Ivory 302 in Salesmans Box

The 302 was the Bell System's mainstay phone for two decades, and the first Western Electric phone not to require a subset. The 302 was designed by famous industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss (1904-1972), who also designed John Deere tractors, Hoover vacuum cleaners, and streamlined trains. The shell of the 302 was intended to be cast out of metal. However, in 1941, the critical war-time need for metal caused Western Electric to retool to make the 302 out of molded thermoplastic. The 302 was the first WE telephone containing all of its circuitry within the base and not requiring a separately mounted subset box for the ringer.

The model 302 telephone is a desk set telephone that was manufactured in the United States by Western Electric from 1937 until 1955, and by Northern Electric in Canada until the late 1950s, until well after the introduction of the 500-type telephone in 1949. The sets were routinely refurbished into the 1960s. It was one of the most widely used American combined telephone sets to include the ringer and network circuitry in the same telephone housing.