Vintage Bakelite Telephone ITI Type 300 Rotary Dial Telephone Black, Phone

See Photos as they form part of description

Great display item for retail or man Cave

Sold as untested and display item

See our other Art deco and vintage item at olddaysofdevon

Description  This is a rare  Indian

Telephone Industries variant of the GPO Type 300. The GPO phone was

produced (in more than 200 versions) between 1937 and 1959, eventually

being replaced by the familiar all-plastic Type 706 (an intervening

model, the Type 700, looked like a Type 300 but was plastic and was

never put into general use by the GPO) - at which point the moulds were

sold to India's answer to the GPO. Now, due to the Type 300 having been

in production for such a long time at this point, they were in a bit of a

sorry state and needed to be reconditioned which was done by

sandblasting them and, as a result, the Indian Type 300s often look

older than their British counterparts despite being made far more

recently.

The easiest way to distinguish between the two is by

looking at the front: British phones have a little slide-out draw for

storage of numbers and notes, on the Indian phones this was omitted to

save costs and replaced with a plain blanking plate (and on this one the

sticker telling us that it was once the property of the Indian Posts

And Telegraphs Department of Bangalore is a giveaway, too).

This

is a fairly early example, as also revealed by a sticker on the base

which reveals that it passed ITI's quality control checks on the 2nd of

August 1977, and it's a little rarer than most because it's an office

phone featuring an optional buzzer and a selector knob for

main/extension lines - it presumably spent its early life on a

secretary's desk at the Posts And Telegraphs Department. Opening it up,

we can see that it's fitted with the large cylindrical tropical-type

capacitor rather than the smaller, rectangular standard type used on

British phones, this being in order to cope with the heat and humidity

of Bangalore; the internals and baseplate also in surprisingly good

condition without any of the corrosion commonly found on this model.

It's also worth mentioning that, if you want a vintage phone, the Indian Type 300s are very rare and interesting,