My grandmother (92) still uses an identical rotary phone here in Italy, in late 2020. It works, she’s comfortable with it. To be pedantic, however, it isn’t made of Bakelite... it’s not that brittle. It’s some other kind of (archaic, by now) plastic with plenty of bromide fire inhibitors because it’s turning darker by the month. I’m told it was originally an off-white; now it’s a very rich beige.
David Gelernter has a book on (mostly? not sure if I remember correctly) industrial and software design, in which he brings up the bakelite telephone as an example of such an object. Weird shape - check, functional - check (the handset's size and placement matches the distance between the ears and the mouth). It became a literal icon of itself.
That’s fine, but there’s a significant trade-off. You can still use a Bell phone from 1950 if you want to, but few people are willing to make that sacrifice in other features. Or if you prefer you are welcome to securely strap a rubberized feature phone to your wrist and never worry about dropping it again.
For that matter, a toy phone made out of a block of wood is much better at surviving the expected hazards of its intended environment than either of them, but it’s hardly a reasonable substitute.
You left out a lot of the phone's components. The screen, the speakers / mic, other electrical components. Most components use alloys, not pure elements.
There's a lot of info, but I can't find what the phone is made of. Using nice metal phones has convinced me never to buy a cheap plastic piece of junk again.
The bakelite phones had some edges and were really heavy. The photo seems a later 70s/80s model with a softer plastic shell that would not really hurt if tossed at you. I think they had to weigh those down with some metal inside,
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