Written on September 25, 2008 – 8:37 am | by Maria Mihale |


Great inventions such as telephone, radio, television and computer have always been a subject of controversy, as many inventors who did pioneer experimental work on voice transmission over a wire credited themselves with the paternity of those devices. Their contribution could never be questioned, there’s no doubt about it, and every discovery they’ve made was one step forward, an improvement on each other’s ideas.

When it comes to the history of telephone, the scenario looks exactly the same and it’s a confusing morass of claim and counterclaim. From Innocenzo Manzetti who first mooted the idea of a “speaking telegraph” (id est the telephone) to the first successful telephone transmission of clear speech, when Alexander Graham Bell said “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” and Watson heard each and every word, the telephone has gone through some important changes, evolving to digital telephony and IP telephony.



We witness today more and more innovations concerning not only the technology and the network behind the telephone, but also the instrument itself which changed a lot after the touch tone replaced the dial in the 1960s.

We see ingenious devices which seem to have landed from future outer universes, being pink-high-heel shaped or featuring bright and shiny colored quartz crystals instead of the traditional button pad.

In a world of outstanding wacky devices, the Pappa Phone, Hulger’s first new phone design for almost three years, it’s also the world’s first wooden VoIP phone. You might raise your eyebrow, sign of the difficulty you come up against in understanding how a piece of wood could ever help you hear your mother’s voice. It spreads simplicity all over the place, as there are no buttons, no dials, not even a display. The Hulger phone is as sleek as it gets and the functions of the computer interface can replace the buttons and the phone-screen menu.

These luxury phones are handcrafted by Furni, in Montreal, Canada, from a single piece of sustainable American walnut, so that the grain of the wood flows from the handset to the base. In addition, the Pappa Phone features a piece of solid hand-polished bras. On Hulger’s official website, they give you information on how the brass should be taken care of. If you want to restore the phone’s lustre, you can use high quality furniture polish or Danish oil to the wooden parts. As a matter of fact, when it was manufactured, the same Danish oil finished the execution of the phone, which was designed to naturally “wear in” with age.



The Pappa Phone works with any VoIP service on both Macs and PCs (therefore, works on Windows and OS X platforms) such as iChat, GoogleTalk, Vonage, Yahoo and Skype and there is no software installation required. The device isn’t wireless and features a handset cord which is 1,5 meters long.

A disadvantage consists of the fact that, being handmade, it takes from 6 to 8 weeks for the phone to be built and delivered. Anyways, the Pappa Phone is available to order at Fulger’s online shop and it’s priced at $300.

(Source gizmodo.com)