telephone again

電話機、もう一台

29 June 2011, USA
‘Forever’
Pioneers of American Industrial Design

Model 302 Bell telephone, 1937
designed by Henry Dreyfuss (1904-1972)

When I saw this stamp, I thought this crisp telephone design must be the inspiration for the Ericsson telephone which I featured – but the fact seems the opposite.   The Henry Dreyfuss Associates web site is linked to a wikipedia articles, which says that the Ericsson phone was designed in 1929 and Henry Dreyfuss was influenced by that.  So, I amended my post accordingly.

This series of stamps ( 12 of them ) are showing early examples of American industrial design – some of them are familiar and the rest are not.  Simple images are featured, but there is no denomination on the stamp…  Is ‘Forever’ the replacement of postal price?

Two more designs for communication tools below – the radio was designed by Dreyfuss’s mentor Bel Geddes.

‘Patriot’ radio for Emerson Radio & Phonograph Co. by Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958)
‘Selectric’ typewriter for IBM in 1961 by Eliot Noyes (1910-1977)

この切れのある電話機の切手を見た時、3つ前のポストで紹介したエリクソンの電話機はこれを見て影響を受けたのかも?と思ったのだけど、事実は正反対だったようです。今でも続いているHenry Dreyfuss事務所のHP(おそろしく前時代的なデザインですが、、)からたどって行く記事に、1929年にデザインされたエリクソンの電話機に影響を受けたとしっかり記されていました。

この12枚セットの切手はアメリカのインダストリアルデザイン黎明期を紹介しています。中には見慣れたデザインもあります。

4 thoughts on “telephone again

  1. yes indeed “forever” means that those stamps are valid “forever”, it’s the way the US post call their permanent stamps…

  2. Yes, it allows people to purchase stamps at today’s rate (which is currently 45¢ for a normal first class stamp; the rate actually increases to 46¢ this weekend). So the stamps I bought last week for 45¢ a piece last week will still be good to use next week when the rate goes up. Hence, “forever.” Most stamps issued in the US are now “forever” stamps, with the exception of some commemoratives and semi-postals, I think. Really loving your blog, by the way. I recently started a stamp blog of my own, called Stamp Drawer 🙂 Thank you for the inspiration!

    1. Thank you for your explanation – I understand it finally! I visited your blog and enjoyed it a lot, too. I am making a link of yours on mine, and looking forward to see and read more features.

      Tomoko

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.