Type | Toy telephone |
---|---|
Company | Fisher-Price |
Country | United States |
Availability | 1961 | –present
Materials | Wood, plastic |
Slogan | "Look who's talking now!" |
The Chatter Telephone is a pull toy for toddlers 12 to 36 months of age. [1] Introduced in 1961 by the Fisher-Price company as the "Talk Back Phone" for infants and children, which was updated to the name Chatter Telephone in 1962, is a roll along pull toy. It has a smiling face, and when the toy is pulled, it makes a chattering sound and the eyes move up and down. The toy has a rotary dial that rings a bell, and was conceived as a way to teach children how to dial a phone. [2]
The original version was made of wood, with a polyethylene receiver and cord. [3] In 2000, Fisher-Price changed the rotary dial for a push-button version with lights in an effort to modernize the toy, but consumers complained and the rotary version returned to the market the following year. [4] The Chatter Telephone was designed by Ernest Thornell, [5] whose daughter Tina would drag around a metal phone while playing. This gave him the idea of adding wheels, which with a bent axle permitted the movement of eyes, adding to the "whimsical" nature, that Herman Fisher desired of all Fisher-Price toys (from phone conversation with Ernie Thornell and recollections of Herm Fisher by John Smith).
From its introduction through the 1970s, the Chatter Telephone was Fisher-Price's best selling product. [6] It has been cited as one of the company's offerings that helped save Fisher Price in the 1990s following a failed attempt to market toys for older children in the late 1980s, [7] and enjoys continuing popularity. [8] It is available both as an authentic reproduction [9] and in a modern form. [10]
A rotary dial is a component of a telephone or a telephone switchboard that implements a signaling technology in telecommunications known as pulse dialing. It is used when initiating a telephone call to transmit the destination telephone number to a telephone exchange.
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.
A dial tone is a telephony signal sent by a telephone exchange or private branch exchange (PBX) to a terminating device, such as a telephone, when an off-hook condition is detected. It indicates that the exchange is working and is ready to initiate a telephone call. The tone stops when the first dialed digit is recognized. If no digits are forthcoming, the partial dial procedure is invoked, often eliciting a special information tone and an intercept message, followed by the off-hook tone, requiring the caller to hang up and redial.
A telephone keypad is a keypad installed on a push-button telephone or similar telecommunication device for dialing a telephone number. It was standardized when the dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) system was developed in the Bell System in the United States in the 1960s that replaced rotary dialing originally developed in electromechanical switching systems. Because of the installed abundance of rotary dial equipment well into the 1990s, many telephone keypads were also designed to produce loop-disconnect pulses electronically, and some could be optionally switched to produce either DTMF or pulses.
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A vertical service code (VSC) is a sequence of digits and the signals star (*) and pound/hash (#) dialed on a telephone keypad or rotary dial to access certain telephone service features. Some vertical service codes require dialing of a telephone number after the code sequence. On a touch tone telephone, the codes are usually initiated with the star key, resulting in the commonly used name star codes. On rotary dial telephones, the star is replaced by dialing 11.
Tin Toy is a 1988 American animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short film, which runs for five minutes, stars Tinny, a tin one-man band toy, trying to escape from Billy, a human baby. The third short film produced by the company's small animation division, it was a risky investment: due to the low revenue produced by Pixar's main product, the Pixar Image Computer, the company was under financial constraints.
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Elmo Saves Christmas is a Sesame Street Christmas musical fantasy comedy drama television special released on PBS on December 2, 1996. It was released to VHS that same year. Inspired by the 1892 short story "Christmas Every Day" by William Dean Howells, Elmo wishes for Christmas to occur every day, only to be taken to the future to learn the adverse consequences of his wish. The program was filmed in Sesame Street's usual home, the Kaufman Astoria Studios in New York City. Footage from the film It's a Wonderful Life also appears in the program and after the credits.
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Fisher-Price, Inc. is an American company that produces educational toys for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, headquartered in East Aurora, New York. It was founded in 1930 during the Great Depression by Herman Fisher, Irving Price, Helen Schelle and Margaret Evans Price.
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A push-button telephone is a telephone that has buttons or keys for dialing a telephone number, in contrast to a rotary dial used in earlier telephones.