The Contempra is a telephone designed and produced by Northern Electric beginning in 1967. Contempra was the first phone designed in Canada, previous Canadian sets having been designed in the US for Western Electric and built under licence.
Contempra was highly stylized, using straight lines and oblique angles where curves and corners would be found on contemporary sets like the Trimline. The design was further notable at release for being available in "nine outrageously elegant colours" including bright red and orange, deep brown and green, and other colours selected to match new styles of interior decorating emerging in the 1960s. The one option that was not initially supplied was black, the standard colour for phones for decades.
Contempra remains an icon of Canadian industrial design, famous to the point of being featured on a postage stamp. It won numerous design awards and is part of the permanent display at the Canadian Museum of History and Canada Science and Technology Museum. It was widely licensed around the world and its production, including that of a smaller version known as Contemprette, continued into the 1990s.
History
Like Bell Telephone in the United States, Bell Canada held a monopoly on telephone service in Canada which encompassed every aspect of the network from the wiring to the telephone handsets. Bell Canada had its own manufacturing arm, Northern Electric (NE), which over time became partially owned by its US counterpart, Western Electric (WE). As a purely manufacturing organization, Northern Electric had no internal design department and the telephones produced in Canada were US models. This also allowed the Canadian factories to sell into the US as seasonal demand waxed and waned.
In 1949, an antitrust suit in the US forced Western Electric to sell its stake in Northern Electric; the sale was completed in 1956. The two companies arranged a ten-year licensing deal allowing NE to continue producing WE designs during that time. In 1965, as the end of the licensing deal approached, R C Scrivener, director of Bell Canada, began developing Northern Electric to become truly independent. He later said of the design process: "We could have adopted, as we have in the past, an American design. They have excellent models with many of the same features. But we thought we should produce our own."
John Tyson, a recent graduate of the Ontario College of Art (OCAD), joined Northern Electric's Carling Campus in Ottawa as their first industrial designer. A few months later he was asked to design a new phone that could be built at NE's London, Ontario, factory using as many Canadian components as possible.
At that time, Henry Dreyfuss Associates was working on a new design for Western Electric. Dreyfuss had designed all of Bell's phones since the 1940s, including the ubiquitous business-oriented Model 500 and the more modern home-oriented Princess. Their newly introduced Trimline design had several unique features, including having the rotary dial in the handset instead of the base, and compressing the size of the dial through the use of a moving finger-stop.
Tyson took Dreyfuss' advice on how to design a good product; Dreyfuss believed that if one wanted to design a successful gas pump, you should go out and pump gas. Tyson fulfilled this need by spending several weeks with telephone installers in Guelph, Ontario. This work revealed two important behaviours that led to a design significantly different from the Trimline. The first was that he found customers often had two phones, a desktop model for a side table in the bedroom and a wall model for the kitchen. Tyson concluded that any new design should be able to be used on either mounting. He also noticed that users would often try to hold the handset between their shoulder and chin, something that could not be easily done with the Trimline due to its rounded back and slippery plastic shell.
Tyson produced a new design roughly the size of the Trimline but in an angular enclosure with large flat areas on the handset that allowed it to be easily held on the shoulder. Tyson removed the Trimline's light-up dial, which, at that time required a bulky transformer plugged into a wall socket to power the lamp. He also widened the base to make it more stable and less likely to be pulled off a desk by the handset cord, and then moved the handset to the left side of the case to provide room on the right for future innovations such as a videophone screen. The resulting design was similar to the Trimline in overall layout, but somewhat larger and dramatically more striking and modern looking.