Henry Dreyfuss & Failing

I love the design of rotary dial telephones. Henry Dreyfuss designed many products that have become absolute classics. He focused on what is now known as human-centered design. His design process will look familiar to any current product designer. Learn, make, share, repeat.

The artifacts from his creative process are fantastic. The classic Honeywell thermostat that the Nest is based on was designed by Henry Dreyfuss.

Check out this incredible prototype for designing a John Deere tractor.

I would love to have this in my house. Skirted toilets are the way to go. These are rare even today, but they make cleaning easier and look great. I don’t know why I have never seen a toilet with a foot flush. Why doesn’t this exist?

He is the designer of what we know as the rotary dial telephone. Again, check out these prototypes for creating the receiver. Wonderful.

My love for rotary dial phones, of course, goes back to being a kid. I grew up with a couple of these in my house. They have such a great weight to them. They fit in your hand well. The feedback of dialing is fantastic.

This brings me to the project I have been playing around with and failing. Our house is 118 years old. That means we have a wide variety of old tech throughout. This includes phone lines in every room. I started down this path of building a private phone exchange. I want to use the old phone hookups to dial an extension and call from one room to another. This is ridiculous, of course.

The first step was to buy a couple of old phones.

I bought a crappy old PBX system to be able to handle the extensions.

The point that I have failed at so far. Figuring out the line to the outside that works. I still need a connection to the outside line for this system to work. From my understanding, you don’t need service, but connecting to an active phone line should make the system work.

So my stopping point is this mess of wires. The one labeled “Outside line” doesn’t seem to get a dial tone.

If anyone has more network knowledge and wants to go down a bit of a goose chase, you are welcome to give me some tips on where to begin.