In 1967, phone design found customer favour
Canadian-designed and -built Contempra was ‘beautiful object,’ says Ottawa creator
When he was six years old, John Tyson won a sandcastle-building contest at McNabb Park.
In retrospect, the other youngsters probably never had a chance. Tyson, who now resides in Barrhaven, went on to become an industrial designer best known for creating one of Canada’s most iconic and elegant products — the Contempra phone.
You can be forgiven if you’re too young to remember it by name — its decade-long heyday began half a century ago, after all. But for a time, the sleek phone was ubiquitous. The first telephone to be designed and manufactured in Canada, more than 15 million of them made their way into homes in North America and abroad. It’s in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York and, closer to home, the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Canada Science and Technology Museum. In 1974, it was featured on a postage stamp, and, 50 years after consumers first went crazy for them, you can still find Contempras in use — in cottages and basement rec rooms, and most notably as house phones in hotels.
Tyson was barely in his mid-20s in the mid-1960s, and considering an offer to become a set designer at CTV in Ottawa as television went from black-and-white to colour. Instead, though, he was hired at Northern Electric Research and Development Laboratories (eventually Nortel) on Carling Avenue as its first industrial designer. A couple of months later, he was tasked with designing a phone that could incorporate Canadian components for manufacture in London, Ont.
A recent graduate of Ontario College of Art (now OCAD), Tyson recalled the advice of U.S. industrial design guru Henry Dreyfuss, whose numerous seminal designs included the Princess and Trimline phones: If somebody asks you to design a gas pump, the very first thing you should do is learn how to pump gas. So he went on the road for a couple of weeks with
The phone is absolutely my most iconic design, and it’s an icon of Canadian industrial design.
Bell Canada phone installers in Guelph, to customers’ homes to get an idea of what customers wanted and the delivery process.
He noticed that customers typically got phones for their kitchens and bedrooms — different styles for each — but not often for other rooms. He thought about a design that would work in any room. “Also, why does a telephone have to look like a telephone? Why can’t it be just an object? And why can’t it be a beautiful object? Why can’t it be a piece of sculpture in its passive state, an objet d’art?
But he was mindful of another piece of advice he’d learned at college: Give the client what he wants and believes he needs, and only then offer an alternative. And so he set about on an 18- to 24-month journey to do just that, carefully shepherding the project every step of the way. He gave the client — Bell Canada — the phone he thought they wanted, which he describes as “an amorphous blob,” and then he gave them the Contempra.
He even named it. “There was a contest at Bell Canada,” he recalls. It was leading into 1967 and they wanted to call it Expo phone. There was already a product called the Princess phone, so someone thought Tinkerbell would have been perfect.
“I had to deal with all that, head on.”
The new phone was gorgeous and modern, could be desk- or wall-mounted, and came in nine designer colours. “But not black,” recalls Tyson. “I refused. I said we could add it in a few years as ebony or executive black, but not right now. Right now, black is pure utility.”
It proved so popular that, as it entered production in late 1967 following Bell’s initial news conference about its release, Tyson was thrown into the public-speaking tour on morning radio talk-shows and television. “Did most people like it?” he asks rhetorically. “They loved it.”
Although the Contempra’s design remains a source of pride for him, he no longer finds it beautiful. Today, he says, it’s big and bulky. “But I can’t escape it. I did a lot more, and better, design than that, in my opinion.
“But the phone is absolutely my most iconic design, and it’s an icon of Canadian industrial design. I mean, how many industrial designers have had their product on a stamp?”
This story was brought to you by the letter C, for Contempra phone, and is part of a series of stories about Ottawa, one for each letter of the alphabet. Stay tuned — next in the series: D is for Dagain, Canadian goddess of the millennium.