Ralph O. Meyer, a physicist and telephone historian, and Russell A. Flinchum, archivist, curator, and emeritus professor of industrial and graphic design at North Carolina State University, bring decades of research experience to their latest joint effort, Bell Telephone System’s Preeminent Role in the Growth of Industrial Communication. Earlier collaborations focused on the prolific industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, including a Winterthur Portfolio article about his work for Bell 1 and the 2022 book Henry Dreyfuss: Designing for People. 2 The present work, however, decenters Dreyfuss (without discounting him) to shed light on numerous other designers and engineers whose efforts shaped the telephone’s form and function. The authors manage to condense an immense amount of information into an accessible account of both Bell and telephone design in general, tracing these histories predominantly through primary sources. Patents, corporate ephemera, contemporaneous press coverage, and oral histories—especially of Donald Genaro, theDreyfuss & Associates designer who would eventually become a partner and then president of the firm—inform the authors’ thorough analysis, but it is their meticulous dual-attention to the corded telephone’s evolving form and materials, on the one hand, and to the nuances of industrial design as a highly collaborative art and science, on the other, that are the book’s major contribution.
Meyer and Flinchum present a number of compelling connections between Bell and the emergence of industrial design between roughly 1877, when Alexander Graham Bell’s box phone first went into service. and 1984. when the most contemporary design example, AT&T’s No. 700 business set, was produced. Their geographic focus is narrowly Western: much of the discussion necessarily centers on the history and evolution of Bell and telephony in the United States, although British and European examples demonstrate how telephone design evolved on both sides of the northern Atlantic. The volume is organized into seven parts that unfold more or less chronologically, with periodic thematic or technical detours to explain key ideas or advances. While these contribute to the reader’s overall understanding of Bell and telephone technology more broadly, the arrangement occasionally interrupts the book’s flow. Furthermore, the authors employ concepts such as anthropometrics, technical jargon like “talk-off” and “howling,” and period styles and tenets (namely, Art Deco, streamlining, and the Bauhaus) without definition, theorization, or contextualization. While such explications are unnecessary for experienced collectors, curators, and design historians, their lack might make this text less comprehensible to those less familiar with these terrains. Finally, close readers will notice minor typographical errors throughout and a few missing references, but such defects signal editorial inattentiveness rather than authorial inadequacy.
These small gripes, however, should not deter readers. Indeed, specialists will appreciate Flinchum and Meyer’s deft articulation of formal and functional elements both minute and major. They will no doubt delight in the extremely detailed discussions of technical specifications and design processes, such as Bell’s head-measuring program outlined in Chapter 11, a pioneering ergonomic study to determine the telephone handset’s “modal” dimensions, or the optimal size and angles from acoustic and haptic standpoints. The authors supplement their comprehensive research with archival images as well as diagrams seemingly commissioned for the purpose. If neophytes cannot yet fully appreciate this rigorous attention to detail, they will nonetheless benefit from the book’s careful synthesis of science, technology, and aesthetics into a compendious—and richly illustrated—narrative of industrial design at Bell, which is, after all, the book’s stated purpose. Flinchum and Meyer’s prose is very approachable, often reading more like a lecture by your favorite professor than a dry techno-history. In fact, the authors have prepared and circulated slides based on the book to facilitate its inclusion in industrial design classrooms and coursework. That the title is available as a free Open Access PDF on the Purdue University Press website is an additional boon for researchers.
As a design historian, I found the chapter “Henry Dreyfuss and the Myths” to be the book’s most intriguing intervention. A historiographical revision of commonly held assumptions about design authorship, it dispels the myth of the celebrity designer, in this case Henry Dreyfuss, who casts a long shadow over industrial design broadly and Bell in particular. Meyer and Flinchum, who have written definitive accounts of his work and ideas, revisit a design often attributed to Dreyfuss, the No. 302 telephone. Through connoisseurship and close rereading of primary sources retrace the steps of earlier researchers (themselves included) to credit Bell System’s George Lum—rather than Dreyfuss—for this classic design. Such scholarship contributes to a growing area of design historical research that seeks to better understand how twentieth-century design firms actually operated in terms of hierarchy, workflow, and attribution. Flinchum and Meyer’s work thus serves as both a richly detailed reference text on Bell products and personnel as well as a model of rigorous research, scholarly reassessment, and creative collaboration that should inspire researchers from a variety of backgrounds, including industrial design scholars and practitioners, historians of Bell and the telephone, as well as communications collectors and enthusiasts.
Footnotes
Russell A. Flinchum and Ralph O. Meyer, “Henry Dreyfuss and Bell Telephones,” Winterthur Portfolio 51, no. 4 (2017): 173-200.
Russell A. Flinchum and Ralph O. Meyer. Henry Dreyfuss: Designing for People. (SUNY Press, 2022).