The Western Electric 302 vintage rotary phone is a classic rotary phone model that is the predecessor to the Western Electric Model 500.
Historically speaking, the first introduced in 1937, the Western Electric 302 originally had a full metal housing made of zinc using a die cast process. During World War II, when zinc was in demand for use in building war products, a thermo plastic housing was introduced for the Western Electric 302 rotary dial phone.
Originally manufactured with a Bakelite handset, this was also changed to thermo plastic at some point in the phone’s history. Additionally, the Western Electric 302 was the first of the classic rotary desk phones that were built to contain the ringer apparatus in the base of the telephone.
Most frequently found in black, the Western Electric 302 also was produced in an assortment of colors. In fact, there were ten colors listed in catalogs from the time period: black, brass, ivory, silver, bronze, gold, blue, rose, red and green. An additional feature of the colored phones was that the handset cloth cord came in a matching color. The advent of the thermo-plastic housing saw yet another change in the phone manufacturing process: the color was no part of the plastic process and no longer painted on the exterior which was the method of application for the original die cast rotary phones.
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