From FB group Bell Telephone…
Keelan Lightfoot
I have never seen any of the switching equipment, but it had to be electromechanical, something along the likes of strowger switches. The dial phone my friend has was working many decades ago, but the oil has gummed up. It has five vertical levers, their ends stick out of the dial plate, each lever is pulled down to a digit. When the levers are set to a number, a release button lets them consecutively travel back to their reset position, dialing the number.
The handset for the phone was made of standard telephone equipment parts for that day. I can’t remember what the nameplate said, but the inventor was from Kansas, not likely Lindsborg or close by. There are a lot of Swedes in that area, and I remember seeing Swedish American Telephone Co. on old wooden wall phones from there. I will have to look at some documents and ask some questions to find out more. I would also like to find out more about the history and technology of that inventor.
I found several patents on Google with the name Frank A. Lundquist. They were mostly from the early 1900s.
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