Give Me a Ring: A Telephone Retrospective at the SFO Museum

We’re calling with a great reason to wish for a long layover at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

The SFO Museum is presenting a new year-long show about the history and development of telephones.

The exhibition, made possible thanks to a loan from the JKL Museum of Telephony in Northern California, features an array of classic telephones from the late 19_^th century to the 1990s.

On display are streamlined Art Deco telephones, payphones, and novel Picturephones of the 1960s, a 1958 Touch-Tone telephone prototype and much more.

Here’s a preview of some of the information and objects you’ll see in the exhibit.

Candlestick telephones

Introduced in the late 1890s, the candlestick telephone required the caller to speak into the candlestick while holding the receiver to their ear to hear the other party.

To place a call, a person had to speak with a switchboard operator who made the connection to the requested number.

Rotary dials and handsets

The first rotary dial telephones allowed people to dial a telephone number without the assistance of an operator.

In rotary dialing, each number on the dial is associated with a series of electrical pulses.

When a caller turns the dial, it sends the pulses down the line. For instance, if one dials ‘7,’ the telephone delivers seven pulses. These pulses are then translated at an automatic telephone exchange to connect the call to the desired number.

Payphones

Payphones, hard to find today, remained an important part of telephone communication until the advent of cell phones.

William Gray patented the first coin-controlled apparatus that used a bell system to signify when a user inserted a coin. Operators listened carefully as coins of different denominations traveled down separate chutes where they struck bells and gongs to verify that the correct payment was received.

The first pay telephone was installed in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1889, and in 1911, Western Electric worked with Gray’s company to design a standard payphone with a coin return.

The Western Electric Model 50-A had three slots: one for nickels, one for dimes, and one for quarters. Within a year, thousands of payphones appeared, housed indoors in wooden booths.

Outdoor phone booths made from glass and aluminum became commonplace in the 1950s. In 1965, Western Electric introduced the single-slot, flat-fronted public telephone still familiar to some today.

Picturephones

By the late 1920s, AT&T had created an electromechanical television-videophone, which they successfully tested in 1927.

By 1930, AT&T’s “two-way television-telephone system” was used experimentally. Work on concept models continued into the 1950s.

AT&T’s Bell Laboratories first demonstrated the Model I Picturephone at the 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair and at Disneyland in California.

Other models were introduced later on, but failed commercially, and the company concluded that the videophone was a “concept looking for a market.”

In the early 2000s, though, broadband internet and video compression made video telphony easy. And today, with the widespread use of mobile phones and other mobile devices equipped with video capabilities, most people cannot imagine living without video telephone communications.

Give Me a Ring – A Telephone Restrospective is on view at SFO Airport, post-security in Terminal 2, through mid-August 2026. All images courtesy of the SFO Museum.