The global company

There is no room here to tell about the ever-increasing operation that quickly turned Ericsson into a global company, and I shall only mention a few more significant events and years.

After that I will let the telephones speak for themselves with caption texts for each telephone, for those of you who wish to learn more about the story of how each model came into being. I have consciously chosen to limit the collection of the museum to, in any event, the first fifty years of telephone history. Telephones with number dials and the era of mobile phones I leave to other collectors to account for, and the modern Ericsson company to manage.

In 1880 the firm moved to larger premises on Norrmallmsgatan 5, and four years later they built an entire factory of their own on Tulegatan 5 together with annexes.

What the company made was magnet telephones with horse shoe magnets and they can be regarded as very close replicas of very similar copys of equivalent apparatus from German Siemens & Halske. We are talking about models with leather-clad metal casing.

In 1882 Ericsson launched its traditional wall telephone in pulpit style with a crank inductor, and two years later the desk telephone called the “Skeleton”. These two telephone models came to be produced in different variations in their hundreds of thousands, even millions, until the beginning of the 1930s. The models also influenced countless other telephone manufacturers' designs.

The company established subsidiaries and set up factories in many countries, including USA and Russia.

Lars Magnus Ericsson himself resigned from active management in the company in 1903 and passed away in 1926.

The basis for the rapid development of the company was not, contrary to what one might think, groundbreaking innovations of its own, but rather an improved design and workmanship skill. This, coupled with an ability for systematic industrial production under strict financial management, without forgoing either technical quality or product finish. Lars Magnus Ericsson was simply equipped with the basic traits that the gifted pioneers Öller and Brunius had been lacking.

<< Back to The pioneering years