Seventeen years ago, Ralph Meyer began a study of the technical evolution of the telephone during its developing period. He is a physicist, known internationally in his major field of research on fuel for nuclear power reactors. After almost two decades in his avocation, Dr. Meyer is now also well known among collectors, museum curators, and professionals working with early telephones. His location near Washington, DC, put him close to archival records at the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, U.S. Patent Office, and National Institute of Standards and Technology. His long-time membership in collectors associations provided a source of old telephones for his work. And his research experience helped him examine and test every telephone in this book except a few of the very earliest instruments that are not in his collection. He made thousands of measurements, recorded hundreds of pages of data, and benchmarked his results with the sparsely published values found in archived documents. The result of Dr. Meyer's work is an authoritative source of historical design and technical information. Old-Time Telephones has received excellent reviews, and he has been called a superb teacher because of the clear tutorial style of this book.
