I had a wonderful few minutes watching this old stop-motion film from 1947 showing how a telephone was put together. The music was great (although I couldn’t help seeing Wilson, Keppel, and Betty dancing off in the wings somewhere.)
The old dial phones had quite a few parts, didn’t they? But on the gripping hand, they were built like tanks and lasted pert’near forever.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Playing in the World Game 
Whaddya mean ‘pert near’ forever? You plug that Western Electric 302 Set into a phone jack right now (might want to change the cord to get a RJ11 Modular Jack on the end) and it’ll most likely still work, and at worst it’s a minor fix. They took “Five Nines” 99.999% reliability very seriously.
It’s the Phone Network that might not – they’re actually thinking of eliminating pulse dialing from the new digital offices to save a few pennies.
Wal, might not work so good in 2715, but that’s pert’near forever 😉