Description

This bell box is a sealed wooden box with two bells mounted on the outside. The box itself is mounted on a wood board with a magneto (IN-0223), transmitter (IN-0916), and receiver (IN-0921).

Bell boxes, or ringer boxes, were used in early telephone systems as a signaling device. When a telephone call was incoming, an electromagnetically-driven clapper inside of the bell box struck the gong, creating a ringing tone that alerted users of a call. Unlike in later telephones (which have internal phone ringers), the bell box was separate from the phone transmitter and receiver.

When MIT moved from Boston to Cambridge in 1916, physics professor William Drisko (SB 1895) acquired some discarded telephone equipment from the Walker building. His son John (SB 1917) eventually donated them to the MIT Museum in 1975, and they were mounted together to form a working telephone system. That same year, the musem was planning an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent. To their surprise, the components still worked! They rigged up a working two-unit telephone system to model how telephones were used in the 1890s. This bell box was mounted on one of the telephone boards.