Bell Telephone introduces push button telephone, eventually to replace the rotory dial telphone that had dominated the market since its invention in 1891 when Almon Strowger patented the twin inventions of the automatic telephone exchange and the pulse-driven telephone in the home. Although early prototypes had been built earlier by Bell Labs in 1941 (left-most image above) in a 302-style case with F1 handset with two rows of five keys on the front that plucked reeds to produce two tones for each digit. The design was shelved during World War II and forgotten until many years later after the transistor was developed and tones could be produced with electronic oscillators.
Henry Dryfus, an industrial designer working for Bell Telphone, is credited with inventing the interface notion of the pushbutton, working as a consultant to Bell Telephone. One of the first protypes of the design was made of wood (second photo above) showing how early protypes can be quite effective in communicating new concepts and getting customer feedback. The version that Bell Systems / Western Electric introduced in 1962 at a World’s Fair in Seattle and as a commercial product on November 18, 1963 was based on this wooden model (third photograph above). They replaced the basic design language from a circle to square to visibly highlight the change from dial to pushbutton design. The concept was considered as the seed for revolutionary telecommunications concepts, such as the one pictured in the right-most image above for the videophone concept published as an advertisement in 1963. The “button” continues to be a winning design concept for telecommunication devices and is used in the recent introduction of a new generation of phones and advanced button designs inpsired by Apple Computers’ iPhone.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on push buttons and telephone design or our resources on industrial design. For related educational resources, visit the Computer Engineering Education, the Electrical Engineering Education or the Computer Science Education disciplinary communities.
Tags: Computer Engineering · Electrical Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Industrial Engineering · Mechanical Engineering
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6 Katie // Apr 16, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Hey,
Your article about the history of the telephone was very interesting. I really enjoyed looking at the pictures of the old phones.
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