What’s This Weird Box Plugged Into Your Wall? Here’s What It Really Is!
September 16, 2024
Source: Old Phone Shop
Have you ever seen a small metallic box connected to an outlet of a house built in the 60’s or even earlier with wires emerging from the bottom? Then, most probably, you were looking at a vintage power transformer. Commonly installed in homes built during the 1950s and 1960s, this simple device powered a unique feature of early telephones: Large, easy to read and well lit rotary dials.
Earlier on, most home telephone systems came with four-wire cords which included red, green, black and yellow wires and the black and yellow wires were different. These were connected to this transformer in order to provide the required voltage to light the dial especially in the low light conditions. When rotary dial phones were a common sight in most households, the light-up dial was not only useful, but also pretty. These transformers would humbly feed the system, and in some cases, they would do that in the background for four or five decades.
In the course of the telephone technological advancement, lighted dials were no longer used, and so there was no need for these transformers any longer. But, most of these power transformers remained plugged in even after the phones they supplied power to were no longer in use, because they were small, compact, and simply out of sight, out of mind.
Thus if you are ever to encounter one of these small metallic boxes during a house renovation or when settling into a home that was built in the earlier decades of the telephone then you are lucky to be in possession of a piece of art that depicted the advancement of the telephone from just a tool of communication to one that also signified the modernity of the home. And it is not required for today’s devices, it shows us the past when even dialing the phone was something special.