The Princess phone: it's little, it's lovely, and it probably doesn't light

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 14, 2026

The Bell System sold America on a telephone that nobody was allowed to buy. Fifty-five million households were renting their phones in 1984. The option to purchase them ran out in 1987. Nine years after that, the Federal Trade Commission had to issue a press release telling five million people they were still paying rent.

What a Princess phone actually is

A Princess is a small oval extension telephone with the dial set into the middle of the base and the handset lying across the top of it. The Bell System introduced it in 1959. It was designed by Henry Dreyfuss and Henry Dreyfuss Associates, the same office responsible for the Western Electric 500 desk set of 1949, which is to say the office responsible for what most Americans pictured when they pictured a telephone at all.

It was not meant to be the household phone. It was meant to be the second one, the one in the bedroom, and it was aimed with some precision at women and teenage girls. AT&T ran the naming through consumer research in 1956, screening more than three hundred candidates. The shortlist that lost included Slimphone, Slenderphone, Fashion Phone, Companion and Petite Phone. The company test-marketed the result in Norristown, Pennsylvania, over the summer and fall of 1957, and found that two thirds of the takers were married with small children.

The specifications were the pitch. The Princess stood two inches shorter than the 500 and weighed 42 ounces. It launched in rose pink, aqua and turquoise, at a moment when the default telephone was black and came in exactly one shape. The Henry Ford, which holds a 701B in pink, files it as the moment the telephone stopped being equipment and started being furniture.

That is the useful way to think about it on a shelf at an estate sale. A Princess is not an appliance somebody bought. It is a decorating decision somebody rented.

Why you could not buy one, only rent it

This is the fact that explains almost everything else about the object, and almost nobody selling one mentions it.

Under the Bell System, the telephone in your house belonged to the telephone company. You paid a monthly charge for the line and a monthly charge for the instrument, and a Princess in a color cost more per month than a black 500. The FCC's Carterfone decision in 1968 established that customers could attach their own lawful devices to the network so long as they did no harm, which cracked the door open. It did not change the status of the tens of millions of Bell-owned sets already sitting on nightstands.

Then the numbers, all of them from federal records:

Date	What happened	Figure
1968	FCC Carterfone decision permits customer-owned devices on the network	13 F.C.C.2d 420
1984	Bell System divestiture. Consumers leasing their telephones	about 55,000,000
1987	The option to buy out a leased set expires	—
February 22, 1996	FTC and FCC jointly alert consumers still leasing	more than 5,000,000 customers
1996 rate	Monthly lease, rotary set / push-button set	more than $4 / about $6
2007	Customers still leasing through the successor company	about 580,000
2019	Customers still leasing	fewer than 100,000

Run the arithmetic the FTC was implicitly asking people to run. From the 1987 buyout deadline to the 1996 warning is nine years. At the rotary rate the agencies quoted, that is roughly $432 in rent on a telephone you could have owned outright, and about three times what a good Princess asks on the open market today. The FTC's own comparison was blunter: a year of leasing a push-button set cost almost three times what buying a similar phone cost.

The practical consequence for a collector is supply. Because the sets were company property, they were built to be repaired and reissued rather than replaced, they were refurbished between customers, and they came back to the telephone company at the end of a lease. That is why so many survive, why so many carry mismatched internal date codes, and why the housing on a 1963 phone may well be newer than the guts inside it.

The models, and what changed between them

Princess model numbers are readable once you know the grammar. The middle digit tells you about the ringer; a leading 1 or 2 tells you about the dial; a trailing M means modular.

Model	What it is	What to know
701B	1959. Rotary, no internal ringer	Needed a separate bell box. The empty ringer cavity was filled with a lead weight so the set would stop sliding while you dialed. Uses the 495 network.
701D	Rotary with a message-waiting lamp	Less common. The lamp is a different feature from the dial light.
702B / 702BM	1963 onward. Rotary with the internal M1A ringer	The 2 is the ringer. The M is a modular cord. Early sets use the 4010 network, later ones the 4228.
1702B	Ten-button Touch-Tone	Ten buttons, no star and no pound. The keypad itself dates the phone.
2702B / 2702BM	Twelve-button Touch-Tone	The version most people picture as “the Touch-Tone Princess.”
711B, 712B, 713B	Two-line variants	Extra switch or button on the housing. Scarcer, and usually from an office rather than a bedroom.
CS702BM, CS2702BMG	1980s sets for AT&T Phone Center Stores	The end of the line. A documented CS702BM dated February 3, 1983 has no socket for a dial lamp at all.

That last row is the single most useful thing in this guide for anyone about to spend money. The Princess was sold on three promises and the third one was the light. By the 1980s Western Electric had quietly stopped building the socket that made it possible. A late set is a real Princess in every other respect and will never light no matter what you plug into the wall.

How to tell a real Princess

Western Electric marked its work, and the marks are on the bottom. Turn the phone over before you do anything else. This is the same order of operations we use on brass and on a copyright page: read the boring compliance text first, admire the object second.

• Read the bottom plate. A Bell System set carries the Bell System name, “made by Western Electric,” a model designation and a date code, all on the base. A 1971 Western Electric set catalogued by a design dealer reads, in full: Bell System Made by Western Electric — Loud — C/D — 500 — 10-71. A phone with no plate, or with a plate carrying another company's name, is not a Western Electric Princess.
• Look for the lamp socket under the dial. This is the check almost nobody makes. Early and middle-period sets have a socket for a dial lamp: a screw-base number 46 on the earliest, a wedge-base number 259 later, sold as a GE259 or a CM259. The 1980s Phone Center Store sets do not have the socket. No socket means no light, ever.
• Ask whether the transformer is included. The dial lamp does not run on the phone line. It runs on an external plug-in transformer, Western Electric type 2012A, 2012C or 2012D. In normal use a dropping resistor keeps the bulb dim as a night light, and contacts in the hookswitch bypass the resistor to bring it up full when you lift the handset. A switch on the back turns the night light off. Ninety percent of the Princess phones offered online have long since been separated from their transformer, and “the light doesn't work” usually means “the light has nothing to work from.”
• Decide whether a missing ringer is a fault or a feature. On a 701 it is original: the set never had one. On a 702 it should be there, and the giveaway that you are holding a 701 rather than a 702 is weight in the wrong place, because the cavity holds lead instead of a bell.
• Check the color inside the shell, not outside it. Collector documentation treats Princess colors as plastic colors rather than finishes, which means the color should continue on the inside face of the housing and under the edge of the dial bezel. A repaint is a surface. Look where a sprayer's masking tape would have stopped. We should be clear that we are describing collector practice here rather than quoting a Western Electric manufacturing document.
• Count the buttons if it is a Touch-Tone. Ten buttons with no star or pound is a 1702-type and genuinely earlier. Twelve buttons is a 2702-type. A keypad that does not match the model number stamped on the base means the two halves have been married.
• Allow for yellowing. Light-colored housings shift with ultraviolet exposure over sixty years. A phone that reads as beige may have started white, and an ivory one may read as cream. This is the single largest source of honest color misdescription in the category, and it is also the condition that makes a housing a candidate for repainting.

How to date one from the base

Western Electric was close to obsessive about dating components, which is a gift. Expect a date on the base plate and separate dates on the network, the ringer, the dial and often the handset. Three formats turn up, and they run in chronological order.

Format	Example	Reading
Roman numeral and year	II-37	Second quarter of 1937. Predates the Princess, but you will meet it on other Western Electric sets.
Month and year	3-69, 10-71	March 1969. October 1971. The format you will see on most Princess sets.
Julian, five digits	83034, 80179	Year then day of year. 83034 is the 34th day of 1983, February 3. 80179 is June 27, 1980.

Then compare the dates against each other. Collectors call a set where all the major components carry dates within a few months of one another a birthday phone, and it is the closest thing this category has to an untouched example. Wide scatter is not evidence of a fake. It is evidence of exactly what the leasing section described: a phone that went back to the telephone company, got rebuilt from the parts bin, and went out again to another house. That is ordinary Bell System history, and it is worth knowing before you pay a premium for originality.

The look-alikes, and who made them

The important thing here, as with Stickley and with the banker's lamp, is that most of these are not fakes. The Bell System covered most of the country but not all of it, and the independent telephone companies bought their equipment from other manufacturers, who built compact lighted-dial bedroom extensions of their own because customers were asking for one. A competitor's phone is a competitor's phone, not a counterfeit.

What it is	How it fools you	The tell
Stromberg-Carlson Petite	The direct competitor, and the closest thing to a true equivalent. Compact, narrow, made for a bedside table, with an illuminated dial that glows dimly at rest and comes up bright when the handset is lifted — the same behavior the Princess advertised.	Its own name on the base. Like the 701, it has no built-in ringer and used an external bell box. A restorer currently lists a pink one at $283.36 CAD, which tells you the competitor is not the cheap option.
Stromberg-Carlson Slenderset	Listed constantly as a Princess phone by sellers who mean the shape rather than the brand.	Again, the maker's name. The word Princess is a Bell System product name, not a generic form.
Automatic Electric / GTE sets	Period, American, and fitted to independent telephone company lines across large parts of the country.	Automatic Electric or GTE markings instead of Bell System and Western Electric. Genuine vintage telephones, generally cheaper, and frequently better survivors because they were not churned through a lease pool.
ITT-marked sets	They turn up constantly in the same searches and in the same colors, including Touch-Tone models in red.	The ITT name on the housing or base. We have not traced the manufacturing relationships behind these sets and are not going to pretend otherwise; treat ITT as its own brand and price it as its own brand.
1980s clear princess-style phones	See-through housings, Touch-Tone, the same silhouette, and sold in pairs. Unisonic is the name that comes up most.	Modern lightweight electronics, no Bell System plate, no lamp socket in the Western Electric pattern. These are 1980s consumer-electronics products, not Bell System equipment. Western Electric did make a clear Princess as a special order, which is why this one is worth checking rather than dismissing.
Modern retro reproductions	Made new, in pink, in roughly the right outline, for the same shelf the original wants.	No date code anywhere, no Bell System marking, modular cords molded in, and a plastic that feels light in the hand. The Princess is a dense little object; a 42-ounce phone does not feel like a toy.

Owl and Twig has written about the decade when the telephone stopped taking itself seriously at all — the Garfield phone and the phone that pretended to be a spacecraft are both downstream of the Princess. Once Bell had established that a telephone could be a color and a shape rather than an appliance, the novelty phone was only a matter of time.

What Princess phones actually sell for

Here is the awkward part, and we would rather say it plainly than manufacture confidence. There is essentially no published realized-price record for this telephone. We checked the auction price databases. The Princess lots that appear there carry no published sale results at all; the figures sit behind subscription walls or were never recorded, because auction houses do not generally sell $150 telephones as individual lots.

So everything below is an asking price observed on the open market, in September 2026, and should be read as what sellers hope for rather than what buyers paid.

Asking prices, September 2026

What	Asking	Where
Pink Princess rotary, untested	$150	Online marketplace, Buy It Now
Baby blue Princess rotary	$128	Handmade and vintage marketplace
Pink Princess, described as new in box	$160	Handmade and vintage marketplace
White AT&T Princess	$195	Handmade and vintage marketplace
ITT Touch-Tone, red	$129	Handmade and vintage marketplace
Stromberg-Carlson Petite, pink, restored	$283.36 CAD	Specialist telephone restorer, currently sold out
Western Electric-matched pink spray paint, one can	$22.98	Telephone parts supplier

The working band for an honest, complete, correct-color Princess is therefore roughly $100 to $200, with color doing most of the work inside that range and the transformer, the original cords and a genuinely functioning dial light pushing toward the top of it. A restored set from a specialist costs more than double, and that is a fair price for the labor, not a collector premium.

What to check before you buy

• Turn it over and photograph the base plate square and in daylight before you negotiate anything.
• Read the model number and decide what it should have: ringer or no ringer, rotary or ten-button or twelve-button.
• Read the date code, then ask the seller to read you the date codes on the network and the ringer, and see whether they agree.
• Ask directly whether the dial lamp socket is present. Not whether the light works — whether the socket exists.
• Ask whether the transformer is included, and get the type number if it is.
• Look at the color on an inside surface and under the dial bezel, especially on a pink one.
• Check the cords: cloth or smooth vinyl, four-prong plug or modular, and whether they have been swapped.
• Turn the dial and listen. A rotary dial that returns slowly or unevenly needs service, which is routine but not free.
• Price it against the $100 to $200 band, not against a restored example from a specialist.
• If it is shipping to you, ask how it will be packed. A 42-ounce phone with a loose handset is a packing-table problem waiting to happen.

The third promise

“It's little. It's lovely. It lights.” Three claims, and the company delivered all three in 1959. It was little, and being little was the entire product; the 500 was a machine and the Princess was a thing you could put on a nightstand without apologizing for it. It was lovely, in rose pink and aqua and turquoise, at a moment when the telephone had been black for fifty years and nobody had asked whether it had to be.

And it lit, for a while. The dial glowed dim all night and came up bright the instant you lifted the handset, which is a small piece of engineering doing a surprisingly large amount of emotional work: it meant the phone was findable in the dark, and findable in the dark meant a teenager could call somebody at eleven at night without turning on the lamp and waking the house. That was the actual product. Bell sold it as a color.

By 1983 the socket was gone. The phone still looked the same, still said Princess in every catalog, and the third word in the slogan had quietly stopped being true. Nobody announced it. It is simply not there when you turn a late one over, and you will not find it mentioned in a single listing.

Which leaves a nice irony for anyone shopping. The Princess is one of the very few collectibles where the correct question is not “is it real” — they are almost all real, because they were company property, built to last and counted carefully. The question is whether the one in front of you can still do the thing it was named and sold and advertised for. Turn it over. Look for the socket. Then decide what it is worth.

And if you find one in a closet with a small beige transformer still tangled in the cord, keep the transformer. That is the rare part.