News and Events

5 June 2023

Updates to TMC page thanks to Ian Jolly (Ireland) regarding details of the Tele H and Tele F.

10 February 2022

Updates to Dictograph page thanks to Mike Williams who worked for Dictograph Telephones for many years and is familiar with all of the British models shown on this site.

13 December 2019

Jan Verhelst has provided lots of information not available on the 2013 snapshot. Work has started and the Automatic Electric files are now on the site. More to come.

7 January 2014

We have discovered a snapshot of Bob's site taken in May 2013 before site access dissappeared. We have started going through this snapshop file by file and updating any differences. Not everything appears to be there - some files and some pictures are missing but it is a start.

27 November 2013

The "Collection" tab is now available and the timeline page has been linked to the "Essays" page. Please report any links that don't work properly.

25 November 2013

The "Essays" tab is now available and links to Bob Freshwater's site should have been fixed. The "Collection" tab is still under construction.

22 November 2013

The first part of the web site is now ready to go and is linked from the ATCS web site. Unfortunately some links may not work and the "Collection" and "Essays" tabs are still under construction.

15 November 2013

Now that Bob Estreich has passed away (late 2011), his web site is no longer on the internet. Following his death, Bob's family passed much of his material to the Australasian Telephone Collectors Society Inc. Amongst this material was a backup of the web site from 2008. We propose to load this material on to the ATCS web site and make it again available to all. Work has started to get it ready and we hope to have material available soon.

19 April 2011

You may have noticed that there are a number of major stuffups on the site at the moment - broken links, empty pages and so on. This is due to an upload that crashed halfway through. I am fixing it as fast as I can and adding new content that has come in over the past year. My apologies.

21 July 2010

Well, I am finally back in operation following retirement, illness, moving house and all the rest. For all those people who have sent me information in the past couple of years, thank you very much. I'm sorry I haven't been able to get to it earlier but I will now be spending time doing all the updates. I will add information on the updates on this page as I get them done.

January 2009

Thanks to John Marshall who has provided information on the origins of Sterling Telephone & Electric. We finally know where they came from. Hopefully the "Bandwidth Exceeded" messages are finished for a while, although it has meant doubling the bandwidth in the last few months.

Jack Ryan is looking for information on the 1924 French PTT bakelite handset - the one that looks suspiciously like a Western Electric E1. Does anyone have any information that may help him? Doctor.Jack.Ryan@gmail.com. He is also looking for information, examples, anything on the 800 series Telecom Australia part line phone for 4/10 party lines. It is a grey (usually) plastic phone on a plinth, with a dial on the front and a generator handle out the side.

13 April 2008

Federal Telephone and Telegraph has been added. I am not entirely confident about the details of the early history and buyouts - there seems to be some conflicting information and dates from telephone and radio collectors. I have tried to base it on newspaper reports to overcome this, but you can't always believe what you read in the papers either.

31 March 2008

Greg Haywood of Queensland has provided a lot of information on the development history of the PMG and Telecom Australia 800 / 8000 series of telephones. He has compiled this from examination of hundreds of phones and it should allow collectors to pin down the history of their telephone quite accurately. Thanks Greg.

I have put up a small section on the Berliner Telephone Company. This was started by Emil Berliner, who also invented the gramophone. I really need some catalogs or advertising to check the accuracy of the telephones shown to make sure that they are indeed Berliner. It is possible that Berliner's transmitter capsule was used by other makers . Can anyone help?

24 February 2008

Some additions of new companies, and some errors corrected. Some of the errors were silly ones caused by me not properly checking what I had written, You do that sometimes when you work at 5 in the morning, and my eyesight is getting worse anyway. Please let me know if you find anything wrong (or stupid). I would rather be embarrassed but get it right.

Particular thanks go again to Alan Gall, a researcher in Britain. Alan's passion is the General Electric Company. As I mentioned before, he was able to put me right on a number of errors in the history of that company, and provide most of the research used for the history of Peel-Conner. From the number of hits on the Peel-Conner page, it looks like a lot of people were looking for that information.

16 November 2007

Thanks to the generous help of a collector who provided a catalog, we now have Siemens and Halske. The article still needs work, especially in the area of model numbers, foreign versions, and bakelite phones, and I would appreciate any help in these areas.

15 September 2007

We now have Peel-Conner telephones and history, and those IndianTelephone Industries 332 bakelite phones and the copies. Alan Gall in Britain has been researching the General Electric Company (who formed Peel-Conner) and the article has some results of his research as it applies to the company's telephones.

In a recent letter to the ATCS newsletter, I was rather surprised to read that in the UK you don't have many displays of telephones at your get-togethers. What do you do - stand around and brag about what you have in your collection "at home"? A highlight of the recent Australian show at the Gold Coast was the number of extremely rare and beautiful telephones on display. Have a look at some of the pictures in the Elektrisk Bureau section. Of course, it means you have to watch them like a hawk, but it certainly brings in the visitors. I'm not sure how they do it in the U.S.A. , either. From the photos I have seen, trading tables seem to take up most of the space.

17 March 2007

I have done some reformatting of the menu system. Hopefully this will allow better display on smaller screens and improve the downloading time a bit. It may look a bit messy on the new wide screens, though. I am still working on that.