The Princess telephone was originally developed and produced by Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the Bell System. When it arrived on the scene, it took the industry by storm. Being the first telephone ever designed from the start with a focus on marketing, it marked a radical departure from Bell's previous focus on form following function. Virtually all of Western Electric's competitors started scrambling to come up with competitive models. Most of them failed miserably to live up to the Princess, so over the years, through various licensing agreements, almost every other telephone maker, including Northern Electric, ITT/Kellogg, and Stromberg-Carlson, would end up manufacturing nearly identical Princess sets of their own, eliminating almost all the variety that existed in years before. Automatic Electric would become the only telephone maker who never copied the Princess design directly. Instead, they made a set very similar to the Princess, called the Starlite, using all of the design principles of the Western Electric Princess, but using Automatic Electric's own parts and technology. Sylvania, also a subsidiary of GTE at the time, designed an electroluminescent light for the Starlite, known by the tradename of "Panelescent". This technology would be used in many other consumer products of the time. Some of its most famous uses were on the 1960-1963 Chrysler Imperial, the 1966-1967 Dodge Charger, and the Sylvania Halo-Lite Television.
The Princess phone remains one of the best loved phone designs of all time. Production based on the original design and traditional Bell technology finally ceased in 1986, with the closure of the Indianapolis Telephone Works factory. In 1993, AT&T imported a model called the "Signature Princess" from Mexico. It was short-lived and poorly received.
Today, many imitation and reproduction models of the Princess phone are available from various makers, particularly Crosley Radio. Crosley says, "It’s little, and it’s lovely and you probably remember it in your sister’s bedroom or at your mother’s desk." However, these reproduction models don't light. The "it lights" part of the old Western Electric slogan is thus left out. (Was a light simply too expensive to include? Could they not achieve needed safety certification with a light? Was the light just not a marketable feature anymore? I just don't know. CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS????)
I have more information to offer here on the history and production changes of the various brands of Princess phones:
For more information on the various model numbers in the Princess family, please visit this page on Paul Fassbender's site.
For more information on development and timeline photos of Princess phone development, please refer to the following pages on Paul Fassbender's site:
For more information on COLORS, visit this page on Paul Fassbender's site.
You may contact me at zuperdeeNOSPAM@gmail.com, if you remove the part in caps. (I do this to try to prevent spam bots from mining my address.)