There’s a certain allure to the physicality of older phones. There’s something to be said for the feeling of tugging on that old fashioned rotary dial, and on top of having that draw, candlestick phones are just awesome in a dignified “I am wearing a monocle” sort of way. Apparently Adam Ben-Dror agrees, because he took it upon himself to bring the candlestick phone into the digital age by giving it an organ transplant.
The finished device consists of 3 major parts. First, you’ve got the geniune, 90-year-old candlestick casing. Second, you’ve got a mechanism that can convert the receiver’s position on or off the hook into a digital medium. Basically, when the reciever is picked up off the hook, the mechanism presses the green call button (or what used to be the green call button) and when the reciever is placed back down, it presses the red end button. Lastly, there’s a little device that translates the output from the rotary dial into a standard, digital DTMF single. Put them all together and you get a working cellular phone that looks like it’s straight out of the early 1900’s. Some real Wild Wild West stuff right there.
(via Hack a Day)
