Pre-WWII auto-dialler the size of a mini-fridge
Before WWII, a German inventor shipped this "Auto Dial" machine that used "a phantom finger" to dial your phone according to the position you set in your painstakingly labelled grid of frequently dialled number. The apparatus was the size of a small fridge and used mechanical wheels, one for each number.
Link
The Auto Dial was invented by a German before the war. The only sample in this country is owned by Alfred Altman, President of the National Dairymen Association. The machine can handle any 50 telephone numbers desired by the user, and changes can be made at will.The signals can be made up of any number of letters and digits, according to the system used in the local exchange. The regular hand dial on the telephone can be used in the ordinary way when the automatic device has been attached.
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If that is "the size of a small fridge" the phone must be gigantic, or perhaps they have ultra-small micro-fridges in USA these days...
Click through -- the main mechanism sits under the desk.
On my first job as electrical engineer (1974) in rummaging through my bosses' basement junk box, I found an auto-dialler of German origin. It consisted of a roll of wide magnetic tape. The business side was read by a tape head that would travel the width of the tape and "play back" the number to be dialed. One the other side of the tape one would use a pen to write down the name corresponding to the number.
The cool part was the "Programmer", an external box consisting of a rotary dial. In typical over-engineered design, it contained a clock motor, I presume to assure the accuracy of the rotary pulses! The first and only motorized dial I ever came across.
Can't comment on the dialer, but growing up we had that exact same phonebook!
Sorry, where does it say it's sitting under the desk and is the size of a fridge? The inset photo on the right hand side of the page looks quite like it's showing the inside of the apparatus from the underside; the caption is clearly labelled that way. And I don't really see why it would need to be any larger than that, since the mechanics of a rotary dial disk (times 50) are rather small. Even with the disks "extended" to produce many more pulses that the usual ten.
I have to agree with STB... the picture in the lower right is merely showing the view from underneath the same box from the top photo, tipped on its end. It has the same flanges around the base and at the top right corner you can even see the phantom-finger-curvy-end-bit of the lever. Those discs are directly under the slot with the sliding knob.
So easy Sue Storm can use it!
I read somewhere that they had to pay her BIG time for endorsing this back in the day, but by now those residuals have also pretty much disappeared. :\
"the apparatus was the size of a two slice toaster" would be more accurate.
There's no school like old school, baby!
"The design failed to create commercial interest, with the exception of one unit sold to a forward-looking dairyman. Altman, disheartened, returned to Germany and decided to pursue simpler projects. He then developed the Enigma encoding/decoding device, while the error-prone geared dialing system was finally used many years later as the translation engine for the Apple Newton."
that mech looks just like the old switching gear in the telephone exchange my dad worked in when i was a kid. it was noisy, kinetic and amazing. then everything went digital, and it was rows of white cabinets, and the only noise was cooling fans. IT WAS RUBBISH.